2003-08-03 8:14 p.m.
Cascade This To Your People And See If You Get Pushback
Did you know that the California Employment Development Department (the bureaucracy which, among other things, doles out the biweekly pittance that passes for our fair state's unemployment benefit) is going to help TheBoy find a job?
They sent him a threat disguised as assistance, or assistance disguised as a threat, in the form of a letter saying that he's been "selected" to attend a "Personalized Job Search Assistance Session" and he'd better show up.
Here's what the state of California can do for you, the unemployed or underemployed casualty of the New Economy:
During your Personalized Job Search Assistance Session you will:
- Discuss your work search efforts to find employment.
- Add your resume to EDD's job finding system CalJOBS(sm).
- Receive labor market information specific to your work search.
- Learn about retraining and reemployment services available
- Use the Internet to search for employment opportunities.
This part of the discussion is based on your "Work Search Record," a 6-line spreadsheet-like form in which you are supposed to answer the following: Date Applied; Company Name; Company Address; Person Contacted; Type of Work Applied For; Results.
Presumably your employment counselor at the EDD will then try to contact all of the places you listed: the three websites and a mailing list you posted your resume to; the company who may hire a friend of yours for an upcoming contract, who will in turn try to hire you if the project isn't cancelled at the last minute; the twenty companies you resume-bombed in the hopes that they might have an open position they're not advertising; the recruiter who cold-called you on behalf of an unnamed company and who will be just thrilled to provide details about a possible position once you've driven half an hour to his office and signed a nondisclosure agreement in blood.
And the employment counselor will wonder, in his myopic way, why none of these companies have heard of you or remember getting your resume. Because it's not a job application unless you sat under fluorescent lights filling it out in triplicate.
Which they asked you to do six months ago, and you did, but they'll spend half an hour explaining to you how to do it anyway.
If they already had this information, you wouldn't have had to go through 1) and 2).
I do hope that the retraining services aren't for teaching grammar, because another brochure declares that "California state law requires that all job seekers provide his/her legal status or authorization to work documents."
And they save the best part for last, at least for the dot.com refugees:
"Golly!" TheBoy chirped when he told me about this one, making no effort to avoid hitting innocent bystanders with stray sarcasm. "You mean you can find jobs on the Internet?? At which point we both burst out in bitter, bitter laughter.