unemployment posts

Sears has nearly 7,000 job openings and is now soliciting applicants using Twitter. These are not new jobs to support a growing business, but openings that need to filled at existing locations. This number -- 7,000 -- caught my attention, but the use of Twitter by Sears was even more interesting. Sears, Twitter and 7,000 available jobs aren't words often seen strung together, until now.

We keep hearing about people getting hired because of social networking, but now companies are recruiting through Twitter with increasing frequency. Sears is just the latest large company to use a service like TweetMyJOBS to find applicants for all kinds of positions. "We're Tweeting jobs from cashier all the way to vice president of our company," says a Sears spokeswoman. "And reaching out to a whole group of job seekers that might not be looking at traditional job boards."

This is enough to make me want to move to Pennsylvania. The state will give you a loan of up to $60,000 to pay your mortgage and taxes to keep your house if you lose your job.

Whoever thought of this program, I am sending you cyber hugs. No, no, actually, I am nominating you for president. You feel the pain of the unemployed, the uninsured with the audacity to get sick, the recently divorced trying to stand on one financial leg in the greatest recession of all time.

E-mail and the Internet may be the quickest ways to get customer service, but the back-and-forth of e-mails doesn't always resolve the issue quickly.

A telephone call -- if someone answers the call and you don't end up on hold forever -- is often the best solution and can lead to immediate answers instead of waiting a day or more for an e-mail to be answered.

But what if the operator is too busy to answer, as they were last year at the California Employment Development Department, where callers heard a recorded message about unemployment benefits because its call centers were so swamped with calls?

Rudy McComb has an answer: Call the line for Vietnamese speakers.

The College on a Dime series is written by Zac Bissonnette, a junior at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. His book College On a Dime will be published by Penguin in the fall.

With employers hiring 21.6% fewer graduates in 2009 and few signs of improvement on the horizon, more than a few recent college grads have become boomerang kids -- sleeping on their parents' couches, finding that their six-figure college educations still can't get them jobs that don't involve fryalators.

Enter Lesley Mitler, a Wall Street recruiter/CPA turned $400/hour career coach for recent college grads, profiled in a recent New York Times piece. Her company, Priority Candidates, Inc., will school your college graduate on the Seven Step Program: The Seven Steps To Prepare To Get Hired, Starting Now which is service marked, perhaps to distinguish it from Joel Osteen's 7 Steps to Living At Your Full Potential and the Seven Stages of Cocaine Addiction.

No word yet on whether she can train your kid on how to get a job as $400/hour career coach. If she can, her fee just might be worth it.

The Senate voted earlier this week to extend unemployment benefits, allowing Sen. Jim Bunning to watch college basketball in peace and the jobless to collect benefits while looking for work.

Bunning had been opposing the bill extending benefits for 1.2 million Americans because he wanted the money to come from federal stimulus funds, but in the end his fellow Republicans got him to support the bill and not face the wrath against the party of voters tired of inaction in Congress.

For the 14.9 million unemployed Americans, there was more good news, as the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported Friday that the national unemployment rate remained unchanged at 9.7%. At least it's not climbing.

The BLS reported that employment fell in construction and information sectors, while temporary help services added jobs. Severe winter weather in some areas of the country may have affected payroll employment and hours, it reported.

Jeff Foster saw the writing on the wall a year ago when he was laid off as a project manager for a construction company in North Carolina.

Foster was earning $85,000 a year, and as the construction industry was fading, his company saw fewer jobs. The small company, which Foster had joined only six months earlier for better pay, had essentially put all of its eggs into one basket by relying on a grocery chain for work.

But for Foster, 46, the layoff has allowed him to get training in a field he had been interested in for years -- information technology, or IT.

He now gets free training through the Comp TIA Education Foundation, which provides free IT training and certification to people in need, such as dislocated workers who have lost their jobs, U.S. military veterans and people with disabilities.

The Senate went to work today, voting 70-28 to send a jobs bill to the House that would give businesses tax breaks for hiring the unemployed, and puts $20 billion into highway projects.

With nearly one out of 10 Americans in the labor force out of work, that's good news, although long-term unemployment is becoming a way of life for too many people, and it could be years before hiring levels are back to what they were before the recession.

As WalletPop reported two weeks ago, the incentive in the Senate jobs bill for employers to hire the unemployed isn't enough to encourage businesses to hire.

If you're among the 6.3 million long-term unemployed Americans, you've probably been through a fair share of job interviews and know how difficult it can be to prepare for one.

But looking at it from the other side of the table, what are the worst types of habits that job interviewees can have?

The Oatmeal.com, a comics Web site, recently came up with its top-10 list of "crappy interviewees." Here's some of that list, with others thrown in that WalletPop discovered after talking with hiring managers and job coaches:

I want a job, now
To edit, to write, for pay
End unemployment

It may not be the best haiku ever written, but for a chance at $500 I thought I'd give it a chance.
Fedcap, a New York group that helps people get jobs, is sponsoring a "Words About Work!" poetry contest this spring for the best poetry or essay on what work means to them. Since I'm among the 13.9% of the underemployed population in the country, I thought my poem should be about looking for work.

The top prize is $500 for the adult winner and a $100 gift card for the child winner. Previous contest winners have written about how their jobs have brought them greater independence, dignity, self-respect, confidence and how they overcame barriers to find and keep a job.

Simple question: Can you hold out until 2014 when, according to a newly released Rutgers University report, the job market in the U.S. will likely be finally and fully recovered from the horrible real estate caused recession that tightly gripped the nation beginning in 2007?

Well, excuse the pun, but whether you think you can or can't may be academic: The Rutgers report apparently leaves little room for alternative outcomes.

There's finally some good news to report on the job front. In January, the national unemployment rate dropped to 9.7%, the lowest since August 2009. And the news got even better last week when the Labor Department reported that there were 440,000 initial jobless claims filed in the week ended February 6, down almost 10% from the previous week.

It may be a sign that the economy is on its way to recovery -- but more work is still needed in Washington. It will clearly take some time to climb out of a hole that saw 150,000 jobs lost last December alone.

Last year, the federal government took measures to offer some relief to the more than 4.5 million people still looking for work. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) included a provision that exempts the first $2,400 in unemployment benefits from federal income tax. In prior years, all unemployment benefits were taxable for income tax purposes at the federal level.

Here's a good line to throw out at an employer at a job interview: "In case you're on the fence in hiring me, you might want to look into the 6.2% Social Security payroll tax exemption that the government may soon give to businesses that hire unemployed workers."

And if they're still interested, remind them that employers would get an additional $1,000 tax credit for keeping those workers for more than a year.

Need a job? Know how to count? The U.S. Census Bureau needs you.

Areas around the country are reporting that after begging for applicants at the last census in 2000, for this year's count they're seeing the most applicants they've ever seen.

Samantha O'Neil, a Census spokeswoman, told WalletPop that the bureau's Web site has been "swamped with interested people" as has its road tour events. Nationally the census is looking to fill 1.17 million jobs in fiscal 2010.

But things aren't going so well in Ottawa County, Ohio, however, according to a WTOL report:

Unemployment is leading to more men cheating on their wives -- the same women who are returning to work so these men will have a bed to sleep in at night.

Web sites that help people start affairs are seeing an increase in business during the recession as more men who can't find jobs are looking for other ways to fill their time and build up their self-esteem that has been falling since they were laid off.

"In the past six months, we've seen a 25% increase in members versus the previous six months, and it's certainly being driven by the recession," David Rees, founder and director of marriedandlooking.co.uk, which helps facilitate affairs, told theLondon Daily Mail.

LimeLife, a Web site aimed at women, reports that since people with low self-esteem are more likely to cheat on their partners, the recession is leading to more men cheating on their wives.