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The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

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Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#151

Post by UK-AL »

hosh wrote: post #107
at-fates-hands wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can absolutely vouch for this. After a 6 month contract gig, the employer told me they were going to bring me on full-time. I stopped interviewing thinking I had a full-time spot. They told me two weeks before the end of the contract they didn't have anything else for me and I was cut at the beginning of January after our project ended. I did find a job with a small company, but after three days, realized they were…

You don't put "freelance" on your resume. Being "freelance" means you're operating your own company, with its own presence, branding, etc. The least you can do is to name your consulting company and declare yourself as the owner. Even with something as simple as Consulting. Because, at least according to the IRS, you are. Take advantage of it.

I think you will find is that a lot companies don't like hiring small business owners either. Even successful ones. Companies might expect them to be 'arrogant' or "want do things their own way".

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#152

Post by blindhippo »

macspoofing wrote: post #117
bryanlarsen wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't do the resume filtering, I was doing interviewing. As I said, I didn't really mind what the answer was, just that you had an answer. I would have accepted looking after pre-school kids or major house renovations or working at McDonald's. Basically anything that shows you are the sort of person that makes lemon-aid when life gives you lemons.

>As I said, I didn't really mind what the answer was, just that you had an answer. Let's take that. A person with a good employment history, leaves (or loses) their job and takes a few months off to do nothing. What exactly makes them unhireable when they rejoin the workforce? Furthermore, how do you know the person you're interviewing will tell you that they were looking after kids, or working at McDonald's. Maybe t…

" takes a few months off to do nothing"

Isn't that an answer? If I was the interviewer in this situation, that would be a completely acceptable response to me.

I'm sure to other people perhaps taking time off is seen as some sort of weakness, but you don't want to work for those people anyways.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#153

Post by thedufer »

jdminhbg wrote: post #18
tptacek wrote: post #9

Two things. First, I wouldn't want to naysay the idea that unemployment is a vicious cycle, because it intuitively is. But: this analysis is based on resume callbacks. Something that I think is as true as the "damaged goods" stigma is that most Americans do not know how to market themselves during job searches. If your only access to the job market is through a mechanism that is designed to extract basic facts from a…

> I wonder which 50% of the population I might ask to find out more about this. I assume you are looking to ask the 50% of the population with lower unemployment, shorter median unemployment duration, and lower % long-term unemployed: http://www.dol.gov/_sec/media/reports/femalelaborforce/

As for lower unemployment, you might have noticed that women also have lower employment. As a percentage of people who actually want jobs (employed+unemployed) rather than of the total population, the unemployment rate is basically the same between men and women.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#154

Post by ry0ohki »

enraged_camel wrote: post #127
cletus wrote: post #84

This doesn't surprise me at all. One thing I've come to learn in life is the importance of social proof. Social proof takes many form. It's why MIT and Stanford CS grads have tech companies come to their campuses and throw money at them (these institutions don't have a monopoly on good engineers). It's why if you have Google/Facebook/Twitter on your CV you are pretty much guaranteed a job. It's why academic staff who…

>>There is another side of this that the article doesn't touch on: home ownership. Oh boy. There's so much I can say about this topic, and none of it is positive. Basically, the way our culture mindlessly promotes home ownership is insane. Absolutely insane! Every time I hear people complaining about "throwing away money" by renting, and how they would rather put that money into a house, I want to hold them by the sh…

>The only time a house makes sense is when raising kids.

It really depends where you live. Here in Pittsburgh you can buy a decent house for $150k. Meanwhile, rent in that same area is $1000 for something similar. In this case, even if there was zero appreciation, the amount you pay on interest, repairs, etc... is less then the amount you would have spent on rent, but everyone should take the time to make these calculations for themselves. There was no amount of math that made a 1,500 sqft house in Calfornia at $1 mil (during the boom) better then renting.

I should also mention the area I'm thinking of has high demand for rent, so your mobility isn't really limited as you'd be able to rent out at a profit almost immediately.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#155

Post by _delirium »

cletus wrote: post #84

This doesn't surprise me at all. One thing I've come to learn in life is the importance of social proof. Social proof takes many form. It's why MIT and Stanford CS grads have tech companies come to their campuses and throw money at them (these institutions don't have a monopoly on good engineers). It's why if you have Google/Facebook/Twitter on your CV you are pretty much guaranteed a job. It's why academic staff who…

The social-proof side not only means you need to have jobs, but they have to be a certain "class" of jobs. Though you can invent them pretty well.

Here's a story from an acquaintance (don't know him that well, so may or may not be apocryphal, but it seems plausible). For a period of 2 years he worked at Home Depot to pay the bills, and did a bit of puttering around on tech side projects on the side. Not really any kind of business, just for fun mostly. So he listed that honestly: Home Depot was in the employment section, and a few side projects that had become releasable were listed under projects.

Later, he changed his resume. He removed Home Depot from the resume entirely, because he had gotten the impression that working a retail job while post-college-age carried a stigma, at least if you were looking for "professional" jobs rather than other retail jobs. To explain what he was doing in those two years, he grouped together those side projects as an "unsuccessful startup". Big improvement in responses.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#156

Post by ameister14 »

droithomme wrote: post #108
akincisor wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've been looking for work full time for 6 months and not a single employer has wanted to hire you, being unemployed for 6 months is the least of your problems.

Absolutely correct. The proposed scenario suggesting that the long term unemployed consists of competent, skilled and psychologically capable people who have spent 8 hrs a day working hard preparing and customizing resumes and going on interviews, but have not had a single offer after more than six months of doing this on a daily basis is complete fiction. Perhaps there is a single person who falls into this category…

I'm sorry, but you don't know what you're talking about.

Usually, what happens is, they spend the time looking for jobs they are qualified for and want, and don't get. Then they spend some of their time looking for jobs they are overqualified for as well, and usually don't get.

That's 6 months.

I've done it. I was unemployed for about a year; during that time I went on about a dozen interviews, did volunteer work, took courses etc. so as to have something to explain what I did during this blank period on my resume.

I learned much better multi-tasking skills during this period, and how to organize dozens of contacts, because if job x calls you and you've applied to 28 jobs in the last 10 days, you have to know immediately who they are and what they do as well as what you said to them in your customized application.

Personally, I'd like to see better integration between linkedin and my smartphone to facilitate this. Anyone working on that?

Applying to jobs is hard, not getting them is hard, and there's about 10% unemployment in the US for a reason. It's not just because 10% of people are lazy or incompetent and 90% are hardworking and good.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#157

Post by jdietrich »

enraged_camel wrote: post #127
cletus wrote: post #84

This doesn't surprise me at all. One thing I've come to learn in life is the importance of social proof. Social proof takes many form. It's why MIT and Stanford CS grads have tech companies come to their campuses and throw money at them (these institutions don't have a monopoly on good engineers). It's why if you have Google/Facebook/Twitter on your CV you are pretty much guaranteed a job. It's why academic staff who…

>>There is another side of this that the article doesn't touch on: home ownership. Oh boy. There's so much I can say about this topic, and none of it is positive. Basically, the way our culture mindlessly promotes home ownership is insane. Absolutely insane! Every time I hear people complaining about "throwing away money" by renting, and how they would rather put that money into a house, I want to hold them by the sh…

It's a very simple mathematical error - people compare the cost of a mortgage payment with the cost of a month's rent, failing to take into account that only a tiny fraction of the mortgage payment actually becomes equity.

If they actually sit down and work it out, most people are astonished at how much flexibility they sacrifice for that small slice of equity.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#158

Post by [deleted] »

enraged_camel wrote: post #127
cletus wrote: post #84

This doesn't surprise me at all. One thing I've come to learn in life is the importance of social proof. Social proof takes many form. It's why MIT and Stanford CS grads have tech companies come to their campuses and throw money at them (these institutions don't have a monopoly on good engineers). It's why if you have Google/Facebook/Twitter on your CV you are pretty much guaranteed a job. It's why academic staff who…

>>There is another side of this that the article doesn't touch on: home ownership. Oh boy. There's so much I can say about this topic, and none of it is positive. Basically, the way our culture mindlessly promotes home ownership is insane. Absolutely insane! Every time I hear people complaining about "throwing away money" by renting, and how they would rather put that money into a house, I want to hold them by the sh…

[deleted]

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#159

Post by Vivtek »

venomsnake wrote: post #114

Hire half unemployed to dig holes with a shovel all day, and the other half to fill them and pay them 30% below minimum wage. Or do something useful - there is always infrastructure in need of repairs. If won't cost much compared to wars and will do wonders for the self worth of the people.

You've just invented the Public Works Administration! A huge proportion of America's infrastructure was built in the 30's by the PWA - including the vast majority of infrastructure in federal and state parks.

They had to stop because that's socialism - and as we all know, socialism is unAmerican and bad.

Re: The Terrifying Reality of Long-Term Unemployment

#160

Post by nbouscal »

[deleted] wrote: post #158
enraged_camel wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>There is another side of this that the article doesn't touch on: home ownership. Oh boy. There's so much I can say about this topic, and none of it is positive. Basically, the way our culture mindlessly promotes home ownership is insane. Absolutely insane! Every time I hear people complaining about "throwing away money" by renting, and how they would rather put that money into a house, I want to hold them by the sh…

[deleted]

Early in a mortgage you're paying what, 25% principal? Probably less? And that's not even taking into consideration property taxes, mortgage insurance, etc, etc. So no, you're not getting $1k back from every month.
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