My wife has been working part-time on-call at a local children’s shelter. She had worked there full-time, but it’s pretty emotionally wringing, so she went part time instead. However, they’ve been cutting hours a lot, so she’s only been working one or two days a week, tops. So she’s decided to re-enter the workforce.
Now, granted, she left the full-time workforce about ten years ago to provide day-care for our grandkids, this after having worked at call centers for literally over a decade, first as an international long-distance operator, then as a dispatcher for a national automotive emergency service company when the company providing long-distance operator services lost their contract. Since then she’s worked at a couple of public schools, at the children’s shelter, and one short stint as a deli worker at a local grocery store.
So now she finds that to apply for a job, you pretty much HAVE to have a computer with internet access – something she really doesn’t like. She’s pretty much an internet widow as it is. Having to, figuratively, ask my mistress for a job grates on her more than a little bit. But what bothered her more than anything are the qualifications employers are asking for, and the stupid damned psychological tests they make you take now. For example: one local position open was for a part-time parking lot attendant. They wanted someone with accounting experience. Excuse me? To sit in a booth and collect parking fees for minimum wage? Part time? That position, unsurprisingly, is still open. I looked at some of the job openings out there. I realize there are a lot of unemployed people out there, but since when do you need a college degree to work at a call center? For $8 an hour? (Maybe that Master’s in Comparative Theology will pay off for someone! Kinda tough to pay off the $120k in student loans on that salary, though.)
More to the point, though, pretty much every online application included a psych test – a timed psych test. I was prompted, however, to do this post because of today’s Dilbert cartoon:
No wonder it’s tough to get a job.
My last job they called me 24 hours after they got my resume, skipped the phone interview, and I had the job within minutes of ending my actual interview. (admittedly it's building NVGs and I did have 10 years experience testing them for the USAF)As for minimum wage type jobs, up in phoenix all the fast food joints are paying at least $10/hour.