Jobs Report

 A week before school started (yes, the new school year has begun in these parts), I was part of a group of folks who interviewed a new director for our site's afterschool program. Apologies for so much "school" in the last few lines. There happens to be a lot of that (school) around my life currently. And for the past quarter century. And now back to our story: There were a pair of interviews scheduled, with the afterschool directors having done the initial screening, hoping to make our job easier by picking the best of the best from which we were to select.

But only one could get the job. To paraphrase Glengary Glen Ross, "second prize is you don't get a job." We would all like to believe in a win-win world, but that wasn't really the case here. We knew going in that we would hire one person. The other one was going back to log into Monster.com. I did not think about this at the time. I was far too concerned with getting just the right person to watch over the kids at our school who stick around after that last bell. 

I'm thinking about it now. As it turned out, after the second interview, our choice was obvious. One of the candidates spoke fluent Spanish. That more than any other particular answer to our probing questions dropped the job in her lap. Our enrollment is more than fifty percent Latino, and communicating with our kids and especially their parents required a skill that probably wasn't on the application. Suddenly, I was back in the conference room at the book warehouse where I used to work, tag-teaming with the other manager. We would interrogate prospective employees for hours at a time, usually around the holidays, looking to bring on some new hands for the big push to the Christmas rush. If things worked out, they would be asked to stick around beyond that. We had a phrase back then, when we were unsure about which applicants we might end up hiring: "It's just a temp." This is how we reassured ourselves that, if we made a bad choice, we could always cut them loose. Sometimes, when pickings were slim, we would rationalize our decision by telling each other that we were "just looking for a warm body." 

Again, it is only now that I think about what must have been said about me when I wandered out of that same conference room after my initial interview with the company. Yet another warm body. And then I think about my son, and his current struggle to find a job after he graduated from college a year ago and was shot out into a world that wasn't aching to have theater arts majors, and his former employer Best Buy had furloughed him because, well, pandemic. 

I know, because I read the news, that there are "millions of jobs being created." Which is good news to read. I know that I didn't have one to give one of our applicants at our school. And though my son has been called back by a couple of the companies to which he has applied, he is still waiting to be hired. Second place.