Jack on the Job; What Does it Take to Get Hired in Today’s Economy?

A senior takes to the streets to investigate employment practice in Los Angeles and whether the unemployed are getting a fair shake. 

There are only a few things you can find on Craigslist that won’t be scams or serial killers. One of them is resume building. Now I know it is suspect to consult Craigslist for something as important as a resume, but I was desperate. As a high schooler, I was eager to get a summer job, however I quickly ran into some trouble. I applied to eleven jobs, only to be swiftly rejected for all of them, an unfortunate development. I mean, what was going on? All day I read about how there were ten million job openings across the country and how businesses were foaming at the mouth to hire workers, yet I, Jack James Adams, still couldn’t get a gig.

I needed help. So where else to go than the Resume Fairy, who, after further investigation, is a white woman with dreadlocks. A “top-notch consultant” who proclaims on her website: “Greetings! Now accepting dreamers! I am here to help you turn the page to a new chapter by transforming you on paper.” So I emailed her the resume that got me turned down from eleven establishments. The Resume Fairy responded with a request for a grandiose fee of sixty dollars. For a resume. The whole reason I even considered emailing her is because I didn’t have a job and had no money, so how was I supposed to afford that? Are resumes really that critical to getting a job? Was my “bad” resume the reason I had been rejected by so many employers? I took matters into my own hands and decided to find out.

Because of my lack of a job, I couldn’t afford to “turn the page to a new chapter.” Instead, I put my hypothesis to the test. The game plan: create two resumes and submit them to the same three businesses. The first resume would be the one that I’d been submitting for the past year, to no avail. The second would be constructed by me and some of my associates at The Jaguardian, this one more professional and less personal. This experiment had to be perfect. I applied with the same resume font, lettering, and jobs. Most importantly, I had different people walk in to submit my resumes to these businesses because, due to my notoriety in the Pacific Palisades, managers would recognize me from my previous interactions with them. The results were shocking.

As expected, each business I applied to with my first (unedited) application received no response. However, fascinatingly, not a single one of these businesses responded to my second, more professional, application either. How could this be? Experts have estimated that there are over nine million job openings across the United States. The Chamber of Commerce is practically issuing a state of emergency. I had to figure out why they rejected all these resumes. So I confronted them.

Only one manager actually agreed to talk to me about the specifics. His name? John, from Beech Street (a local Italian restaurant with a for-hire sign propped up on their window.)

“Your first resume, you know, the one with the Harvard of Santa Monica [joke] may be funny to you and your friends, but it’s a red flag to us.” Fair enough. But what about my professional resume?

“To be honest, we’re looking for someone with a little more educational and work experience.” Educational experience? To hand out spaghetti carbonara? I pressed him.

“We’re just looking for the right fit,” he kept replying.

I lobbed back at him, “Well if you’re so desperate for workers,” he nodded, “isn’t finding the right fit tough?”

“Mmhm,” he responded. A stunning admission. Perhaps, I wasn’t the problem after all.

Continuing my thorough investigation, I expanded the search radius all the way to Santa Monica. I called Ron Schur, the owner of The Galley Restaurant to hear his perspective.

I started strong, “Thank you for being with me Mr. Schur.”

“If you call me Mr. Schur one more time I’m going to hang up.” I knew this was going to get testy. Now, Ron has been a restaurant owner for over 31 years.

“So that means you have a lot of experience with hiring people, right?”

“Well, you’re a f***ing genius, aren’t you,” he quips. Now here we go. I quizzed Ron on how to get a job at his establishment.

“I don’t f***ing look at a resume,” contradicting John from Beech Street. “That has nothing to do with whether or not I hire a person… likability is the most important. You need to have a ton of experience.”

For the next minute or so, Ron and I danced around each other, but what I really wanted to know was why I and many others haven’t been hired or even considered.

(Caroline Crain / The Jaguardian)

The Galley in Santa Monica, owned by Ron Schur.

“Let me put it to you this way, I’ve been making love for 65 years; that doesn’t mean I’m good at it.” The point Ron was making, or at least trying to make, is that all employers may not know what they’re talking about. John and Ron both use different, and sometimes arbitrary methodologies to hire workers, but they both seem to want top-notch employees.

It seems strange that all these employers have such high expectations given the dire circumstances. I talked to Matthew Hill, a Professor of Economics at Loyola Marymount University, to find the answer. Professor Hill detailed how employers have struggled to adjust from their high expectations from previous years. “Employers are going to have to adjust, like in any time, [but] it doesn’t seem that’s the case,” Hill said.

It’s important to note that even though both businesses interviewed have such high expectations for potential workers, each job only offers fifteen dollars an hour as starting wage. Hardly enough to live on in Los Angeles. Why would a person with great experience and education work for so little? This is a question employers are going to have to keep asking themselves as they continue to struggle to find workers because now that unemployment benefits have expired, the majority of the country is fully vaccinated, and Covid restrictions are lifted. So to the jobs that rejected me, the businesses that need workers, and the restaurants that refuse to change their ways, maybe the problem isn’t everyone else, maybe it’s you.