Microjobs

Microjobs are small jobs that you do for a fee. They can be "odd jobs", as in yard word, handyman type jobs, small household projects or assisting with a move and getting paid for it. They can include little side entrepreneurial jobs like dogwalking or transcription. Microjobs can also include graphic design tasks, like create a poster for an upcoming gig, or write a book review for a free book or ten dollars. Websites like Elance and Virtual Vocations, though they have contract and telework positions will also advertise microjobs.

The truth is, workers have been performing microjobs for years--centuries if you also want to count the piece work that laborers took home to complete at night, and all the washing and extra cooking that women would perform for bachelors for a fee. These jobs made it possible to save up for books, to send a child to school, or to keep food on the table and a roof over your head, especially when prospects were lean and before established social welfare programs.

But some people don't know about these microjobs, or they have just thought of them as "odd jobs", or they just didn't know that they should get paid for them since they were doing them for a friend or as a favor. Many people also don't consider them to be "real" work, but they can help provide extra income while not requiring a lot of extra exertion. And best of all, you can usually work them out in your schedule.

I have had several microjobs: I write blog posts, reviews and articles; I tutor and proofread; I dogwalk; I read Tarot cards at parties; I make little crafty items for sale (like scarves and soaps). And I will, occasionally, do labor jobs if I know that I won't ache for three days, no scaffolding, and that I am not working with a power tool cowboy. The benefit: I do them when I have time and get paid as soon as it is completed. Most of the work is for personal satisfaction, not the money.

Microjobs can help you out of a jam with cash. They are a better financial option than selling off your textbooks, or scrambling to pick up an extra shift at your regular job. The next few posts will explore some sources for microjobs if you want to find some work for yourself or if you have clients coming into the library who need money immediately. Suggesting a microjob is a socially responsible referral, unlike giving a client the address of a payday loan office, IMHO.

Once you know where to find microjobs you will never have to worry about the employer who rarely, if ever, pays on time, pick up shifts at a job that you dislike but can tolerate, or multitask by watching Supernatural or listening to a novel. Try to do that at work.

You can find out more about microjobs in this post from 800 CEO Read that features Chris Guillebeau's Unconventional Guide to Working for Yourself.

Paul Forster, Indeed's CEO, talks about Indeed

Total Picture Radio interviewed Paul Forster, the CEO of Indeed, about how Indeed works. Indeed, if you haven't used it, is a vertical search engine which "scrapes" jobs from major boards and allows you to search those boards from their interface. If you find something you like, you select the job and Indeed takes you to where the original placement of the job--like on Monster--and you follow the posting steps from their to apply.

The interview gives a good overview of Indeed and some of its features, like the Job Trends, setting up alerts, how the search engine lets you search by salary even if not every job posting includes salary information. I also learned about how sponsored jobs works--sounds a bit like Facebook's ads within the social network. They also talked a bit about job scams and phishers on the site and the steps that Indeed is taking to lessen the posts from scammers.

Which is how I found out about the interview, through a post on the Diggings blog which is powered by JobDig. The writer does make a good point that if Indeed didn't deal with places that harbor scammers, like major job boards that do no checks on job authenticity, scamming would be lessened, but that's like saying Google shouldn't return results that would include misleading information.

As a researcher, you should be aware that there are some vertical search engines that aggregate employer job feeds only, like Eluta and vertical search engines that scrape, like Indeed, SimplyHired and WowJobs. Taking employer feeds directly can indicate that these are real jobs--though you also get fewer results. (Researchers know less is more, desperate job seekers just get frustrated.) A submitted feed may also be inauthentic, since it is hard to tell if the search engine has someone who is investigating the authenticity of the the job feeds beyond the initial email of please add our feed to your results.

I think that including tools like map mashups or letting you discover how many times an employer has posted the job and for how long are other tools that will help you discover the authenticity of a job. If there is no mapped location, or the location seems suspect, it's probably not real--as in, using a post office box and not a company address to submit your resume, a tactic that was used by old school scammers that used print classifieds. If a job is frequently posted or runs forever, these are also tip offs that something is wrong, though it could just mean that the job has a high turnover rate, such as car washers.

The interview, however, is good and offers some insights to searchers using Indeed.

Federal Jobs (US)

There is a website for federal service jobs in the US, Making the Difference, which includes advice on writing a resume, the infamous KSAs, as well as a housing guide for the DC area.

There's more about finding a federal job on the NACE Bulletin for August 4th, 2009pt. 2.

I want to be a librarian

And now, don't you want to be one, too?

Library Day in the Life Project

The Library Day in the Life Project is a great way to find out what certain types of librarians do all day in their libraries, to research career options and to prep for interviews, so you can ask more sophisticated questions about duties and expectations.

A plea for subject lines

This post on BNET about how to annoy your colleagues with email put me in mind of some email problems that I have experienced lately. Well, not my problem really: other people's problems.

• Sending email with no subject header or a re: subject header. It screams: I'm a virus, I'm a virus. I have set my email to kick these suckers out of the queue, straight to delete. If you send your job applications like that you have just sent them to the electrical shredder. Ditto, if you did this to follow up on a request from someone you met at a networking event, or to ask your former bosses to give you a reference. It doesn't matter if they recognize the email address. Prudence says, turf it. If you think your bosses will remember your name and email from when you worked there, that was your corporate email. They aren't going to know gobbledygook at google.com
  
• Vague subject lines are just as bad, since those have been hijacked by spammers. About our conversation last week is terrible, and I might delete it since I think that one has been used by people trying to sell me Viagra. About our conversation at CLA is a bit better, until bots start using acronyms and abbreviations, hoping for a bite. Use a specific subject line, such as a short paraphrase of the topic discussed, and then use We discussed this at CLA, in the body of the message so I remember who you are. 
• If you are applying on a job posting with a reference number and job title, use both. Some jobs titles have multiple competitions with different numbers, so use both to help with filtering.
  

What if I sent the email message out with no subject line by mistake and it is due right away: do I resend? Oh, no, multiple copies of items with attachments from the same address doesn't look like spam at all. If they're going to open it, sending it once to the appropriate person (assuming you got that right) will take care of the problem.

Fill out subject lines first, job title and number, and then cut, paste and attach your messages and documents into the email. Don't leave a subject line blank, but if you got everything else right, don't punish yourself for that small mistake, but make it easier on the HR person to sort you out.

Recovery jobless and pay-less?

Translation: if you drop wages, who's going to buy your stuff?

If you're still doubtful about "downward mobility", you can find more information Bill Moyer's Now, Downward Mobility (The Family Budget Calculator that the article cites has moved, and the data hasn't been revised for this year). Think they're a little excitable, according to the Economic Policy Institute, "The most recent data show there are now nearly 6 workers for every single job opening in the country."

Salary negotiations where you think you are going to get paid what you are worth will be a thing of the past. And most workers will be worth-less.

The He-cession

A colleague of mine sent me an article about how women, especially older women, are doing surprisingly well, despite the recession. What's interesting is that, according to the article, women are finding work in battered industries: finance, real estate and insurance. They are also becoming self-employed--not always an indicator of improvement for standard of living, since some entrepreneurs don't make more than what they did as salary workers, and they usually have to pay their own benefits and pension.

But it is good to know that there are glimmers in some areas.

From Canada's He-Cession from the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.

In the U.S., they’ve begun calling the recession there a “he-cession,” because 80% of American workers whose jobs have been wiped out are men.

In Canada, we’re experiencing a he-cession of our own: 71% of Canada’s unemployment victims in the recession thus far are men. Canada’s official unemployment rate for men in June was 9.2%, compared to 6.8% for women.

Career Experts Complaints

I came across this post from one of the people in my LinkedIn network and I felt that it was important enough to post a link to it, just because the scam site looks so credible.

You can also search scams on the Scam Slammer site, a valuable service for any of your clients/patrons or for your own use.

LinkedIn webinar for Career Services

LinkedIn has prepared a webinar for Career Services professionals about using LinkedIn and how to use it to help students, teach about networking and use it for research. I've been a long time member on LinkedIn and I found the tour to be very useful and easy to follow (so you don't have to take LinkedIn 101 first). Lindsey Pollak, the author of Getting from College to Career, was the presenter and she did her homework: she had spoken with career services professionals and had looked at how they had used LinkedIn (sometimes, presenters just do a surface presentation and don't understand how career service business rules work, but she was well-versed).

LinkedIn has also opened a Career Services Professionals group and you have to attend the webinar to gain admittance to the group. Librarians that are offering career services or career information in a job centre, or if you work in the academic library with all of the career and business reference material, should consider attending one of these sessions.

Cross-posted at co-agitating

An excessive need to be me

HBSP has an interesting blog post from Marshall Goldsmith about the excessive need to be yourself. After reading it, I would also argue that there are some people who don't know themselves, but are just behaving a certain way because they thought it was the right way.

But it is true that the excessive need to be you (with little self awareness) can be undermining. You see it when people do interview prep. They balk at the question, Tell me about the last time you had a conflict at work and how you dealt with it, and in response they assume namaste and blink their saint's eyes at you, and say I don't have conflicts with people. Well, you're about to have a conflict with me because I think you're full of baloney. Tell me about how you're going to deal with that. (And for god sakes, read a peace studies or peace education book, since they acknowledge that conflict has a role in creating peace. You're just being evasive, there's a difference.)

There are lots of stereotypes that we buy into because we think they make us better professionals--and they can vary from profession to profession. The manager in the post didn't want to give recognition because it just wasn't part of his personal makeup--or what he believed hard driving managers did, according to his stereotype.

So what are your personal stereotypes, the one's you hold about your identity?

Letterman and Spacey talk Twitter

It's a Boomer confab over Twitter, but Letterman does have a point: how many people think Twitter is a waste of time?