I dont have a phone so I always put down my email as my preferred contact. Even if I apply online, I never receive an email rejecting me. Do employer just give up if the Phone is no good? Isn’t that a catch22?
Yes. You need at least a number for voicemail that you can check.
When you apply online (at least in my experience) it’s one of two things: throwing your resume into a black hole, or signing up for spam from survey-taking businesses.
Use Google Voice for your phone number. It’s free. The employer calls and it will go to voice mail or you can set it up to forward to someone else’s phone.
It works great and it’s FREE 
So employers giv up after a no answer? Don’t bother to email? Could lack of phone be to blame for my unemPloyment or are people just not hiring? If I had phone and applied @ mcdonalds, am I likely to be hired or just more likely to get a response?
Yes you need a phone number. You don’t need an actual phone, just an answer phone.
If you went to McDonalds and applied and received no answer it’s likely because you’re phone number is no good.
I have an online resume and I give employers the option of
Phoning
Filling out a contact form online and mailing
Email.
I had two potential employers fill out the form, NONE ever emailed me and all the rest called.
So go to Google Voice and get yourself a phone number. Use THAT on your job applications.
Your employer will call and leave you a voice mail message.
Employers rarely send letters of decline now. In the past it was pretty hit and miss, but I’ve had employers fly me out to different cities, put me up overnight at their expense and interview me and never call me back again to tell me that another person got the job.
With so many people out of work, employers assume that if you were wanted they WILL get in touch with you.
Times are tough for job hunting, but people will want to talk to you in person. I’ve found that what they often do is do both, within minutes of each other. They need the email to view your resume, they need your phone to see how clear the phone interview will be – someone once noted that my cell phone signal wasn’t clear enough for a phone interview.
Like I said, times are tough. Employers feel justified in being extra picky, with so many unemployed people around to choose from.
Well, people just aren’t hiring, and lots of people are out of work, so employers have tons of applications. If one person doesn’t answer, they’ll just go down the list to the next person.
Your best bet to get hired at someplace like McDonalds is to go in when they’re not busy and talk to the manager. But yeah, you need some way for them to get in touch with you. Even if you can’t afford a regular cell phone you can get a tracfone or something like that for like $10.
What you have to remember is that employers are getting overwhelmed with applicants. The last time I posted something on Craig’s List (for a receptionist position), I had 120 responses within 3 days - we ignored most stragglers who came in later than that. We weeded out 100 very quickly in a first round of elimination. Then we looked at 20 resumes that looked decent in a second round. We called some of these people for a quick phone screening. Ultimately, we picked 5 to interview and they got e-mails and phone calls.
An application with no phone number would have been tossed out in the first round with the other 100.
If a teenager would have been acceptable for my position, I’d have been understanding if the number was a shared/family line that wasn’t exclusive to the applicant. But I would have required a phone number.
Also, your posts are full of grammatical and spelling issues, including capitalization problems. Those would get you tossed out in the first round, too, so I hope you’ve been more careful on your resume submissions than you are here.
Don’t you have a landline phone?
No I don’t have a landline. Even when I did I could never pick up until after 6. Most managers leave at 5PM. I put down my landline back then but I could never pick up. I didn’t have an answering machine.
What’s the likelihood that someone wanted to hire me but couldn’t call me, and what’s the likelihood that they just weren’t hiring anyone? How many jobs could I have missed out on in the past year just because I didn’t have a phone?
When did Google Voice come about?
For the grammatical issues: I was typing on my friend’s iPhone which made me think of this topic.
Can you afford $25 a month? You can get a $20 Virgin Mobile phone and their cheapest plan and solve the problem.
Why couldn’t you pick up?
No offense, but it sounds to me like you’re trying to justify getting some sort of expensive cell-phone plan.
A phone is needed. You want to make it as easy as possible for the employer to contact you. Without a phone number you run the risk of them just going to the next person on the list of potential hires. Also, an employer will likely think it is weird that you don’t have a phone. Finally, an employer might not want to email you because s/he doesn’t want to give out an email address, or get in to a big long email discussion; s/he might just want to have a quick call to schedule an interview. It might not seem fair, but a phone number is needed.
Actual restaurant manager inputting his $0.02;
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We get LOTS of job applications. I tend to get, on average, 5-6 applications per day. Depending on turnover, I hire at MOST 1 person a week. It’s a safe bet that most of the people who apply I won’t be calling back.
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No phone # - no callback. I don’t have access to the wide-open internet from in my restaurant.
Sounds to me like your best bet is some sort of pay-as-you-go cellphone. No contracts. Pay only for the couple of minutes a day that you’ll need to check your messages.
Impossible to say, depends on how many jobs you applied to, how many wanted to hire you, but didn’t reach you vs. how many didn’t want to hire you anyway for some other reason.
However, even one job opening you missed because of no phone is one too many in my opinion.
Again, you don’t even need a cheap cell phone. Google Voice will go this for you. The employer will leave a message. Employers understand not everyone is available to them ASAP.
Just get GV and call in to check it, or you can do what I do, just check it via email. My computer is almost always on, so I can tell right after they leave the message.
I use my GV for job hunting, as you do get “Shut out” of companies after applying.
I noticed if I apply for a job and get no call back and I apply again, no call back. I’ll get a different GV number and call and I WILL get a call back. So it seems a lot of employers use the phone numbers to weed out people.
I remember when I was really poor in the 80s, I would leave the number to a pay phone and then sit by it for half the day. I’d put down on the application telephone number XXX-XXXX (best time to call is 1pm - 5pm) then camp out by the pay phone. The employer would call between those times. Of course those were the days when answer phones and such were not that common.
I was remembering the bad old days when I worked at McDonalds. It was a very common occurrence for people to not show up for their shifts and then the manager would have to call them. If I were hiring for a McJob, I’d definitely rather hire someone with a phone.
Yeah - I popped in to suggest a cheap prepaid phone. Anywhere from 10-30 dollars for a bottom-of-the-line phone, plus 10 bucks for a top-up card, and you’ve got something to have around for emergencies, job calls, etc.
If I were an employer and had someone with no phone number, I’d be pretty weirded out. What if I needed to get hold of the employee in an emergency? I worked one place, many years ago, where they ultimately fired an employee for not having a phone: he needed to be on call for systems support, and refused to have a home phone even after being warned that the availability was a job requirement. This was all before cell phones of course.