In which I attend another meeting, which makes me think thoughts...

I participated in another interesting discussion at CVP today during a committee meeting.

We were talking about extending our practice interviews to cover telephone interviews as well as in-person interviews. One of the committee members - the one who came up with the idea to do this last week, in fact - was talking about how most businesses have gone to using phone interviews as a screening technique. It is cheaper and takes less time, apparently, to call applicants up and ask them some basic questions in order to cut the number of applicants down to a manageable number rather than trying to call tens, or sometimes hundreds, of people in for in-person interviews.

And that makes sense. If you have two hundred and fifty applicants for one position - which isn't exactly unheard of these days - there is simply no manageable way to give them all in-person interviews. But you can call the ones who aren't judged unsuitable for the position based on their application or resume alone and ask them a few basic questions. What hours are they willing to work? Are they able to work weekends and holidays if necessary? What kind of wage or salary are they willing to accept? If applicable to the position, are they willing to travel? Are they willing to relocate if necessary?

And, honestly, there are advantages to phone interviews for the the job-seeker as well. The most obvious is the opportunity to make a good impression on the company without having that impression depend on visual cues: How tall or short is the applicant? Is the applicant outside the socially acceptable range of weight? How old does the applicant appear to be? How does the applicant wear their hair? There are others, and I could go on. Of course, it's really unfair that these sorts of judgments are made, but people do make them every day, and they make them as they are making hiring decisions. If an applicant has made a good impression over the phone, however, the judgements once he or she appears for an in-person interview might not be as harsh as they would be if the same person, minus the good impression, walked in for an interview.

But, what I thought about during the dicusssion today wasn't really about any of that.

I started thinking, instead, about the recent kerfluffle over programs that provide no-cost or low-cost phone service to the poor, the unemployed, and the homeless in the United States. There have been programs like this in place for years, but right around election time some Republicans decided that furnishing cell phones to those who could not otherwise afford them was just a Socialist Obama rip-off. Never mind the fact that such subsidized phone service was first introduced during Ronald Reagan's (not a Socialist) administration and was extended from just landlines to cell phones during the time George W. Bush (not a Socialist) was president. The fact that Obama is not a Socialist either is lost on them.

The thing is, the people who were complaining about this so-called "handout" to the poor and homeless un- and under-employed (because there are homeless people who are employed) were the same people who were calling the unemployed and the homeless "lazy and shiftless" and accusing them of just looking for a handout. They accuse them of not wanting a job and then try to deny them an essential tool for getting a job.

No phone, no interview. No interview, no job. This isn't a difficult equation to figure out, and it puts the people who claim they aren't in favor of creating a permanent underclass in the position of advocating policies that will certainly lead to the creation of a permanent underclass.

My question to them is this: Do you want people who are poor and/or unemployed to be able to get a job, get off the welfare rolls, and become what you consider to be a productive member of society? Or, are you so opposed to giving any sort of assistance to those whom you accuse of being lazy, stupid, and immoral, that you are willing to pretty much guarantee that those folks will not be able to do the things they need to do to get a job?

Because, you know, you can't have it both ways.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I can hear them now: "They don't want jobs anyway, so why give them the phone that they're just going to use to call up their dealer and score whatever drugs they're on." I suppose there is no hope for the people who think like that. They are so caught up in their worldview that there isn't any room for any other possibilities. But they are trying to have it both ways, whether they are able or willing to admit it or not...trying to say that people don't want to work and then turning around and closing that possibility off to them, except perhaps for a few low-paying jobs that don't lead anywhere but to frustration and continued poverty.

I don't know. I just don't understand people sometimes. They proclaim, without any hard evidence, that people who aren't working don't want jobs, but then they complain when someone proposes a way to give them something they need to get a job.

Yes. I've said this about three different ways in the course of this short post. It's because I'm trying to understand that mindset, and I'm not having much success.

Could someone explain it to me? There is no justification, but there should be an explanation of this behavior out there somewhere.

We've come a long way, baby?

Right now, I'm reading Tom Brokaw's book Boom, about the baby boom generation. It's an interesting book.

Last night I read the section on the women's movement in the 1960s and 1970s, and how there was a rivalry between Betty Friedan, who wrote the book The Feminine Mystique (1963), and journalist Gloria Steinem. In the book, Brokaw relates writer and director Nora Ephron's impressions of this rivalry, especially as Ephron remembered it from a meeting of the National Women's Political Caucus at the 1972 Democratic National Convention, but in general as well. Ephron observed that the younger, thinner, and more physically attractive Steinem got more - much more - attention than did Friedan, mostly because Steinem was all of those things.

In some ways, women in the United States have come a long way from the early days of the women's movement. In other ways, things have not really changed much at all. In truth, I think it might be worse for older, fatter, and less physically attractive women now than it was in those days - and it was very bad in those days. The thing that makes it worse now is that we have to live with what I call the tyranny of youth and perfectionism.

I've written about this before here. The media are constantly telling women, especially, that they have to be perfect to be of any worth at all. I saw an advertisement online the other day that said something like "Mother, 57, looks 27". This headline was followed with copy implying that this is what all women want, or should want. I'm not sure of the wording, but the ages are those that appeared in the ad's copy. We are expected to be thin, cover any gray we have in our hair, and go to any lengths necessary - including surgery - to make sure we have no wrinkles. In short, we are all told we are expected to look like we are in our 20s, at the oldest.

This morning I saw another ad, on television this time, for some sort of face-lift procedure. The ad is not clear about exactly what the procedure involves, but it exhorts women to take advantage of the opportunity to look young and "healthy", as if there is something inherently unhealthy about being, or looking, old. This is an attitude that I see and hear more and more - that age is something that can, should, and must be cured.

There is a flaw in this plan. We are all aging, all the time, and people who are 57 years old should not look like they are 27. It isn't natural. This, however, does not stop the media from regularly running stories encouraging older job seekers (I see lots of this stuff because I am currently looking for work) to color their hair, to make sure they diet and go to the gym regularly, and even to have plastic surgery. The implication is that if women don't do these things, we will not be able to compete in the job market.

This attitude is ludicrous. I just do not understand - I never have and I never will - why so many people believe that what someone looks like should trump their skills, experience, and ability to do a job. Certainly, if I were a personnel manager, I would prefer that an individual I hire be able to do the job they were hired to do rather than just be able to stand around and look nice.

What this all brings to mind more than anything are the not-very-funny jokes I used to hear in the 1960s, as a young girl, about men hiring secretaries (one of the few jobs most women could get at that time): "Well, no the girl [and they were always "girls", not women] can't type of take dictation, but she sure looks good around the office." Even then, when I was not a teenager yet, I couldn't figure out why anyone would hire someone based on their looks rather than their skills.

I'm not sure whether I should feel sad, angry, or depressed that some things have changed so little since the time of job advertisements that were divided by gender and of high school counselors attempting to steer every female student into three professions - teacher, nurse, or secretary - and asking the young women why they were bothering with college, anyway, when they were just going to get married and have babies. That, certainly, was part of my high school experience in the early 1970s.

Yes, there are more women executives now than there were (but still not anywhere near parity with men), and more women are graduating from law school and medical school. Women are nearly half or more than half of the U.S. workforce now, depending on whose statistics you look at. But no matter how intelligent, skilled, and experienced a woman is, she is often still expected to fit certain physical criteria in order to be considered for a job. And, even if that is not always true, Madison Avenue wants us to believe that's the way it is.

We may have come a long way, baby, but we've still got a long way to go, apparently.

Some days, you do what you have to do...

Ever have one of those day where you'd rather just hide, stay in bed, and curl up with a good book?

I'm having one of those days. The weather has turned cooler again (not that it warmed up much from recent seemingly arctic temperatures), and it looks like rain. That's the kind of day when this usually happens to me. Also, I'm reading a good book, and when I find a good book it is sometimes very difficult for me to pry myself away from it.

Now, I didn't get to stay in bed with my book. I had a meeting and a workshop to go to. So, not only did I have to get out and about, I had to wake up early in order to get a ride to the 9 a.m. meeting. Add to the fact that I knew ahead of time that the meeting would not be the fascinating highlight of my week and the fact that my eustachian tube has been plugged off and on for the past couple of days, which means an earache. None of this helped my mood this morning. Neither did the prospect of riding home on the bus. I don't mind riding the bus generally, but in cold weather and with all kinds of creeping crud going around, I'd just rather not.

Now, though, that I'm back home and could, technically, head for bed and that book, I'm not in such a bad mood at all, even though I'm not in bed and not reading my book.

What's the difference?

The difference is, while the meeting was as underwhelming as I'd expected, the workshop I attended afterward was energizing, interesting, and helpful. It wasn't one of those deadly dull affairs where the presenter gets up and lectures to you for a couple of hours, maybe flashes a few PowerPoint slides on a screen or a whiteboard. There wasn't even a set topic for the session.

I think that, back in the Sixties, it might have qualified as a "rap session". Am I the only one here old enough to remember those?

The whole purpose was to generate topics for workshops for members of CVP. We're all looking for work, many of us at an age that makes employers less than eager to hire us. Toward this end, the facilitator asked each of us (there were maybe fifteen of us in the workshop) to introduce ourselves, talk about our area of expertise, and then say what one thing would we find most valuable to take away from a workshop.

Because we were a fairly diverse group in regard to our backgrounds of education and work life, just listening to each participant talk about what they have done and what they would like to do going forward was quite interesting. What was instructive, however, was what each of us said we would like to take from the workshop, that would help us in getting where we want to be. It turns out that many of us have very similar worries or issues, despite our diverse backgrounds.

My "takeaway" suggestion was that I would like to be able to discuss my abilities and talents without feeling like I'm "blowing my own horn" or bragging about myself. I have a great deal of trouble with that because my upbringing was such that I was taught that one just does not brag on what they can do, that doing so is unattractive and unseemly. Because of this, I have a tough time in job interviews trying to sell the interviewers on my potential worth to their companies.

To my surprise, I was far from the only one who had similar issues with either feeling self-worth or communicating their worth to potential employers. Our issues came from different places, to be sure. Along with my upbringing, the fact that communicating my worth to a company feels like I'm selling myself to interviewers is uncomfortable to me. Also, I did not get the sales gene, and selling myself and my talents has always felt even more uncomfortable than trying to sell a product. I've tried sales jobs before (I was even an Avon Lady for awhile, back when Avon Ladies actually went door-to-door in an assigned territory; it was an awful experience). Sales is just not a good fit for me. In other words, I'm miserable at it.

The facilitator said something that might make it easier for me. She said that what is really needed is that I share myself rather than think of it as selling myself. And that makes sense to me. I don't know how that readjustment in my outlook will work in practical terms, next time I apply for a job, but the concept is one that I appreciate. I can share much more readily and successfully, I think, than I can sell.

So, I'm in a much better frame of mind this afternoon than I was this morning.

All of this has me thinking, though...when you would rather just stay home and read a good book, or do whatever it is that you enjoy doing when you would rather just hide from the world, what does it take to get you out of hermit mode?

Happy New Year...now get to work

Look at that. We've all got a brand-new, shiny year to play with.

The triskaidekaphobics will probably have a rough time of it but, you know, you can't please everyone. Years aren't like buildings; you can't just rename the 13th year of the century the 14th year and go on like nothing happened.

Well, I guess you could, but it would just confuse everyone.

This is the day that people traditionally make resolutions for the year ahead, promising themselves to behave themselves and quit doing the things they think they shouldn't be doing and to start doing the things they think they should be doing but don't really feel inclined to do.

I don't make resolutions.

There are a couple of reasons for that. First of all, the track record of humanity, collectively, for keeping resolutions, is not that great, and I don't like to set myself up for failure. I'm good enough at it without building it into the plan for a year. But, more important, I've always believed that if something is important enough to do, there's no good reason for waiting until an arbitrary day to start doing it.

What I do try to do every year, on the first day of the year, is to sit down and think about what direction I would like to go during the year.

First and foremost, I hope to get work this year.

I've proably mentioned here that I've been out of work. At this point, it has been a little over a year since I've worked at a paying job. This is not my choice. I was let go from my previous job as a result of the economy and, although I've been looking faithfully, there really hasn't been anything out there.

This is something I don't have complete control over. I can apply for job after job after job, but that doesn't mean that I'll get an interview, much less a job. The official jobless numbers in my county are still above 14 percent; the unoffical numbers are just about universally agreed to be close to 10 percentage points higher than that. But I can continue to look and to apply and to hope for the best. I can also continue to do volunteer work at Central Valley Professionals while I look for work. The things I do there, including writing and presenting workshops for other jobseekers, are helping me develop new skills that could help me get work.

While I'm looking for work, there is no reason for me not to continue to work on ongoing writing projects that can eventually become revenue streams for me. And so I will do that, and look for other, smaller projects that can pay off more quickly than the two big, ongoing projects that I'm currently working on.

There is also this blog. I intend to continue blogging every day, or as close to that as I can manage. I want to continue writing the Music Sunday and Movie Monday posts. I would like to do more social and political commentary here, as well. Previously, I tried to stay away from politics, especially, here, but the lessons of the recent presidsential campaign included, for me, that it is important to keep the conversation going on the issues of the day, rather than expecting our elected and appointed officials to do the right thing. Because, you know, it isn't a foregone conclusion that they will know the right thing, much less do it.

So, I plan to focus on two things this year - looking for a job and trying to create my own job through my writing. Neither one is mutually exclusive of the other, and even if I am successful in finding a job, I will continue writing. Continuing to write implies also continuing to read. And I will do that.

All that should keep me more than busy this year.

Well, that, and trying to nuture a social life, and keeping up on popular culture, and coping with the things that come up and make life interesting and, occasionally, frustrating.

Watch this space. We'll get through 2013 together.

And what did you do this week?...

I'm just coming off a very busy week. Four out of the past five days I've been either doing volunteer work at Central Valley Professionals (which I've referred to here before) or finishing up preparing the proofreading workshop I presented at CVP on
Wednesday. It's been a fun few days, working on the workshop, presenting the workshop, and then participating in two days of practice interviews for the new members of CVP who just did the week-long seminar that CVP offers every month.

What we on the Interview Committee do with the practice interviews is provide a panel of three or four interviewers for each seminar participant so that they can get a feel for what will be coming up as they apply for and interview for jobs in the real world. We have a series of eleven sort of generic, frequently asked questions that tend to appear in job interviews. Then we give them feedback on the things they did and said during the interview that went well and on the things they might need to improve on. All of this is put on a video card and then transferred to a thumb drive for each interviewee so that they can go back and watch their interview and the feedback and work on the parts of the interview that didn't go so well.

This isn't the only practice CVP members get interviewing, however. After the initial practice interview, if a member has an interview coming up that they are worried about, they can get in touch with the chair of the committee and ask for a practice interview focused in on the job they are applying for. The chair gets a panel together and interviews the job-seeker to get them ready for that specific interview.

Yesterday, we had the rare experience of interviewing a new member for the first time with the goal of preparing her for a real interview she had later in the morning. So, we were able to tailor her practice interview for her upcoming interview. I don't know if she got the job, but she did come back by CVP after she finished and I hear that she felt good about the real interview and that she felt that our practice interview had helped get her ready for the real thing.

Some people, of course, choose not to take advantage of the practice interview.

I was almost one of those people when I did the seminar in June. It had been at least fifteen years since my last job interview, what with going to school, then taking care of my mother, and then having a job sort of fall into my lap without having to apply for it or interview for it. Furthermore, I hadn't liked interviewing when I had to do it and I was afraid to try it again. But, I took a deep breath and went through the process. I am very glad that I did. It went better than I had expected it would. That alone gave me more confidence in my ability to interview and not make a blubbering fool of myself.

It also put me more at ease about being assigned to the Interview Committee, something that I was skeptical about when we received our assignments in seminar. I wasn't sure that being on that committee was going to really benefit me, or be much fun. I wanted to get involved in something that seemed more active - like the committee that puts on seminar every month, or the Resume Committee, which gives the same kind of help to CVP members on their resumes that the Interview Committee does with interviewing. I figured that Resume would be a natural for me as a writer.

I'm happy where I am now, though, as long as I haven't found a job yet. I can help others in my position, looking for a job, and I can improve my own interview skills while I interview others. I'm on the Interview Techniques subcommittee, which means helping write workshops and training classes about different approaches to interviewing for jobs. I am also helping the Desk Coordinator out, doing things like making sure that materials are in order for our part of seminar and for practice interview days. It is all keeping my quite busy.

I'll be happier still when I've found a job of my own, of course, but until then I at least feel like I'm doing something other than just carrying out the daily (and so far unsuccessful) job search that gets more frustrating by the day.

I guess I should consider myself lucky, though. I've only been looking for a job for just short of a year. There are others at CVP, skilled, competent professionals, who have have been looking for far longer than that.

What I did today...or, good thing I don't have a public speaking phobia

I'm still trying to absorb the results of the election, so I'm not ready to write much about that yet. I'm glad President Obama won re-election, and I'm glad the our local Measure B, which provides money for libraries, won. Taxes for schools won here in California, which means the kids of California won. That's good. There were some other good results, and a few I'm not so wild about. I'll probably write more about all of it in a couple of days, once I've had a chance to sit down and read some stuff and digest what it all might mean.

I haven't really had time to do that yet because I had other things to attend to today. It kind of felt like the world stopped yesterday for the election, but it's the day after now and we've all got to get back to everyday life now.

Which is what I did today.

I don't know that I've mentioned it much around here, but I'm currently out of work. Well, out of paying work. I've got a couple of writing projects that are ongoing, but those will pay when and if I can get them published. And while I'm looking for a paying job, I'm doing volunteer work for Central Valley Professionals, the group that puts on the week-long job search seminar I attended in June. In exchange for the volunteer work, I get use of their office facilities for my job search - phones if I need them, copy machines, and so forth - as well as a wonderful support system. It's a really cool deal. In exchange for 16 hours of volunteer work per month, they make their facilities available to their members. The way you become a member is by participating in the seminar.

When I was finished with the seminar, I was put on the Interview Committee. This means that I help with practice interview days the week after seminar week every month. I also help with the presentation on interviewing that my committee puts on every month at seminar, and I've been helping write and present some other workshops, as well. It's all a lot of fun.

Today was our seminar presentation for November, and it went pretty well. I've helped present enough times now that I can do it off-book (I don't need notes), just using the PowerPoint slides as prompts. The seminar participants laughed in the right places today, asked good questions that I was able to answer while not getting too far behind in the presentation (we have an hour and a half to present, which sounds like a long time, but really isn't), and I think my "um" count was down some this time. All of this is good.

It's interesting what comes out of my mouth sometimes when I'm doing my part of the presentation, which takes up about twenty minutes of the whole. I talk about actually interviewing for a job, as opposed to preparing for the interview or following up afterward, and one of the things I talk about is how it isn't good to just randomly fill silence with talking. There are times of silence within a job interview. Sometimes it is quiet while the interviewer or interviewers are making notes about what the interviewee has told them, and sometimes the silence is strategic, with the interviewers trying to see if they can get the interviewee to say something they shouldn't.

Today, the example I used came from The Rocky Horror Picture Show. If you've seen the movie, you know that when Frank-N-Furter invites Brad and Janet up to his lair, he has the line about "antici............pation". Even watching the movie, the silence in the middle of that word drives some people crazy. In the movie, Janet doesn't say anything to fill it, but she leans forward as if urging him to complete the word. As. Soon. As. Possible. I didn't plan to use this example. It just popped into my head and I used it. I'm not even sure it was really appropriate in the circumstances.

On the other hand, it worked. The seminar participants got the message I was trying to communicate about the urge of fill silences and the better practice of avoiding doing that. Additionally, it was interesting how I could tell which of the participants have seen the movie by the way they smiled at the reference. I think I might have confused one man, but he finally figured it out. And, no one from my committee said anything about the use of that as an example, so I guess it wasn't too out of line.

Maybe the best thing about the day is that I had fun presenting today. I finally know the material well enough to feel comfortable with it. I presented off-book last month as well, but even with rehearsal the night before I was not completely at ease while I was presenting. This time, I didn't rehearse; I was too busy watching the election returns last night. Despite that, it was fun and I think I got my points across.

Still, I'm glad that the seminar presentation is only once a month. Because of its nature and its purpose, it's very structured. I have more fun with the workshops because, although I write a script for each workshop, I don't necessarily have to stick to it so exactly.

I've got a workshop coming up soon, in fact. It's about proofreading resumes and cover letters, and I'm going to try to make it a little more fun and interesting than it sounds. It's a natural for me, as proofreading is one of the things I do very well, and I'm having fun writing it. I want to have a fake resume for the workshop participants to proofread, complete with planted mistakes, as an exercise that doesn't involve them having to go over their own resume yet again. We'll do that, too, but I thought having a resume to read for, say, someone who is applying for a job as a rat-wrangler, would make the exercise more fun.

What? There are rat-wranglers. I've done rat-wrangling. But that's another story for another day. Remind me sometime, and I'll tell you all about it.

In the meantime, since I'm looking for a job, without much luck, what was the weirdest job you ever had?