What makes that evident? I mean, my savings lasted close to a year, but I haven’t put “Lived off savings, not unemployment!” on my resume.
And I would hesitate to hire someone who is willing to give up the equivalent of $12 per hour for a $10 per hour job as I believe it show poor decision making as they are not only giving up a couple bucks an hour of straight pay but are also paying an opportunity cost in giving up time that could be spent looking for a job which is a better fit.
I just don’t get the stigma associated with unemployment insurance. We don’t fault people for taking full advantage of health or auto insurance.
How is this supposed to help? all it does is reverse the problem.
I found it a miracle I found a full-time gig this year after working almost 3 yrs part-time as in, doing 3 job gigs that TOTALED 24hrs a week. It helped that I was a pharmacist and therefore the applicant pool being smaller. (as in 120 applications versus the 700 applications for techs for openings)
I am not sure how other occupations are doing it, but I met two pharmacists who were stay-at-home moms for 12 and 16 years straight w/o working. They were able to find jobs on the basis that registered pharmacists were hard to come by (well those who would work part-time) They told me if they had to do it all over again, that they could at least have found part-time gigs as supplemental income while raising their kids.
This makes zero sense to me. What about the people who are actually fiscally responsible, and who have 1) saved up enough that they have a multiple-month cushion so they can concentrate full-time on the job search or 2) worked out a system with their spouse that they can live for a long time on one paycheck or 3) a combination of both? You’re weeding those people out as well, and they might well be the most driven and better employees.
What about just getting a business bank account and a DBA (doing business as) for your “company” and say you were self-employed for however long you were unemployed?
I mean, it’s not technically a lie, even if your little shell company wasn’t actually paying you, you did OWN the whole thing, right?
If you managed to land a freelance gig or two to create some references, all the better.
That might help take the stink out of a long unemployment stretch, wouldn’t it? Am I being terribly unethical?
It’s been pretty common knowledge for at least the last three years.
I tell you what I found terrifying about not working. When I finally found a full time job I found I was struggling to write!
I had a ledger I have to fill in longhand and boy did I stumble. My brain was going faster than my hands, mistakes all over the place - I appeared to be barely literate.
No, its what many IT people and project managers do when they get laid off. Or they register with a consulting firm - they aren’t always “placed” but by registering and getting on their roster they have an “employer.” Your resume says something like June 2011 - present Consultant - Very Small Boutique Consulting Company - various clients.
Hopefully, they will be able to throw some work your way so when asked, you can talk about your various clients instead of saying “business was really slow, so I learned Clojure.” (If business is very slow, do SOMETHING other than watch old episodes of the Rockford Files while sending out resumes.)
Also, a friend of mine had success volunteering in between jobs after he got laid off. From my experience, if you’re hit with unexpected job loss, most people won’t hold it against you as long is you’re doing something in the interim besides sit on your ass and collect unemployment. The long - term unemployment response rate is ultimately caused by automated HR systems that drop resumes automatically based on certain criteria, so if you can fill that void on your resume with anything at all, you’ll be fine.
I graduated college in 1989, and have been employed full-time, in a full- time degree program, or some combination of those ever since. The longest I’ve ever been between jobs is less than 3 weeks (knock wood). But if I lost my job, I wouldn’t be able to do the vast majority of retail or service jobs because I have a bum ankle and simply cannot spend long periods on my feet. Doesn’t make me lazy to have physical limitations. I simply have no cartilage in my left ankle, so certain jobs are just not going to be a good fit.
Bolding mine, I’m thinking if they could get another good job with just a few weeks of focused searching they would have done so during the first few weeks of unemployment, right?
The problem is people who think the financial cost of a lower paying job is greater than the resume cost of being a holdout. Most low wage jobs are part time anyway, which does leave room for focused job searching and interviewing. The part time gig plus the small unemployment will probably be enough to skate by for a short while, and it sounds like a much better plan than refusing the low wage gig until you’re pulling coins out of the couch 6 months later.
I think actualliberalnotoneofthose’s qualification in #3 was meant to imply that #2 really means to make a show of being self-employed, ala CompuGlobalHyperMegaNet and The Pirates Who Don’t Do Anything. You make up business cards, stationery, a basic website, maybe file legal paperwork to have a real company registration, then you sit on your ass and do nothing for six months except call your sister once a month and remind her to check the smoke detectors, and then claim you spent the past six months as the CEO of Robert Columbia Consulting, Inc.
I’ve known a few IT guys who have registered their own company. What they do is apply for jobs and then ask to be paid via 1099 to their company. Then, they, as the sole owner of their company, can pay themselves whatever they want out of that. If they get laid off, then they continue “working” for their own company doing “business development” and “marketing” as they look for another job.
This is one of the reasons that I’m in favor of more objective examination-based hiring practices. E.g. instead of going through interviews that are very subjective, you could take the Target Customer Service Representative Aptitude Test and it wouldn’t matter if you had a PhD in Astrophysics, if you scored high enough you would probably get in. Interviews, reference checks, and background checks would be restricted to basic, barebones screening activities to make sure you didn’t have cave-man manners or lack required professional licensure (if required by the government for the job). Maybe you could get additional “points” for degrees and be docked points for a criminal record, but in the end you would get a “score” that was compared with other candidates rather than some manager’s opinion that, “Oh, I don’t think he’s suitable. What are you doing for lunch?”
This sounds good until you find yourself with 5000 applicants with the exact same score. What do you do then?
- Make the test longer. More questions generally leads to fewer score collisions. E.g. a 1000 question test will probably have fewer people with the exact same score than a 10 question test.
- Make going through the test more onerous, involved, or lengthy to reduce the number of applicants. E.g. the exam is only given in this small town in West Virginia, meaning everyone outside the area has to really want the job enough to be willing to take the effort to travel all that way to take the test. Require that the exam be given in three different sections with each section given a month after the previous one. People who were applying on a lark are less likely to want slug through three 5-hour exam sessions over three months.
- Add near-continuously measured items to the test. E.g. for a position stocking shelves at Target, you could have an item on the test be a timed simulation where the candidate has to stock a shelf. If they don’t finish in 10 minutes with fewer than 5 errors, they get zero points. If they do, they get 10 basic points and then additional points, measured to the hundredth of a point, for the amount of time they had remaining until the deadline (gotta love employees who get the job done early!). You could even add on points for making fewer than the expected/allowed 5 errors (candidate likely to exceed expectations!).