Job interviews and summer

by Eleanor Arnason | June 16, 2009 • I mentioned having a job interview about week ago. I asked the interviewer how many resumes they had gotten and how people they were interviewing. The answer was 60 resumes and 11 interviews. This means they were interviewing 18% of the people who sent resumes.

Facts and Fictions - Eleanor Arnason writes science fiction and fantasy. Occasional posts are republished with permission from her blog.

I had a phone interview for another job yesterday and asked the same question. This employer got 90 resumes and is interviewing 20 people or 22%. This suggests to me that the quality of the resumes is high, if they are interviewing one person in five. This fits with my sense when I go to workshops at Unemployment: there are a lot of highly skilled professional people out looking for work. I have another job interview this week, my fourth. Looking back to the last time I was job hunting, after the collapse of the dot com bubble, I think I'm having a similar experience. I get a fair number of interviews, but it takes time to get a job offer. I still feel very uneasy about this economy. A gazillion dollars in government money has apparently saved the zombie banks, but the underlying problem -- the huge worldwide contraction of trade and production -- is continuing. It took me three months to find a new job after the dot com crash. It may well take longer this time. I'm reading a book on the WPA right now: American-Made. It's interesting to read the book's description of the early years of the Depression and compare with today. The Depression didn't happen all at once. Instead, it was a long descent from October 29 to the spring of 33, when Roosevelt came into office. And the Roosevelt Administration's response -- though certainly rapid compared to Hoover's inaction -- took time and trial and error. The law creating the WPA was passed in 1935. Moving on to the seasons... Spring is over, though the weather has continued to be fairly cool, at least till the last few days. The roses and peonies are blooming, and the cottonwoods are dropping their seeds, which means the air is full of floating bits of fluff. Back when I lived by the chain of lakes in south Minneapolis, cottonwood fluff signaled carp spawning. At the same time that the air was full of cottonwood seeds, the carp would be thrashing in the shallows of Lake of the Isles. Floating fluff and thrashing carp: there ought to be a haiku there.