A few weeks ago I had mentioned that the unemployment numbers come out the first Friday of every month. Well, not much good news today. For the month of May, unemployment numbers have risen to 9.4 percent, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The BLS also says that "the number of job losers and persons who completed temporary jobs rose by 732,000 in May to 9.5 million. This group has in-creased by 5.8 million since the start of the recession."
NPR'S Planet Money also has some interesting findings from the report. The average job search now takes 22.5 weeks, up from 21 weeks in April. That's almost half a year.
While I let the gravity of this escalating unemployment rate hit you full on, I'll update you on my job hunt. I've reached this novel idea of only applying for jobs which I'd actually like to do. I think for awhile I was so focused on just finding a job that I didn't care what it is. But when I stopped and thought about how much time I'll be spending at said job, it gave me pause.
My informational interview at dream company went extremely well this morning. It gave me a good idea of how to stay on their radar and what I'd need to do to eventually get a job there. But it left me feeling pretty convinced that if I want a job in DC, I'm going to have to move there. Look for some news about that in the coming days.
And before I sign off for the weekend, a gripe (ok, I know you're thinking that this whole blog is one big gripe, see video below). We have put a man on the moon, perfected aviation travel, made advances in medicine, and I can now know what's going on in someone's life in 140 characters or less at all times, yet still, some companies have failed to find a way to have applicants upload their resumes in PDF format. I mean, seriously. I hate cutting and pasting my carefully-formatted resume into these boxes because it never recognizes my bullets, indentations, or sometimes even the darn words themselves. It's like a super-human feat of patience to be able to format these things...I think that in itself must be the result of some twisted HR person to try and weed out the weak employees....
Ok video as promised (I'm trying to make this more multimedia-friendly):
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I always make my resume in Word format, with all of my nice, pleasing-to-the-eye fonts and formatting. Then I make a duplicate resume that is a simple text document. Within Text, I can make rudimentary bullets or whatever, and at least make sure the spacing is right. That way, you always have an easy, painless way of doing the copy/paste dance.
ReplyDeleteAnd that's my two cents! Good luck lady! - Laurel M