by Peter Lloyd for Job Hunting
I’ve always wanted and enjoyed lots of free time. Freelance writing gave me very little at first. I was always busy. I would complain that being a free agent tied me down more than a regular, 9-to-5 kind of job. Then it ended.
When all of my freelance clients either sent me packing, stopped offering work, or closed their doors, I had all the free time I ever wanted. What did I do with it? Looked for work. Looking for work is one of the worst and ways to spend time. My job search era turned out to be one of the worst periods of my life. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: freelance writing, school bus
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by Peter Lloyd for Job Hunting
If there were a job waiting for each of us, a job search would involve nothing more than finding it. A job search, then, could accurately be called a job search. Today, with six of us scrambling for every one available job (15.5 million job seekers v. 2.4 million jobs), we need a new name for what we do every day.
Job race, job wars, employment scrum? It’s more like a melée for positions out here. While the ratio shows signs of improving, we can’t just wait for the day when there are six jobs for every job seeker—the day when our biggest headache is figuring out which combination of salaries, bonuses, perks, and benefits suits us best.
The obvious strategy for standing out from the other six has most of us working to improve every angle of our search—resumés, networking, interviewing skills, cover letters, follow-up calls. Since this is the obvious strategy, most of the other five looking at our target job are doing the same. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: employment, freelance writing, odd jobs, school bus, unemployment
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by Peter Lloyd for Job Hunting
The title doesn’t sound that intriguing—Tribulations of a Cashier—but maybe that’s because it’s a literal translation of Les tribulations d’une caissière.
I hope it sounds snappier to the French-speaking world.
According to a story on NPR, ‘Checkout’ Girl Cashes In With Best-Selling Memoir, author Anna Sam, at age 29, has realized her dream of becoming a writer by writing about her lousy day job. Not only that, she wrote the whole book in French! Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: Anna Sam, day job, dream job, freelance writing, school bus, Studs Terkel
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by Peter Lloyd for Job Hunting
Since 1977, Cincinnati has celebrated Labor Day with a bang—a day-long festival and fireworks display called Riverfest. This year the big bang began around 9 PM and echoed off into the surrounding hills of the Ohio valley about 40 minutes later.
Many American might be surprised to learn that this worker’s holiday is an immigrant. An American labor leader imported it in 1882 from Canada. At that time, the idea of workers joining forces and speaking with a collective voice scared the bejeezus out of President Cleveland.
Something to think about as we search for jobs or wonder how long we’ll keep the one we have. The same goes for those of us looking for job candidates to hire or, more likely, how many, when, and which to let go. Read the rest of this entry »
Tags: drug testing, freelance writing, Labor Day, Riverfest, Samuel Gompers, school bus, unemployment
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