I definitely get what msmith537 is saying. I can remember a time when if had, say 10-20 years of experience, you were considered a pretty valuable commodity not just at your company, but among your competitors, as well. If you got passed over for promotion or were unhappy with your job for some other reason, you could at least make a lateral move to another company, get a raise, and probably even be in line for that promotion you were denied at your old company.
Since the '80s big companies started squeezing out those mid-range employees; that management style spread to smaller companies, and it’s gotten progressively tighter for every employee in that area. Even a stellar record isn’t enough. You have to either bring business with you or be able to implement some complicated system that your old company used and your new company wants to use. Otherwise, they’ll either promote from within or look for a younger hotshot with a newer, fancier degree.
Questions like these can be traps. What’s your reaction when a candidate says the company relied on them to keep the legacy systems running smoothly while it worked the bugs out of the new systems, that they trained and mentored 15 years worth of new hires, or that the person they worked with left and they’re now doing that work as well, but still hitting their deadlines?
One thing I learned the hard way: If multiple people are telling you that XYZ is a terrible place to work at and you’re better off without a job than you are with one there, they’re right, and if you hear that a certain department has a dreadful boss and everyone s/he hires either quits or gets fired within a few weeks or months, you don’t want to work there.
Regarding your last paragraph, you’re right…I was apparently drawing a false distinction. I have always tended to think that an employment contract is one that can’t be broken at the whim of an employer (i.e. for any reason, without having to establish “just cause” for termination, and without warning, as long as the reason is not illegal). I have a hard time calling an employment agreement a “contract” when the employment relationship is “at-will” and the employee can be terminated at any time without warning. Nevertheless, a lay person like myself with no legal training can easily get these types of things wrong.
Speaking in lay terms, I would say that the unionized workers I am familiar with have a written contract. I would not say that my son has an employment contract, but I say this mostly because the “contract” can be ended by the employer at any time without warning. Most non-lawyers would agree with me…but I fully admit we non-lawyers may have it wrong.
Of course, even the unionized workers with their written contract can quit at any time without warning, thereby immediately terminating their employment and employment contract.
But yeah, I do read comments on Indeed and Glassdoor. I take them with a grain or two of salt, but I look for certain patterns within the comments. If someone says “Place sucks” and doesn’t specify why, that’s one thing. But if more than one person says “Lots of initiatives but no follow-through” or “Poor communication between management and staff generally” then I begin making mental notes.
First: I’m really sorry to hear what’s happening to you and your particular situation. AI and robotics are going to infiltrate areas of the economy over time. But they’re not going to suddenly replace all truck drivers, pilots, and supermarket checkers, and hurl the workforce onto the streets. I work in automation, and trust me it’s not ready for prime-time – not even close.
This is an article by Rodney Brooks. He’s the founder of iRobot, is well versed in artificial intelligence and robotics, and is still active, both in design and theory. A lot of his predictions put my mind at ease on this. I agree with Mr Brooks, and simply don’t see this experimental stuff taking over the world any time soon. If it matters, I develop autonomous aircraft software and I’ve ponied up over >60K to get my son through flight school and into the airlines. We joke about this, and when I tell of accomplishments at work, he reminds me that if I automate him out of a job he will move back home. I’m not really scared of this future, and have made a sizable bet on it.
Returning to the original subject matter, I think we’re seeing a lot of problems matching jobs to qualified applicants due to limitations in HR. I can’t say for sure, but it seems the internet has drastically increased the number of applications for a particular job, and the software used to filter this barrage isn’t very nuanced. I suspect a lot of well-qualified candidates are simply purged and never seen by human eyes due to small errors in how the application is interpreted.
My kiddo is more than qualified for the major carriers now, with all the required turbine PIC (pilot-in-command) hours and college degree. But for months now he’s been essentially ghosted by companies. (Note: there are large aggregating application companies that supply multiple airlines, so a single application and its info get transmitted to all) I noticed he was still checking the box for a very minor FAA violation from many years ago. When I pointed out that this had aged out of the official record, and he no longer needed to disclose it unless asked, he changed the app and resubmitted. Phone’s ringing off the hook now. He’s got multiple callbacks, interviews lined up and one has already called to say he’s hired and will get instructions to show up for training soon. All from unchecking a box and clicking the submit button. The software apparently dropped all applications with that box checked, no matter how minor or old.
I went to an online college to get a bachelor’s degree.
I now have $ 40,000 in student debt that my upcoming bankruptcy protection will not cover. The degree is unfinished because I was looking for permanent employment, working full time temp jobs, and caring for my ailing elderly mother, all at the same time. That left me no time to complete the classes for the degree. When my former employer offered me my old job back, I jumped at the chance. So the forty grand was all for nothing. I’m in my mid-fifties, so I’ll be paying it off while looking for assisted living quarters.
I have thirty years experience at what I do, but age discrimination means I don’t put that on my resume if I have any sense at all. My boss told me at my review that I’m loyal and hard working. But all HR will do for me is confirm how long I worked, because nobody gives references anymore, for fear of being sued.
I have a couple of letters from temp job bosses of mine praising my work. Guess I’ll hold on tight to those.
As for “just” doing basic data entry, all those all important financial reports, and account anaylsis, and future projections, with all those fancy pivot tables and color coding and pie charts couldn’t happen if I didn’t do my job and do it accurately. The last person they had in my position made so many mistakes from trying to go too fast. (She was probably trying to look attractive to her employers.) The screwups in the basic data she entered caused such headaches that the whole financial department still talks about her three years later.
My work’s not like that. My work is correct and accurate going in the first time. And if loyalty, accuracy, and plain hard work in the trenches for thirty years is “just” basic data entry, and not enough for today’s employers, it’s no wonder that today’s job market is just a big fat joke.
I hate to bring economics into this, but the population being higher does not make the job market tougher; that doesn’t make any sense at all.
If that were true, think about it; the unemployment rate would be eighty percent. The unemployment rate in the USA in 1933 was 25%, and today it’s about 4. Yet there are many more people in the USA.
When the population increases, you have more jobseekers, but you also need to employ more people. More people equals more aggreggate demand - more people need houses, food, clothes, haircuts, rides on planes, and all that kinda stuff. More of everything. It’s an offsetting effect.
This may make some jobs tougher to find, but it clearly does not make jobs in general harder to find, or else why is the unemployment rate so low?
First off, it sounds like you’re dealing with a lot right now - all the best of luck. I, too, have anxieties about the future, but I try not to get too far ahead of myself. I’m pretty good at letting my ‘what ifs’ get the better of me, especially when I’m in a foul mood and a couple of glasses into a wine bottle.
On the bright side, I think there’s still a market for someone with good excel and access skills. Lots of offices still need people with that skill set.
The flip side is that as an employee, or even if you agree to those terms, since it’s an at-will state, you can just bail whenever it suits you. Two weeks notice is a convention and the polite thing to do, but it’s not required, and there’s no reason legally that you can’t just walk in and say “I quit”, and go to your new employer the next day and start work.
Here’s the thing though- if your value-add is basically that you enter it accurately and quickly, that’s not a winning proposition versus a machine that can do the same thing.
In other words, if it’s something a machine can do, you’re going to get replaced.
It’s relatively trivial these days to set up a system that can scan in a stack of unsorted documents, identify them, and read whatever pertinent data you choose directly into database fields, as well as store the scanned copies in separate folders depending on type or the data on them. It’s even easier if it’s PDF files or some kind of electronic format.
I bet it would maybe cost three salary years to set all that up, and you’d maybe need one person to quality check it and possibly do minor corrections. And that’s a big maybe- if the documents coming in are in good shape and clear, most of the data is going to be fine without manual intervention.
That’s the thing- a lot of lower-level clerical type positions that center on eyeballing some paper and typing something related to it into a computer are about to go away because computers can do that these days just about as good, and without all the hassle of a live employee.
If you are asked at a subsequent job interview, years later, why you left a certain job after 4 months, and while hemming and hawing, the interviewer says, “You can tell me the truth; I’ve heard that this is a very difficult place to work at,” or you mention that you worked somewhere and everyone instantly knows who your boss was and why you don’t work there any more, or why a certain place is CONSTANTLY advertising for the same job over and over again, yep, you don’t want to work there.
My BFF found himself job-hunting with 3 teenagers and the same useless credentials I have, and in time he did find a good job, with an independent pharmacy (his only complaint is that the health insurance plan is terrible, but he loves his job) and he told me about a certain hospital in his old city that always had openings in the pharmacy. He replied that he’d rather flip burgers than work there, and that there are some very good reasons why there are always openings despite saturation in the field.
This is exactly what I’m saying. How many low level office jobs are going to go away? You can get all snobby and superior about how people like me should try harder to be attractive to employers, but low level office jobs keep a lot of people eating and paying bills. When the software takes over, where are we going to go? Not all of us are going to fit into upper management. Sure, I could finish my bachelor’s degree, but since those are a dime a dozen, what will that do except get me deeper in debt?
That’s why I said I’m fucking scared of the future.
I know lots of people who would make great employees but never get a call back. Lots of terrible employees who are very good at filling out applications.
When I was looking for work a few years back I was great if I could interview face-to-face… the hard part was getting to another human being. This isn’t really a surprise, since my early training in job hunting emphasized human interactions and interviews by a human. The kids these days who grew up talking to screens have an advantage in dealing with the computerized gatekeepers compared to an old fart like myself, but even they have problems getting past the key words and algorithms.
This paper-pushing former desk-jockey first went into low-level construction work with a general contractor I knew, then into retail. But, to be honest, for someone middle-aged getting into even light construction work is going to be a physical ordeal (most who started in that area are aging out by 50 due to either injuries or simply no longer being able to keep up with the younger folks) if it’s possible at all, and retail is downsizing its workforce, too. That, and retail can be more physically demanding than people realize until they start working in it.
I also had to start at the bottom in retail and start climbing back up - which was possible largely because I had no debt. Those who have debt are in a really, really bad place for doing that and I just don’t have a good answer for the folks with student debt.
I don’t know. I think the advantage these kids (at least the ones in tech) have is that they’ve probably been coding, building web pages and “building a personal brand” on social media since they were little kids. But a lot of them are shit at networking and interpersonal skills.
Unfortunately Millennials are now in their 30s and starting to take on roles as hiring managers and recruiters. I’m not really sure how to respond on their phone interviews when they stammer away, enthusiastically not really asking any real questions.
Trying to get past the ATS system through online applications is generally a losing battle anyway, IMHO. Online applications have been the worst way to find a job since everyone outside of technology figured out how to use Monster and CareerBuilder a decade an a half ago. Many of the posted jobs are just there for compliance reasons for an internal hire or the system may not even be monitored.
I recall about ten years ago, I was at a startup and we were trying to hire an admin/office manager to run the phones and front desk. I received something like 100 resumes in 48 hours. The first thing I did was weed it down to 20 or so candidates with prior experience as an admin or office manager at an investment bank or tech company, just so we had a manageable list of people to phone screen. From there, we brought in maybe 6 to interview, from which we eventually made a selection who didn’t last more than a year because our general manager drove her nuts with his whiny micromanaging.
Right, but companies don’t need the John Henry of data entry. They are dealing with terabytes of the stuff and need people who are skilled in tools like Excel, SQL, R, MongoDB, Hadoop, Python, machine learning software, Tableau (all stuff you can actually learn online through inexpensive Udemy.com courses, FYI)
I see what you’re saying about lay usage. And you’re totally right! That is how the word is sometimes used. But, fighting ignorance and all.
Certainly, it feels more secure to have a defined process that you get to go through before getting fired. And it is to some extent.
But if your worries are about future technological displacement, I’m not convinced that a union provides a lot of protection. If you have 20 years seniority and you just need to make another 10 to retirement, then sure. But if you’re the new guy and your job gets mostly replaced by AI, I don’t think that’s going to matter much.
My understanding is that long-haul trucking mostly isn’t much unionized any more. But imagine that it were. If self-driving trucks come along, is the union going to be able to hold back that tide? Maybe for a few years. Maybe a decade? Long enough for the senior members to make it to retirement. But the rest?
Unions have power, and I’m generally in favor of them. But for all the good they do, they can’t really fight technological sector upheaval.
For that, you’ve got learning new skills, and the ballot box.
Human contact is always going to beat screens. To expand on what **msmith537 **said, I used to get giant stacks of resumes even for the pretty specialized openings we had. When you make a first pass through those applications, you aren’t looking for the perfect candidate, you are looking for reasons to trash applications which are not going to work.
If on the other hand you know someone who knows someone who knows a hiring manager, and get a connection in order to make a call, you are going to be ahead of all of those electronic submissions. Reading a giant stack of resumes is not nearly as bad as having to send a ton out, but it still sucks.
You hear people complain all the time about not hearing back when they have applied. Then in their next breath they say they applied to 100 places. Duh.
I’m not really scared of this future, and have made a sizable bet on it.