Thursday, March 1, 2012

Ode To The Village Voice Classifieds: Part Two

Waiting rooms, millennium style

It used to be you had to show up at the HR office or the agency. Sit in waiting rooms that ranged from shabby, duct-taped chairs to sleek modern lines heralding the cutting edge of 1970s interior design. And hope the company was willing to interview you.

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A series on job hunting and gainful employment.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

We ued to have what was called the "unemployment office" years ago and if you didn't see anything in the paper to apply for you could go there. You walked in, registered, then went to scan the "boards", pulled off what you were interested in and took a seat and waited for your number to be called. That would be the sixties that I remember it from. There was hardly a soul in there, just a lot of government workers that dressed a whole lot better than I did.

c.o. moed said...

What an extraordinary memory! It's like a little movie....

City Of Strangers said...

I've been thinking about this lately, in the midst of my own job search, how much it's changed even in the last few years. Now, almost everything goes through a recruitment agent. You have to be interviewed by the recruitment agent, who then sends you on an interview with the company.

Or else you can go through online classifieds, send in your CV, and compete with hundreds of others who have sent in their CV for the same ad. In some ways, much more convenient than going through newspaper classifieds, calling the number on the ad, then going to the office. But in some ways harder, because now that it's 'simple', hundreds are applying in just the same manner, and it's that much harder to get an interview.

t.

c.o. moed said...

nicely and aptly put c-o-s. and incredibly depressing.