Awkward solutions for the desperate unemployed
Cyrus Emadi, a West Hollywood resident, is so eager to find a job after a nine month unsuccessful job search that he recently posted an ad on Craig’s List offering 3,000 dollars to anyone who could find him an accountant position.
After one week of posting the ad in Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego Emadi still got no response. He had a hint from someone who told him something about an energy industry position he knew of in Antarctica but he said that he was not willing to move to the other end of the world. Millions of job seekers are already desperate facing the fact that the United States employment market continues to shrink. According to the United States Department of Labor, there were 2,000 more initial claims for unemployment insurance in the week between the 1st and the 7th of August compared to the previous period raising from 482,000 to 484,000.
The unemployment rate jumped to 9.5 percent in the last period, and Randall Hansen a career consultant that owns a website, said that he received a desperate letter from an anonymous writer which said that he had followed all the advice that him and other career guru offered but had no results and has been unemployed for the past two years, so he recently stopped looking for a job because feels that has no change of finding one. Since the start of the recession many job seekers have tried to catch attention with very creative efforts of finding a job. A Bridgeport, Connecticut woman for example rented a roadside billboard and a woman from Santa Clarita turned her resume into a t-shirt. A LaSalle University graduate handed out resumes in a busy intersection from St. Paul, Minnesota.
Corporate consultant Margot Carmichel Lester says that this kind of behavior is not working; on the contrary, it intimidates the employers. Emadi’s aggressive Craig’s List offer is like the job of an executive recruiter which is acting on his behalf. Emadi said that he was asked 5,000 dollars by the companies that offered to help him with his job search. His last full time job was as the financial controller of a small San Diego telecom company, and after being laid off, he began doing some freelance consulting for a real estate company as a part time job, but he says that he is now searching for a full time job which includes benefits.
