Craigslist or the Economy? Where are the Jobs

The jobs section of the classifieds this Sunday was four pages. If you take out the house ads, it was more like three and a half. Wow. What happened to all the jobs?

Ninety percent of the jobs I've had, I found in the T-D classifieds. I religiously looked through the Sunday job listings every week, even when I had a job, in case there was a better job. Sometimes there was. Occasionally I got it. Then you hit this dangerous plateau where you're making a hard-to-exceed salary, but you don't particularly love what you're doing. You'd like to do something else, but you can't afford to. You're stuck. (I guess that's called success?) So I torture myself by finding way more interesting jobs and then being appalled by the salary range. It used to be quite a process, scanning every column of tiny text on every page, searching for that gem of a job, which could be under any category really. You had to look at every single one.

That doesn't take very long these days. The claim is that all the jobs went to craigslist, but did they really? Most of them look like email address-collecting scams. So where did all the real jobs go?

The company websites.

So you pretty much have to pick the places you want to work and keep checking their websites. I want to work for Henrico County, so I have to go there every week, which is hard to remember to do, and scroll through the listings, which only marginally change, and then guess. For instance, they have a "community liaison" position which based on the title alone sounds like something I wouldn't be good at, but turns out is exactly what I do now, only the title is completely different. I wouldn't have known about it if a friend didn't tip me off, (and then I didn't get it anyway).

The newspapers had a classifieds model which worked great if you knew what you could do, and didn't care where you did it. Sad to see it crash and burn.

(The other thing that killed the classifieds: They cost too much to place, especially when it's free online.)