Help Wanted?

Hubby is getting discouraged. He applies to job after job, ranging from warehouse work to restaurant work to road crew work and still nothing. He hits the streets once or twice a week to apply in person to jobs advertised in the paper, only to be told to fill out an application online. This is the future of job searching-- online applications where you have no human contact with anyone other than yourself. You push a bunch of keys and leave your personal information, then you get a confirmation email thanking you for your interest and you will be notified of any future contacts. Which results in nothing.



It makes it very hard to know why he isn't getting hired-- Is he too old? Age discrimination? Did he make too much money in a previous job and the future employer cannot match that income and therefore does not hire him? Does he not have enough experience in that particular field? How will he know the answers to these questions if no one calls him and takes the time to learn about him? How do these employers know that he doesn't care if this job offers less pay than his previous job if they don't talk to him? How will these people know that he is willing to learn and has more experience than the application asks about?



He talks about the "good old days" where there would be a "Help Wanted" sign in the window and you'd go in, grab that sign, look for the boss and you'd be hired on the spot. He has been background checked and fingerprinted and drug tested so many times, that he is afraid to do one little wrong thing because his record is now spread out all across the country.



It's a scary thing to have all his personal information left on all these applications either on real paper or on various internet sites. In this day and age of identity theft, his information is probably easily accessible to any one with a more than basic knowledge of computer programming. The spam we get on our email account is unbelieveable and increasing daily, but I cannot block them if one of those emails might be from a potential employer. So every day, I sort through hundreds of "make your penis bigger" type emails and "your medical order is here" emails and bogus "work from home and earn $63,986 a week!" emails.



But he is caught between a rock and a hard place, he fills out the applications because if he doesn't, it is considered incomplete and the application will not be filed.



I can see there are days when not working affects him more than others. He gets testy and stomps around the house and I know to stay out of his way, that this would be a bad time to bring up the clogged toilet or that the car needs more gas. I try to do what I can to take his mind off of his job hunt, but there is only so much I can do. It weighs heavily on him that he cannot find work and support us financially. I tell him that I will always stand by his side, through thick and thin, for richer or poorer.



I read somewhere recently, if everyone were to hang their problems on a clothesline, people would stick with their own problems. There are people out there worse off than we are, with empty bellies and cold concrete to lay on at night and illnesses with no cures.



Things will get better. I know they will. They have to.