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Getbig Main Boards => Politics and Political Issues Board => Topic started by: Soul Crusher on October 26, 2009, 02:58:02 PM
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$13 an Hour? 500 Sign Up, 1 Wins a Job
By MICHAEL LUO
Published: October 21, 2009
BURNS HARBOR, Ind. — As soon as the job opening was posted on the afternoon of Friday, July 10, the deluge began.
Chris Kelsey, right, director of the C.R. England truck driving school in Burns Harbor, Ind., received several hundred applications for an administrative assistant position that was eventually filled by Tiffany Block, 28.
Sally Ryan for The New York Times
C.R. England, a nationwide trucking company, needed an administrative assistant for its bustling driver training school here. Responsibilities included data entry, assembling paperwork and making copies.
It was a bona-fide opening at a decent wage, making it the rarest of commodities here in northwest Indiana, where steel industry layoffs have helped drive unemployment to about 10 percent.
When Stacey Ross, C. R. England’s head of corporate recruiting, arrived at her desk at the company’s Salt Lake City headquarters the next Monday, she found about 300 applications in the company’s e-mail inbox. And the fax machine had spit out an inch-and-a-half thick stack of résumés before running out of paper. By the time she pulled the posting off Careerbuilder.com later in the day, she guessed nearly 500 people had applied for the $13-an-hour job. “It was just shocking,” she said. “I had never seen anything so big.”
Ms. Ross had only a limited amount of time to sort through the résumés. While C. R. England has not been immune to the downturn, it has added significantly to its stable of drivers and continued to hire office staff members to support them. Ms. Ross was also trying to fill more than two dozen other positions.
The 34-year-old recruiter decided the fairest approach was simply to start at the beginning, reviewing résumés in the order in which they came in. When she found a desirable candidate, she called to ask a few preliminary questions, before forwarding the name along to Chris Kelsey, the school’s director. When he had a big enough pool to evaluate, she would stop. Anyone she did not get to was simply out of luck.
She dropped significantly overqualified candidates right away, reasoning that they would leave when the economy improved. Among them was a former I.B.M. business analyst with 18 years experience; a former director of human resources; and someone with a master’s degree and 12 years at Deloitte & Touche, the accounting firm.
Over the course of four days, Ms. Ross forwarded 61 résumés to Mr. Kelsey, while rejecting 210 others. The remainder never even got a look. Many were, in fact, never uploaded to the company’s internal system because there were too many.
Just before the advertisement was removed, a standard one-page résumé arrived from Tiffany Block, 28, who lived in nearby Portage and had lost her job four months earlier as an accounts receivable manager at a building company when it closed its Indiana office.
Someone she knew had applied for the job and had said so on Facebook. Ms. Block went to the company’s Web site and filed an application online, which many others had not. By doing do, her application went directly into the company’s system. She was hardly optimistic, since she had not had an interview in months.
Ms. Ross, however, passed it on the next day to Mr. Kelsey.
Attendance at Mr. Kelsey’s school has surged during the recession. Mr. Kelsey, 33, had just promoted one of his three administrative assistants, who handle the paperwork needed for drivers to hit the road. He needed a replacement quickly.
The overwhelming response astonished him. He asked Cheree Seawood, one of his current assistants, to go through the résumés and help pick out several to interview. To make the task easier, he decided they should be even more rigorous in ruling out anyone who appeared even slightly overqualified. Mr. Kelsey, an ardent New England Patriots fan, compared his personnel strategy to the team’s everyman approach.
“We like to get the fair and middling talent that will work for the wages and groom them from within,” he said.
In other words, he said, he did not want the former bank branch manager Ms. Ross had sent, or the woman who had once owned a trucking company, or even the former legal secretary.
He also realized that in this climate he could afford to be extra picky and require trucking industry experience.
The company eventually settled on eight people to interview, inviting in the first two just five days after the job was posted.
In the past, Mr. Kelsey had mostly ad-libbed interviews, but this time he asked his company’s human resources department for help. They sent him a list of 13 questions, as well as an eight-page packet with 128 questions grouped under 50 “competencies.” He decided he would ask them all.
At the end of each hourlong interview, he and Ms. Seawood each jotted down a rating for each applicant and then compared them.
Invariably, the candidates’ job search travails came up. One woman who lost her job had started working as a waitress and confessed she had come directly from her job on the overnight shift.
But Mr. Kelsey resolved to keep his personal sympathies at bay. “If you start judging applicants on want or need, eventually that want, or need, will go away when they get the job and their financial situation stabilizes,” he said. “Then you’re left with whatever skills they have.”
Before Ms. Seawood called Ms. Block to schedule an interview, she had been getting increasingly depressed.
“I felt like, I’m 28 years old, and I don’t have a job,” she said. “What am I doing with myself?”
But Mr. Kelsey was immediately impressed when she came in on the second day of interviews. Dressed in a conservative business suit, Ms. Block patiently answered all of the 100-plus questions. Mr. Kelsey liked that she remained consistent in her answers and showed independence.
Afterward, Mr. Kelsey gave Ms. Block a 9; Ms. Seawood rated her at a point lower.
The next week, however, Ms. Seawood gravitated to a different candidate. The woman had just had nose surgery and came in wearing a protective mask. Besides her qualifications, the fact she had not tried to postpone impressed Ms. Seawood.
But when Mr. Kelsey invited the woman back, the interview was a disaster. She grew visibly irritated amid his battery of questions.
Mr. Kelsey immediately called Ms. Block to ask if she could come in for a second interview.
Was an hour from now too soon?
Momentarily panicked, Ms. Block quickly assented.
Mr. Kelsey marched through many of his questions again. Then, trying to gauge her ability to be assertive among truck drivers, he added a new hypothetical: if she were in the stands at a baseball game and a foul ball came her way, would she stand up to try to catch it, or wait in her seat and hope it fell her way?
The other finalist had said she would wait. But Ms. Block said immediately that she would jump up to grab it.
Mr. Kelsey decided he had found his hire.
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Wow. $13.00 an hour is nothing. How the hell do people do it anymore?
I'm telling you people, find something you can do on your own and go in your own business. its really the only chance you have.
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"$13.00 an hour is nothing"
It's 500 a week before taxes. That's 26k a year. Not great, but good in this economy if you dont have a degree.
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No, it's nothing...
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i went to the mall today. unreal. I saw maybe 15 kids filling out applications. place was empty. nobody buying starbucks like back in the day.
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"$13.00 an hour is nothing"
It's 500 a week before taxes. That's 26k a year. Not great, but good in this economy if you dont have a degree.
I was at the Renaisance Center in Detroit last week. GM has all their cars on display in the lobby: Camaro, Corvette, CTS-V, Aveo etc. Most of the cars were in the 40-70k range! The CTS-V was 72 K. Ok, it's got a 500+ hp engine but still.
Who the hell do they think are going to buy those cars at these prices???
They have some cool cars - expecially the new Cadillac brands. I know Cadillac was always a more expensive brand. I'd like to see GM come up with cool, inexpensive cars. Under 20K. Then maybe they will move cars again. 12-20K range.
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i went to the mall today. unreal. I saw maybe 15 kids filling out applications. place was empty. nobody buying starbucks like back in the day.
my woman volunteers at a shelter for women. she says theres more and more girls every week that have run away from families collapsing under financial pressure ... and she's never seen it like this in several years of working there.
this is really fucking ridiculous. i'm all for the free market, but this is just out of control... the bankers have to pay for this shit and it seems like they won't. i know the poors are responsible too, but we need to hold people with "specialized knowledge" accountable
they can talk recovery all they want, but this system is still broken
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my woman volunteers at a shelter for women. she says theres more and more girls every week that have run away from families collapsing under financial pressure ... and she's never seen it like this in several years of working there.
this is really fucking ridiculous. i'm all for the free market, but this is just out of control... the bankers have to pay for this shit and it seems like they won't. i know the poors are responsible too, but we need to hold people with "specialized knowledge" accountable
they can talk recovery all they want, but this system is still broken
It will go on just long enough for the elite to take control and buy our freedom for pennies on the dollar. Things will get better economically, but they will get worse overall.
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It will go on just long enough for the elite to take control and buy our freedom for pennies on the dollar. Things will get better economically, but they will get worse overall.
I'm serious guys, you need to develop alternative streams of income. Whether its garage sales, doing odd jobs in your neighborhood, or whatever, if something happens to your present employment, can you stand living wo a paycheck for 6 months to a year?
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Whether its garage sales
great idea. I sold my garage to a family from california who lost their home due to foreclosure. $500 EUR a month. I'm a nice guy, so I let them use the hose in the backyard for laundry and bathing.
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great idea. I sold my garage to a family from california who lost their home due to foreclosure. $500 EUR a month. I'm a nice guy, so I let them use the hose in the backyard for laundry and bathing.
Whatever you have to do. I think for many people things are radically going to change and they need to be prepared. The days of stability are over and many of these corporations are getting used to not having a lot of employees and simply are not going to hire people back. Alot of jobs are gone for good.
If i were unemployed, obvioulsy I would be looking for a job, but I would also be looking to do odd jobs for cash and things that add convenience to peoples' lives. Whether it be home mechanic's, computer repair, small business book keeping and office management, and shit like that.