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posted by chromas on Wednesday August 01 2018, @08:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the what-will-I-do-with-my-25-years-experience-in-Swift? dept.

Submitted via IRC for Sulla

Americans looking to land a first job or break into a dream career face their best odds of success in years.

Employers say they are abandoning preferences for college degrees and specific skill sets to speed-up hiring and broaden the pool of job candidates. Many companies added requirements to job postings after the recession, when millions were out of work and human-resource departments were stacked with resumes.

[...] "Candidates have so many options today," said Amy Glaser, senior vice president of Adecco Group, a staffing agency with around 10,000 company clients in search of employees. "If a company requires a degree, two rounds of interviews and a test for hard-skills, candidates can go down the street to another employer who will make them an offer that day."

Ms. Glaser estimates one in four of the agency's employer clients have made drastic changes to their recruiting process since the start of the year, such as skipping drug tests or criminal background checks, or removing preferences for a higher degree or high-school diploma.

Source: NOTE: Original submission referenced a paywalled page at The Wall Street Journal; this link appears to link to the same story, albeit with a stock chart for Intel Corp., included: http://www.4-traders.com/INTEL-CORPORATION-4829/news/Employers-Eager-to-Hire-Try-a-New-Policy-No-Experience-Necessary-27016610/


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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 03 2018, @12:27AM (7 children)

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday August 03 2018, @12:27AM (#716508)

    Yeah, I don't get any adult allowing themselves to be in a position where taking any minimum wage job is ever more than a dire emergency fill-in job.

    You don't get it, I don't get it - except: desperation. There are plenty of people who need the work or they are looking at their kids going hungry at night, or living in that roach infested apartment another month, or similar unacceptable situations. Yes, there are "answers" for all these things, but when you're money poor you also tend to be time and information, and sometimes intelligence, poor and not fully capable of accessing every available resource...

    The reason I got away with telling the man I'm not working for $3.35 per hour is because I literally did not need the job - I even had that exact conversation with the assistant manager one day, shut his ass up real quick. If they didn't need me, I would have been fired right then, but I took the risk because I had other income and support so that job was optional, and since it was optional I could talk my way into a 80% raise that another more desperate employee might not have been willing to risk.

    Get yourself stuck needing 70 hours a week of minimum wage and you don't have the time or energy to get out of that situation.

    when gaining a valuable skill is not remotely difficult.

    For you, for me, but for someone who is brown skinned in a town where the white skins control the money? Try becoming an apprentice plumber or some such when there are people of the correct color lined up for those opportunities... and there are plenty of other prejudices beyond skin color. Before I got that job in grocery, I had three jobs in restaurants - when I took that resume to retail, some snot nosed old biddy on the other side of the desk basically told me "with your experience you should probably look for food service work" - which, to me, is a clear signal that I am unwanted in their rarified air of clothing sales due to some cultural cue - not my skin color or accent, but something that just didn't fit her (illegal) prejudicial model of what she's building her team with. To this day, I get a kick out of mowing the lawn and then going straight to a high-brow department store just to see the shocked looks on their faces.

    Most everyone today thinks college is the only path forward

    Basically, it is, for those who don't have an unusual advantage, like the son of the local car dealership owner... The evolution of business ownership consolidation and wealth de-distribution means that more and more people don't have that half-million dollar white collar job opportunity that doesn't require college, but we've opened enough prosperity so that everyone can at least get college, and as Brad Bird flogged multiple times in The Incredibles: when everybody is special, nobody is - I think we've arrived at that end for college today.

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  • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 03 2018, @01:26AM (6 children)

    For you, for me, but for someone who is brown skinned in a town where the white skins control the money? Try becoming an apprentice plumber or some such when there are people of the correct color lined up for those opportunities...

    Must be a yankee thing. I haven't seen it in the south to speak of. You'll hear a racist joke now and then but as a general rule the teller doesn't actually care which race it's about; Polish, black, Mexican, rival college football team, it's pretty much all the same. On the other hand, all across the south half the folks you work with are going to be black if you're a blue collar guy. I'm sure it's technically possible to be racist in that situation but you'd damned well better keep it entirely unnoticeable in your work life if you want to keep your job. The black guys working along side you aren't there because of affirmative action; they're there because they make a good hand. So if one guy is causing problems with multiple good hands, it's not a difficult decision for the boss who to shit-can.

    As for the apprentice thing, nobody is lined up for those jobs at the moment. Skilled labor of all kinds is currently suffering a damned painful shortage all across the nation.

    Basically, it is, for those who don't have an unusual advantage, like the son of the local car dealership owner...

    Dude, are you nuts? A welder so shitty you wouldn't even keep him on if you could find anyone else will never be paid less than $25K/yr. A badass welder pulls in a quarter of a million a year and turns down any work he doesn't feel like doing without even thinking about it. Twenty years ago my plumbing/HVAC boss was charging $60/hr labor in one of the poorest states in the nation. And getting as much work at that price as he felt like doing. None of that is even considering that once you hit contractor status it's not that big of a step to hire some hands on and start a company making many times in yearly profit what you could earn alone. Did you really think the skilled trades didn't pay what you could get with a degree?

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    • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 03 2018, @03:11AM (5 children)

      by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday August 03 2018, @03:11AM (#716535)

      I haven't seen it in the south

      What south do you live in? In my South, they still get a hard-on when talking about cross burning and castrating catholic priests, and the candy ass cowards still run around in the night spreading red paint and hateful messages on the houses of their ethnic neighbors. In the bigger cities they'll hire mexicans as apprentice plumbers or electricians or lawn service workers, and let the white guys do the sales talking end of the job (and take 80% of the profit), but when you get out to the smaller towns they just quietly shit-can applications from the "wrong sort" of people.

      A welder so shitty you wouldn't even keep him on if you could find anyone else will never be paid less than $25K/yr.

      Sounds about right - $12/hr is what they paid that jackass that screwed up the first production run of my aluminum bedframes, had to get the $50K/yr senior welder to fix his mess, he was pretty much of a badass - perfect beads every time, could true a frame with a 4x4 but preferred to use his home-made oak sledge, had been working there for 15 years - that shop owner didn't pay anybody more than $60K/yr even if they could walk on water. That shop charged us $50/hr for labor/machine time, $100 on the waterjet due to maintenance costs - no A/C in Tampa, not exactly an ideal place to work.

      If you can step up and be the man quoting $60/hr or whatever for the jobs, then, sure, that's the gravy right there, but you do need a stake to get something like that rolling. I've seen plenty of jackasses try during boom times, spin up a big business on bank loans, then give it all to the bank when the economy turns around on them. Concrete guy who ran a crew "pouring 5 floors a week" comes to mind, watched him live high for about 18 months before it all turned around on him. Another one ran loaders, graders, excavators and trucks - every single one of them financed... It takes a combination of saving enough before you make the leap, taking enough of a risk to grow, and not so much risk that you lose it when things don't go perfectly - then having the discipline to continue to have enough cash cushion to float over lean times. That's a tough thing for most people to pull off, especially the ones with enough balls to try it in the first place. Of course, some do get lucky no matter how poorly they play the game they still win.

      My parents were cowards, their parents sent them to college and they became teachers, they sent me to college and I never had enough stake to do anything other than work for a living, or maybe I'm just too much of a coward to have risked a 6 figure salary with benefits against a chance of going broke. My college degree has been getting me a good enough salary all these years, and kids graduating in my field continue to do well, but it's cyclic, and if you come out at the beginning of a recession it can really set you back, especially if you took big loans to get through school. I was lucky - 2.5 years getting a Master's degree took me out of a recession and kept my little student loan out of repayment until I could get a decent start. If I hadn't had that TA offer from school, I could easily have been back living with Mom for a year or two looking for work that just wasn't there when I got my B.S.

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      • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 03 2018, @05:19AM (4 children)

        What south do you live in? In my South...

        Gotta ask you the same question. I've lived in Texas, Oklahoma, the Carolinas, and now Tennessee and spent more than trivial amounts of time in every other southern state (whole bunch of yankee ones as well but that ain't relevant). In my entire life I've met exactly one person who genuinely appeared to dislike black folks south of the Mason-Dixon line. Plenty of kids talked shit but then they all grew the hell up and got over it. The one I knew was family and, me being the wiseass that I am, I'd intentionally wind him up every time I was around just to see how mouth-frothy I could get him.

        Sounds reasonable for most ordinary shops. The epic badass welders who make $150K+, as opposed to someone who's just pretty damned good and makes $40-60K, go all over the place and weld the weird shit that nobody else even knows how to weld. They're the guys you call when you need some foot thick titanium that's underwater welded and it absolutely has to be perfect and pass x-ray the first time.

        I've seen plenty of jackasses try during boom times, spin up a big business on bank loans, then give it all to the bank when the economy turns around on them.

        Yeah, I don't get that. It's like grabbing the icy hot to jerk off when there's a bottle of lotion right next to it. Why would you do that to yourself? Do some people actually believe that they can go through life without having major setbacks occur fairly often? Why would anyone not say "Gee, I think I'll save some of this back for when shit turns southward"? I mean it's as certain as gravity that it's going to sooner or later. I've just been chalking it up to absurd levels of stupidity.

        Nod nod. This is where non-traditionals have an enormous advantage over traditionals. They've already got something to fall back on and possibly even some savings set aside for schooling. Unless your parents can pay for it or you can manage a nearly full ride worth of scholarships/grants, I'd advise every last highschool graduate to go spend at least five years learning to do something that pays decent and doesn't require college before they even think of enrolling. Taking loans out to pay for an increasingly diminishing promise of success as a result is what I like to refer to as a Bad Idea.

        Having done a few years of honest-to-god hard work to earn their living would do every degree'd person I've met some good as well. Y'all are fond of preaching the benefits of experiencing other cultures in academia but if you haven't even experienced the largest part of your own, you're going to sound like a jackass when you talk to most of your countrymen.

        --
        My rights don't end where your fear begins.
        • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 03 2018, @11:41AM (3 children)

          by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday August 03 2018, @11:41AM (#716630)

          I've lived all over the Florida peninsula with family in Georgia, Louisiana, some time in eastern Tennessee, wife spent several years in Muscle Shoals AL, and a couple of years in Houston. Houston didn't have too much open hate, but I never talked to a non-white contractor and I never saw a non-mexican working a grunt job for those contractors. I had limited experience, but in the two+ years I was there that was my experience. The bigger thing I saw in Houston was reasonable diversity in hiring at my company, but essentially ethnic cleansing during layoffs and it was not ability or contribution to the team or seniority based. Good for me, but still pretty much in-your-face when the 10% that gets cut includes not a single white person.

          The racial crap in Florida / south Georgia circulates mostly among the poor and stupid, and the politicians they elect, but there's always been and still is a lot of it going around. It really started to wear on us in the smaller Florida towns when the school board started painting our mentally challenged kids with the "not our people" brush they use for the colored folk: you bring your kids in to school by the back gate to drop them off on the unpaved circle by the portables, come late, and leave early if you please. Oh, you don't like that principal who's been pairing your kids with teachers who openly hate them, well, if you insist we can give you a spot in the all-black (well, 97%, all black would be a federal offense) school on the other side of town... the bigger nearby city is much better about treating people of all kinds well, but our neighbors still fly the rebel flag - interestingly less so since Obama left office...

          I'd advise every last highschool graduate to go spend at least five years learning to do something that pays decent and doesn't require college before they even think of enrolling.

          That's not bad advice, but it's almost like admitting defeat up front - if you've got the grades you should be going for that brass ring as fast as you can, that's the dream, that's what all the "best" families are doing, don't you want to better yourself and be like them? Takes real balls to step off that fairy float and go get dirty for money when you're 18. There's also some harsh reality that not every journeyman graduates to master, and there are far fewer contractors than workers, so... true odds are that you're not guaranteed to move up to the jobs that a 55 year old can do every day, and going back to school later in life can be a pretty hard trick to pull off - I've known a couple of people who have done it, but none too spectacularly successfully - it did get one old guy I know out of the A/C business (crawling in attics) into a programming job - not a great programming job, but enough to pay the bills. All in all he would have been much better off studying computers up front and skipping the A/C step, but that's not how his life unfolded.

          you're going to sound like a jackass when you talk to most of your countrymen.

          First thing I learned working the stock room in 1988: if you didn't say F--- at least every 4th word, you wouldn't get or hold your co-workers' attention, period. I rewatched Star Trek IV the other night and they actually pointed that out in some typical Kirk-Spock dialog...

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          • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Friday August 03 2018, @03:00PM (2 children)

            Well you're not going to see any Mexican contractors to speak of for good reason. The workers are illegals, which means they both can't get the license and don't have the money to start a contracting business. You're not going to see white guys swinging a hammer much either because the illegals will work for less than you can live on without piling fifty people in one house and sleeping in shifts. It's a good deal for the illegals since it's a temporary gig for them and then they go home with a pocket full of USD but it fucks the wages for the industry up badly.

            So, economics not racism. Also the reason that everybody who does manual labor for a living where there are a bunch of illegals hates their breathing guts. Especially Mexicans who are here legally either on a green card or with citizenship. It's got nothing to do with their skin color and everything to do with them turning any job field they enter into one that's utterly non-viable for anyone who has a right to be here.

            As for the rebel flag, I get why black folks don't dig on it and why white folks who think black folks are fragile and in need of protecting don't but it very much don't mean the same thing to everyone. Like I don't fly one myself but you can bet your sweet bippy that if I had a `69 charger there would be one on its otherwise orange roof. Anyone you see with the stars and bars, it's a pretty safe bet that they hate yankees a lot more than they do black folks.

            Admitting defeat? Nah, that's what I like to call "covering your ass". Anyone who expects life to hold no setbacks and the first job they train for to always be there and always pay well is fucking insane. Having a fallback position is just good sense.

            And yeah, you got the vocabulary down but I was speaking more of shared perspective. If you can't personally relate to what their lives are like you can't even discuss related topics with them much less think you know what's good for them.

            --
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            • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Friday August 03 2018, @05:11PM (1 child)

              by JoeMerchant (3937) on Friday August 03 2018, @05:11PM (#716803)

              The workers are illegals

              You're more from the South than you think you are. The legal Mexican population is approaching 40% across the South, there are plenty of illegals, but even more legals with the right to not only work but also own businesses, just not the social standing. The greasers mowing our lawn in Houston were probably illegal, but the journeyman plumber was almost certainly not.

              everything to do with them turning any job field they enter into one that's utterly non-viable for anyone who has a right to be here.

              I once had a dream of owning/operating a major orange grove... that went down the toilet when I learned that I'd have to harvest using illegals for labor if I was going to turn any profit whatsoever. Not my style.

              Anyone you see with the stars and bars, it's a pretty safe bet that they hate yankees a lot more than they do black folks.

              That used to be the case when I was growing up in west coast Florida in the 1970s, but Yankee hate has kind of faded over the years in my experience.

              Meanwhile, in the 1980s in Muscle Shoals, my wife was waiting tables at a Pizza Hut and explicitly instructed by the owner via management to ask a (clean, able to pay) black family to please leave because they would not be served. If that's not hate, it's at least what I'd call unacceptable by ordinary standards of decency.

              Anyone who expects life to hold no setbacks and the first job they train for to always be there and always pay well is fucking insane. Having a fallback position is just good sense.

              By that measure, there's lots of insanity out there, I'd say it's in the majority.

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              • (Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Saturday August 04 2018, @02:21AM

                by The Mighty Buzzard (18) Subscriber Badge <themightybuzzard@proton.me> on Saturday August 04 2018, @02:21AM (#717077) Homepage Journal

                You're reading what you expect to see instead of what I said. I was talking about construction crews and what I said was absolutely true because legal immigrants can not survive on what illegals are willing to take and have been utterly priced out of the industry except in supervisory capacities. So, yes, they are all illegals.

                I once had a dream of owning/operating a major orange grove... that went down the toilet when I learned that I'd have to harvest using illegals for labor if I was going to turn any profit whatsoever. Not my style.

                Have a shitload of kids. That's how farming has been done for thousands of years. Oddly enough, that's also how gay guys came to be known as faggots. A faggot started out as a bundle of sticks, came to mean any annoying burden, and got applied to the men who did not aid the farm by creating new farm hands, that making them an annoying burden.

                Meanwhile, in the 1980s in Muscle Shoals...

                Okay, you need to take a moment and remember that we're old. That happened but was out of the ordinary even back in the 80s. The 80s are going on 40 years ago though. Things change.

                By that measure, there's lots of insanity out there, I'd say it's in the majority.

                I would not disagree with you. Part of that's always going to be there, part of it's failure to educate, and part of it's by design from those seeking political power by creating bottom-up avarice.

                --
                My rights don't end where your fear begins.