Tales From the Job Market: Unfortunately, It's an Employers' Market [View All]

I know how bad the job market is because I've been unemployed and actively looking for work for the better part of 2 years. The idiot-in-chief is full of you-know-what when he says education is the answer: I have high intelligence and an advanced degree, and those things sure haven't helped.

When it's an employers' market, I'd say one has to assume that the supply of workers exceeds the demand, which would certainly indicate high unemployment. My experience in the past two years attests to it being an employers' market. I've found that when an employer sees a potential employee who has 95% of what they'd like to find, they pass and wait to find someone with 100%, if not 110%--because they can. I've received phone interviews for jobs for which 'm extremely qualified, but I have not received an in-person interview. Why? Because they had "so many qualified candidates" that they narrowed it down to "those who most meet our needs" at the present time--whatever that means. They want the person who has performed the exact task(s) in the exact same business/industry with the exact same type of workplace.

And here's something else employers are doing today: not wanting to waste time and money training a new employee, they only give the new hire a short amount of time to learn the myriad pieces of information enabling her to do the job perfectly. The job description may say the position has a six-month probationary period, but companies are shortening that to about a month! After I got "let go" (ie fired) after about 5-6 weeks from a job as a proofreader, a position at which I've always excelled, I learned some interesting news. Upon filing for Unemployment, the woman with whom I spoke said that my situation was not unique. She's been seeing this lately: about a month or so after hiring a new employee, many companies decide to let her go. Welcome to the brave new world!