Dear Job Market: Please stop penetrating me there

The BBQ Pit
61

Some quick observations:

a) Limit your search to entry level positions that your skills are suited for. What do other UGA soc majors do after graduation?

b) If you have a career services office in Athens that you can still use, utilize their services.

c) Granted, I’m in academia, so this advice is counter to those in corporate settings. But your education is the most recent endeavor you’ve been involved in and it sounds like you did well. I think that should go first.

d) Any profs or folks at UGA that you really hit it off with? Let them know you’re looking to work.

e) Most importantly, find a focus. I can tell a scattershot application when I see one. Find what it is you can and want to do, and the resume should make the case why you’re the right guy for the position.

f) Second the networking idea. A lot of people act as if looking for a job is some sort of supersecret operation. Everybody you know should know that you are looking for a job in x field. I think I’ve more or less gotten every job I’ve had since high school that way.

g) Ask for informational interviews at places you’re interested in working. They might not be hiring today but if an opening comes up they will probably let you know if you impressed them.

h) If you like kids, maybe you can try your hand at subbing for a while. Given your educational background you might it quite interesting.

i) I agree, your demands are a little extreme. If there was a great part-time job that had everything going for it except the full-time thing, why wouldn’t you go for that? If cash is tight you can take on a mindless second job. Otherwise, working part-time is probably better than not working at all.

j) Check into your city or county bureaucracy for a position. Good benefits, stable pay, etc.

k) Grad school is waiting. If you did well in school you might get a good part of it subsidized. But your job #1 is to gain experience, so go for a program that gives you credit for working during your schooling and a job outcome. Don’t get a masters in soc if that only leads to a Ph.D. in soc. There are a lot of one year masters programs that lead to a job.

l) As a former Atlantan, I know the city is crawling with UGA alums. Get a job as an AA at Emory, or Georgia State, or GA Tech… and of course Spelman and Morehouse are places to look. Maybe you could look for jobs advising students in sociology or the liberal arts. See if there are people you know from school working and if they can hook you up. Were you Greek, or were you involved in any clubs? Look for alumni and you will have something in common. Personally I always bend over backwards to help out kids from my high school, or my uni (probably more specific as the city is crawling with UT grads).

62

I think you’re being unreasonable to expect a salaried position. You’re an entry level candidate, first of all. You have very limited relevant work experience. Plus, you haven’t worked since 2006 – at least, according to your resume – this screams ‘unemployable’ or ‘lying about work history’ to me.

To repeat, go to a temp agency - especially since you’re looking for office work! You can easily get some real admin tasks under your belt so that you are considered for these types of positions.

I was in a similar bind that I have a BA in history. It is worth approximately nothing to me (my own fault for not going to grad school, but I decided academia isn’t for me). I got a temp job as a CSR and worked my way up from there. It sucked for awhile but I am stably employed now for a great little software company. (Still not salaried, by the way!)

63

eleanor and Voyager, I was somewhat overdramatic in saying language skills are going the way of the buggywhip. I agree that clarity of communication is an essential in any line of work. I do not, however, think that it is of much help in finding work beyond a very basic level. It is not going to impress a harassed HR person nearly as much as (say) a salary requirement 20% below industry standard.

64

I’d stick with the education on top, since your work experience is generally not related, but I would boot a professor from your references and add a previous employer who can say you are a hard worker and they miss your work.

Another critical element is to tailor your cover letter and resume to the job. If they mention you need a certain skill, mention that you have it in your marketing statement and cover letter.

65

Not to say that this is a perfect fit, but your education may qualify you for something like this:

66

Hey guys, please accept my continuing and shockingly massive thanks for everything you’ve all said and done here. I really, really appreciate it.

I didn’t realize that a salaried position was such an unreasonable thing to expect. That’s born of naivety and has been corrected. Adding hourly positions to the scope of my search will greatly increase my options, I think. I’m glad you guys pointed that out!

There is a large gap in my employment history, yes. I haven’t had a job since 2006, which I am really really regretting right now. Rather than make excuses for why that gap exists, I’ll just admit I fucked up and move on. Hmm…perhaps I’ll also dedicate a little time to finding a way to say that more eloquently if it comes up in an interview.

Hippy Hollow, one reason I’m so keen on full time is that I have no health insurance. If I can find a combination of part time jobs that pay well enough for me to have health insurance that’d be fine, but cash is tight as it is and I’m worried that I couldn’t make ends meet. On the other hand, minimum wage is more than I’m making now.

I’ve found a couple of temp agencies in town that will be enjoying my patronage tomorrow. Thanks for convincing me that it’s a good idea, guys, I appreciate it.

67

One thing I meant to comment on before - please don’t think that your time spent at college just studying and having fun was wasted. There is plenty of time to knuckle down and get your nose to the grindstone and do nothing but work and get ahead - the rest of your life, in fact. You had some fun while you were still young and healthy, plus you got your degree; it’s all good. :slight_smile:

68

You have a degree, a good attitude, and a willingness to work.
Your chosen discipline isn’t helping you get a salaried job, but once you can get in the door, any door, I think that you will do well.

Best of luck to you.

69

I’ll give this a shot, as someone who finished grad school in 2004 and couldn’t find a job for 6 months, and as someone who was laid off the last week of April 08, and started a new job on June 2, with a 10k raise, in a different field.

The key to it is to figure out how to sex up your resume to get the job you want. In my case, I realized that for the most part, I’d done the job for my entire career, but just never actually had the job title. So, I listed myself as having 8 years experience, and then listed my real jobs. That got me a BUNCH of calls and interviews, where listing experience by job title alone got me dick. Then, I planned a strategy to be able to explain how I had 8 years of BA experience with only 2 small contracts actually titled that.

That’s apparently all it took- I got hired as a business analyst with a 10k raise about 4 weeks after being laid off.
I’d say that you probably ought to figure out something similar if you have a particular type of job in mind.

If you don’t, you may want to consider teaching. Here in Texas anyway, there is a big demand for teachers, and there are alternative certification programs. You could probably pretty easily teach high school or middle school social sciences, and it’s salaried, has benefits, and while not highly paid, isn’t as bad as some other jobs. I think the state mandated minimum salary is about 33k or so, with some districts offering more than that for first-year teachers.

The drawback is that even if you’re a terrific teacher with 25 years experience, you probably will top out around 50k.

70

Thank you. I myself don’t understand how my sister got that first interview, either. But she did, and she is now a senior level exec with one (huge–as in massive. Hint: it’s a telecommunications company) corporate client that she [del]babysits[/del handles.
I have to disagree on your saying it will only help at the most basic level as well. Management and administration need skilled communicators (although it may not seen like most days…). Also, misspellings and grammatical errors in power point and other presentations undermine confidence and will ruin a sale. It’s unprofessional. It’s shoddy.

I’ve never been in a position to hire formally but (and of course time matters) I think I might give a history major or whatever a shot. After all, studying one subject says that you are persistent, that you can sustain interest in one subject over time, that you are a strong enough person to think for yourself. Not too bad, for beginning positions, IMO.

71

Is this free? I got paid to go to grad school, it was better than free.

72

I vote for that. Try to make yourself a bit more marketable before your soul gets entirely crushed. A sociology degree isn’t good for much besides getting into grad school.

73

That’s bullshit, Bubba. Plenty of people are earning their livings in those fields. It’s not easy or anything, but hell, nothing is easy these days.

Soul, those lab qualifications seem promising. I hope you’re including lab temp companies in your queries, assuming that you like that kind of work.

I realize you’re desperate and need to get your foot in the door somewhere, anywhere, but I still encourage you to think about what it is you really want to do. Tasks, products, processes. And the environment where you’re most comfortable.

I think your resume sucks, but that’s good news - you’re being rejected b/c you don’t know how to do the job hunt game. It’s been a few years since I had to look for a job, but I used to be really good at it. None of my jobs were anything highfalutin, but I was great at getting hired.

The thing to know is that YOU aren’t being evaluated. People take it so personally - try not to. It has nothing to do with you.

What’s being evaluated is whether your skills can help someone else. I tried to rewrite your resume but there’s just not enough information.

Skills:
(stuff that’s specific to what you’re aiming for – when I was an administrative assistant (i.e. secretary) I used to list all the software I knew)

Proficient in Microsoft Office Suite, Internet use, and SPSS (what’s SPSS? what do you mean by Internet use? Are you talking Facebook, or do you know how to set up a website? Expand on this, list as much detail as possible – there’s a good chance the person looking at your resume doesn’t know what’s in Office Suite. You’d be amazed at how little some people know about computers, they’re scared shitless of them)
Typing Speed: 75wpm
Have you answered multi-line phones?
Any other common office equipment you’ve used?
(BTW, this is where I’d list laboratory skills, if you’re applying for a lab job; otherwise I’d leave them out completely:
Mastered and adapted basic and advanced laboratory protocols related to DNA extraction, DNA analysis, and purification)
Experience:

Customer service in the (luxury? high-volume? formal?) food industry
Managed projects (what kinds of projects?) for several professionals simultaneously (this tells them you can handle multiple bosses)
Performed inventory control in a laboratory setting (this tells them you know how to order copy paper) (lol)
Built a client base as a part of a new small business (what does this mean? what exactly did you do? this could be helpful if you can demonstrate how your experience can help your new employer’s business grow)
Interfaced with multiple levels of management to present a consistent product of highest quality (what the heck does this mean? were you a Team Leader? did you perform specific quality control tasks? it sounds like you had some kind of responsibility for quality control, which could be a good thing to promote about yourself, but it’s too vague)
Created new and exciting space layouts to transform mundane spaces into exciting event venues (how? via what software? whose spaces? what kinds of venues? can you pitch this as a transferable skill, something in marketing? whose problems did you solve?)
Employers:
Household and Structural Entomology Lab, 2004-2006
UGA Campus Catering, September 2004 – February 2005
Creative Catering and Design, May 2004 – August 2004
Education
August 2004 - May 2008, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30606
Bachelor of Arts, Sociology
Graduated Cum Laude with a GPA of 3.5

74

Well, I had a whole long post written out before I left work, but it doesn’t seem to have taken. Take it to say that contrary to BubbaDog’s statement, I do not disdain specialist degrees. There’s a reason they exist, and specialists are needed. In some fields, to be sure.

I do however, disdain those that disdain arts degrees, dismissing them as fluff and not particularly useful in the current job market. I feel they hold much more value than some assume and I will not look askance at my children if that is the direction in which they wish to further their education. But BubbaDog’s children are not mine, nor am I his child.

This is Soul’s thread, that started as a rant and seems to be ending on a much better note than when it started. So congrats on the interview and good luck with the temp agencies, Soul!

75

Here is a recent thread about temping, perhaps it would be useful for you. Most of my friends who I knew that were in your situation (fresh out of college without a preprofessional degree) went the temp route to get their foot in the door and get some experience. It’s not uncommon for a temp job to turn into a permanent full-time offer.

76

This.

I suspect you have things well in hand with your resume so far, so I’ll just take a bit to point this out. I’ve recently run through the interview mill to find someone to work for me. The other guy that helped me interview people agreed that doing the former is a bit of a ding on impressions.

Also, ask clear questions about YOUR expectations of the job. People who just nodded tend to leave a less clear impression than people who know beforehand what questions they want to ask of the interviewer. One dude asked us a bunch of questions about perqs and expectations at the end of the interview. He ultimately turned us down, but the questions that he asked clearly demonstrated that he had been around the block and wouldn’t be at sea as much as someone else might be. We will remember him if his name comes up again.

Some questions that might help with fessie’s pointing out of the ‘interfaced with multiple levels of management…’ part in your resume.

What exactly did you do to interface with multiple management levels? Up or down? Email, powerpoint, verbally? Can you break it down a bit more?

For example: “Created and managed schedules, and communicated milestones and reminders to all stakeholders to ensure that the schedule was met; sent out email status reports to all stakeholders and management including the Big Boss. Organized and drove biweekly status meetings.”

By ‘jobs’, do you mean projects for different clients? Using this in the resume overloads the term to mean ‘general employment’ and ‘specific employment for work contracted to specific clients’. (To be fair, I’m a technical writer. :smiley: )

Serving – does that mean you were on the floor? What does serving involve? Why should someone not actually in the industry care about how you can juggle multiple orders from different tables and make sure the food gets out there in a reasonable amount of time, that sort of thing.

77

Thirded, fourthed, fifthed, whatever. Temping sucks huge monkey testicles (don’t chimps have huge balls, relative to size, while gorillas have small ones?), but it’s an almost necessary evil in the modern workforce, especially in cities. When you have a comparatively useless degree (sorry, harsh, I know, but I feel your pain with my English BA), employers aren’t going to hire you for even monkey work (ie admin assistant-- and besides, not all AA positions are monkey work. There are plenty of them that require huge amounts of organizational abilities, and I’m sure you know as well as anyone who has been through college that you don’t exactly need to be super organized to make it to that BA) without some sort of experience first. So suck it up, forget about volunteering, which if Atlanta prices are anything like Boston, you’ll never be able to afford to do, and sign up with every damn temp agency you can find in the phonebook.

You’ll have to take a battery of tests that show that you can turn a computer on, and type things in both MS Word and Excel without causing explosions. After that, you’ll have a typing test, and as long as you don’t type with 1 or 2 fingers, you will be told that all of your scores are off the charts. Make sure to stress that you will take any work, but name a minimum salary (which you might not be able to do right off the bat, but after a few positions you can ditch the $8-10 jobs [I don’t know how it works in Atlanta, but as nice a salary as this would have been in my home state of NH, there’s no way that I was getting by working daycare for $9 in Boston] in favor of at least $11-12) and that you are most interested in temp-to-perm work.

You’ll have some humiliating positions where your super for the day thanks you for answering the phones and transferring calls without a) hanging up on people, b) sending calls to the wrong lines, and c) causing massive property damage. Then you’ll have other jobs where your current super thanks you for a) understanding the alphabet and or proper order of “numbering”, and b) putting the files she handed you in the “filing cabinet,” rather than the “shedder.”

However, eventually they’ll stick you somewhere that is temp-to-perm, isn’t mind-numbingly, spirit-crushingly boring (it’ll merely be pretty damn boring), has decent people you work with, halfway decent benefits, and most likely, a salary. Grab onto the job, work it for 18 months, then update your resume and apply to places that wouldn’t take you before without experience.

You win life if finding a job takes you less than a year. Don’t be discouraged if it takes longer. You can still afford beer in the meantime.

Sorry if this sounds a bit bitter. I’m not, really. More bemused than anything else, and I wouldn’t have traded my stint in corporate America for anything, despite the fact that my career goals lie in the teaching field. But I literally was thanked profusely for a job that included answering phones and filing things alphabetically. Temping is the new McJob of experience. At least you don’t come home at the end of the day smelling like french fries and have grease burns on your arms.

78

I didn’t see this mentioned, so if it has been, I apologize…

Now that you have an interview scheduled, do as much research about the company as you can. It will show that you actually care about the company and aren’t just treating it as a temporary stepping stool. I’m not really sure how much may be needed though (since I’ve only applied/worked for one private company, the rest were government), so maybe some others have some thoughts on this.

79

I suspected this was the case. Any chance your parent(s) can have you covered under their insurance? Or is there a COBRA-type coverage available for recent graduates?

Another plus in favor of grad school is that being enrolled even part-time at some institutions will make you eligible for insurance and benefits…

80

To some extent that’s true, since a competent resume is what you need to get in the door. However, once you do that, verbal skills are going to help a lot. All things being equal, would you hire a person who hems and haws and mumbles or one who is a dynamic interview? I also think a well crafted resume will help also. Our OPs second one is a lot better than the first.

In an ideal world you’d look past that, but this isn’t an ideal world.