A Gut Feeling

[love_pirate]

Last weekend, I applied for a few jobs with the city.  One was "library page", which according to its posting, required no skills or experience.  Another was "senior library page" which did require some skills, but nothing a high-school student couldn't do.  Yet another was a "wastewater management intern", which actually seemed pretty interesting

Comments

[superquail]

I don't know about the role of the gut feeling in hiring, but I do know that personal connections can make a huge difference. One of the first jobs I had was working as a dishwasher in my mom's biochem lab. I wasn't particularly qualified but I needed something to do for the summer and the regular dishwasher had gone home so they gave the job to me rather than opening up the field and interviewing folks and trying to come up with some fair system for evaluating who had the right qualifications for a job that basically required no skills.

While on the surface, hiring the daughter of an employee just because she's available may seem totally unfair (and it is) there are some advantages. For one thing, if I were to do my job badly, I wouldn't just get in trouble with some boss, I would be in trouble with my mom which is a force that definitely would work to keep me in line.

[love_pirate]

You're right, personal connections are definitely the #1 way to get a job, especially now that jobs are scarce. But since most of the people I know are either unemployed, in school, or in entry-level jobs themselves, I'm not sure how to leverage my connections. I don't have the option of working for a family member, either-- unless you count selling their things on Ebay. My sister became my second client...

[superquail]

The "connections" thing is a really difficult phenomenon to study, I think. People who don't have connections who can get them jobs are at a huge disadvantage, but can you imagine trying to create a government agency to help the connection-less? It would be difficult to prove that you have no exploitable connection, and then you are still left with the problem of how to find jobs for people in an economy that isn't hiring.

[love_pirate]

Yeah. I have the friends I have because I like them as people...I don't care what my friends do for a living (unless it involves murdering people or something) and I don't want to start caring about that in terms of friends. So I guess for a lot of people, building professional connections is a whole different project than building personal connections.