Job Searching Quotes

“This advice comes as a surprise: job searching is not joblessness; it is a job in itself and should be structured to resemble one, right down to the more regrettable features of employment, like having to follow orders--orders which are in this case self-generated.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“Always interview the person who will be your supervisor to make sure they are qualified and ethical. Working for an unqualified and unethical supervisor could be damaging to your career.”
― Dr. Mansur Hasib

“As in other industries, the recruitment process has become a lot easier (cheaper) for employers and a lot more expensive for would be employees. A demo with a new sound or a solid audition isn’t good enough. Artists are now expected to arrive with a market-ready brand and audience, saving their corporate overlords the makeover expense. Building a brand is no longer the purview of slick besuited experts; it’s the individual responsibility of every voice that wants to “make it.”
― Malcolm Harris, Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials

“I decide to ask a question that’s been on my mind for months: “Why, when job searching could be totally rationalized by the Internet through a simple matching of job seekers’ skills to company needs, does everything seem to depend on this old-fashioned, face-to-face networking? After all, there’s going to be an interview anyway, right?”

“It’s about trust,” Ron answers opaquely, not to mention “likability.” “The higher up you get in the exec ranks, the more things depend on being likable. You’ve got to fit in.”

I catch my right hand advancing toward Ron’s untouched French fries and quickly revise the gesture into a reach for the salt. It’s distracting to think that our major economic enterprises, on which the livelihoods and well-being of millions depend, rest so heavily on the thin goo of “likability.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“And no matter how upbeat they are—no matter how ingenious and flexible—the unemployed and underemployed understand that the clock is always ticking in the background. The longer you are unemployed, the less likely you are to find an appropriate job, and entries like “sales associate,” “limo driver,” or “server” do not make an attractive filling for the growing Gap in one’s résumé. At the same time, you are inexorably aging past the peak of occupational attractiveness, which seems to lie somewhere in the midthirties now. Experience is not an advantage; in fact, as Richard Sennett notes of corporate employment, “as a person’s experience accumulates, it loses value.” So once you fall into the low-wage, survival-job trap, there’s a good chance that you will remain there—an unwilling transplant from a more spacious and promising world.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

“Suppose that the [career] transition zone encouraged free-ranging discussion. What might the topics of conversation be? For a start, people might want to address the question of what is happening in the corporate world today; in particular, why does experience seem to be so little valued and accomplishment so unreliably rewarded? Some may object that corporate world is a vague abstraction, concealing a rich diversity of environments, but it was in common use among my fellow job seekers, who often expressed hopes of escaping from it—into a small business, for example, or what they saw as a more meaningful form of work. In saying that I was searching for a corporate position, I seemed to be moving in the opposite direction from many of my fellow seekers, who often expressed a strong desire to get out.”
― Barbara Ehrenreich, Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream