Dog Gets Job

This makes me laugh but is also incredibly disheartening.

From my local paper the Daily Herald by Burt Constable:

E-mails from prospective employers impressed with the résumé on a job-hunting Web site flood the inbox at the home of Cory Creager and Dorie Pike-Creager. For the unemployed Roselle husband and wife, the job offers give them pause. Or maybe paws.

The resumé is for their dog, an 8-year-old chocolate springador (Labrador/springer mix) named Josie Girl.

"It's just so clear she's a dog," says Creager, 40. "Her skill sets are giving paw, chasing squirrels, napping and doing her business."

That didn't stop the dog from getting five glowing e-mails on the day her résumé was posted and more than two dozen since then.

"I saw your résumé on the Internet and felt that I should contact you immediately," reads a typical e-mail, this one saying it is from a state director for American Income. "Our company currently has openings for several outstanding individuals like you."

One with a return address of The Prudential Insurance Company of America offers a training opportunity for "talented and skilled individuals" and reads: "Having reviewed your résumé, I think we should talk."

"Based on my initial review of your résumé, I believe you may be an excellent fit," reads another that says it came from Farmers Insurance and may have a sales job that could pay $550,000 a year.

"It still makes me laugh," says Pike-Creager, 44, as she visualizes her dog sitting at a computer in a cubicle in the corporate world. "But it's kind of disheartening."

The couple, who have daughters Emma, 12, and Josie, 10, ran a nutrition store in Roselle until the economy forced them to close this spring. They know the agony of unemployment and don't want to make light of people's serious job searches.

"This grew out of frustration," says Pike-Creager, who typed up the humorous, corporate-speak résumé late one night. Hailing Josie Girl as a graduate of "Paw Paw University," the résumé touts achievements such as "Successfully oversaw the location and whereabouts of family hamster on many occasions, and didn't eat it" and "Developed fleas on occasion and initiated a risk-assessment initiative to effectively reduce and eradicate the little pests."

"It was kind of cathartic," says Pike-Creager, who failed to get the "validation" she had hoped. "I'm so not validated. I'm worthless. My dog can find a half-million-dollar job and I can't."

The job-hunting site, CareerBuilder.com, didn't respond to a request for comment for this column, but a dog could draw positive comments from many online job-search companies, says John Challenger, CEO of Challenger, Gray and Christmas, a Chicago-based outplacement consulting firm.

"You wonder if the job search is the tail wagging the dog," Challenger quips. "There's no question that today, a lot of the early screening is automated. They couldn't possibly look through the tens of thousands of résumés they get every week."

Filtering software, not humans, scan scores of résumés, searching for a few key words. Josie Girl's success "put a good mirror to the fact that those first e-mails back are meaningless," Challenger says. Employers might be throwing a bone to applicants to see which ones are dogged enough to emerge from the pack.

Challenger suggests Josie Girl's owners take comfort in knowing that lots of employers apparently "love their dog" as much as they do, and from learning the lesson that "you can't find your job by sitting in front of a computer and e-mailing out résumés."

Pike-Creager and Creager, who recently completed the schooling to be a fitness trainer, say they'll be networking and knocking on doors.

"What happened to the good, old-fashioned days when someone put an ad in the newspaper and actually looked at résumés?" Creager asks.

If this were those good, old-fashioned days, an executive at the job-search company would see the story of Josie Girl and respond by offering Pike-Creager and Creager jobs screening online résumés to make sure they are legitimate.

If not, maybe Josie Girl can find another use for the newspaper.

Green Shoots

I keep reading these stories about the economy that mention "green shoots of optimism" popping up all over the place. While I'm glad to hear that most economists think the recession is bottoming out, it'd be nice if the employment numbers started to change as well. One of the most frustrating economic realities is employment as a lagging indicator of health. It takes a while for employers to shed the jobs in the first place and it takes even longer to convince them to make new ones and hire again.

As it is now fully green around here, with leaves fluttering in the breeze, I can only hope some green will finally shoot up in our apartment. After all, we have great sun exposure...

Creating a Network

I started volunteering last week with a domestic violence charity here in the northwest suburbs. It's a great charity called WINGS that helps women and their children who have been displaced by domestic violence. I'm working at their charity shop, sorting donations, straightening racks and this week I plan to learn the register. It's a great program with a safe house for the women and three charity shops that help support the safe house. The clients in the program can even come to the store and "shop" for free for their families. I was told each is given an allotment for the store based on family size.

In addition to getting out of the house every once in a while, I'm hoping that I'll meet some people around here and be able to network as I'm helping out. I've never actually tried networking as a formal thing before, so this is new. My boyfriend recently started a volunteer gig too. His has the possibility of being a paying position though, so it's a little different. The concept of networking is still the same though. Hobknobbing with employed people and hoping that like a virus or something, it rubs off.

Everyone says networking is the key to finding something in a down economy or any economy for that matter. I hope they're right. Because I'm beginning to think unemployment will be the death of me. After nearly a week, my tension headache has finally started to ease, thanks in part to the monetary help of a friend. This help will get me through one more month of expenses, one more month to find a job. And I know, I should be optimistic, and think that I will finish June employed but that's easier to write than believe. When March went out like a lamb and no job had come to claim me, I was alright. I mean it had only been a month, April would be much better- I'd definitely be employed by my birthday. Now my birthday is a month behind me and all that looms across my future is endless job ads, like the rainbow on the horizon. It seemingly has no real end point or a true beginning it just arcs into the mist.

I wish my recent good news fortune cookie would have been a little more time specific when it said, "struggle has ended. happier times are ahead." Just when, oh fortune cookie gods, is that supposed to happen?