50 Ways to Not Have A Job

 By Brian Davis

“The problem is all inside your head", she said to me
The answer is easy if you take it logically
I'd like to help you in your struggle to be free
There must be fifty ways to not have a job

Adapted from Paul Simon

For the past six months, I have been doing a hard target search for a job.  I’ve spent more than a full time job researching, sending out resumes, applying and following up with people. In fact, if I were a salaried employee with the County, I would be getting overtime pay for my job search.  I have nothing to show for all that time.  226 resumes sent out to people and 85 applications without getting to a second interview.  Something is dramatically wrong, and I need to start over.  I have to re-assess where I am, and think about why I cannot find a job.

1. I am a victim of the #MeToo movement and no one is ever going to risk hiring a man again to prevent harassment in the workplace.
2. I was a jerk to most of the community leaders who do the hiring locally.  It was not a good idea to beat them up over their treatment of homeless people for future employment.  I nagged and complained and never accepted that people were doing all they could.  I was always pushing and being aggressive with my advocacy to the point that people did not like me.
3. “It is not what you know, but who you know.” All the people I know either don’t like me or are not in any positions of power to hire.  Formerly homeless people, I guess, are not making employment decisions, or I would be golden.
4. The agency was tolerated but not respected, and so those in positions of authority don’t hire people they don’t respect.
5. My cover letters are too long.
6. I am a horrible during the interviews.  I’m way too serious and my answers are short and to the point, making me seem cold and unfriendly.
7. All my writings from the past 23 years make me come across as dogmatic and preachy when a potential employer Googles me.
8. There are no jobs left in Cleveland for my skills since most of the Social Justice jobs have long since dried up and the agencies closed. I feel like the Blacksmith or the elevator guy at the Halle Building who held out for long past his skills were needed in our society.
9. Cleveland and Ohio are consistently behind the rest of the United States in job creation.
10. I have to move to another city to escape my reputation for being a mean, nasty guy.
11. I sued too many people, too often, which makes me too big of a risk for any employer.
12. There is some bad chatter on social media about me and since I am not on social media except Twitter, I am missing all this and of course there is no defense against anonymous crap about a person in the online world.
13. I really only had one real job in my life and so a real lack of diversity in my employment background makes me an unknown.
14. I was a good bartender or restaurant worker and so that world is calling me back.
15. My age is a concern for supervisors who want some younger person for their jobs.
16. I am applying for jobs that I am over-qualified for and so employers worry that I will just leave.
17. I am applying for jobs that I am under-qualified for and so employers worry that I will not be able to handle a large organization.
18. My resume does not have enough action words that catch people’s attention (whatever that means).
    
19. There is one Godfather type person in our community who I annoyed and he, or more likely she, has put out the word to never hire me.
20. I am very difficult to work with because I have high standards toward solving problems.  I am not sure how this comes out in my cover letters, but it must because most of my cover letters get thrown in the trash.
21. My unpolished shoes during the first interview. They are scuffed and looked used, but my thinking was hard worker who put in time.  I figured on my second interview I would wear the polished black shoes to show I was serious. Problem is that I never got to my second interview. 
22. I am very driven and want a solution as soon as possible.  I viewed homelessness like a prison sentence and therefore those of us working with homeless people should try to reduce the time in prison as quickly as we could. 
23. Everyone in the homeless/housing world is counting on Permanent Supportive Housing to be the silver bullet to effectively end homelessness.  I was always skeptical of spending 80% of a community’s homeless money on one strategy while everything else suffers.  It is like a hospital spending 80% of their resources on their radiology department while the emergency room does not have enough money to buy gauze.  I love these units, but I also love shelter beds and case workers.  I think my writings and opinions might make it difficult for anyone in the homeless sector to hire me.
24. People do not forgive or forget.  When a person’s job is criticized and their livelihood is under threat, they remember the person behind that perceived attack.  No one is going to hire someone who tried to take food off their family’s table.
25.  It would improve my resume if I had served in the US Military. I know this because every application asks that question. They also ask if I am disabled at the same time.  Is that a value our society holds dear, like being a veteran, and should I adjust my thinking to declare a disability? I mean, it is a scale from 10% disabled and able to function “normally” in society to 100% disabled and not able to work. 
26. My wife, who is the best copy editor in the city, is not checking every single cover letter I send out. (Added by my wife: I was unable to get a job as a copy editor, by the way).
27. Maybe it just takes 6 to 8 months for an employer to hire a professional and so all these job offers will come at the end of this year.  Since most of these employers never tell the applicant that they are looking at other people, maybe this is true.
28. Society does not want to talk or even think about homelessness. Employers might be afraid that I will bring the pain, anxiety and struggles into the workplace if they hire me.  “Let’s skip this applicant, he would probably talk too much about homelessness. Who wants to have to hear that with your morning coffee?”
29. An employer might fear I will bring that social justice utopian thinking to the workplace. Hell, I could start a union or force better health care coverage or some other socialist thinking to spread among all the employees.
30. I am using Times New Roman and the world has moved on to Cambria. I think I am going to have to not use Wingdings for my resume since it is hard to translate my e-mail from clevelandhomeless@yahoo.com to English.
31. There are many places that I will not apply because I know they are hostile work environments. They have a corporate ideology that is anti-gay or anti-woman and would just cause issues within the first few months for me not being able to hold my tongue.
32. Maybe the few people who have interviewed me do not like my hand writing with the thank you note that I send, or maybe the card is too feminine, or the whole idea is old-fashioned.
33. Most of the people that I contact just send the equivalent of  “thoughts and prayers” back to me. I send them my resume and they say something nice back, but they really don’t care.  Only 6 out of the 226 people I have sent my resume to actually gave me a real lead to follow.
34. I am just a boring white middle aged guy from the suburbs. I bring no diversity; no exciting geography lesson or wide eyed “just-out-of-college” optimism.
35. For the first two months, I talked about how depressing my previous job was with Trump, homeless deaths on the rise, shelters closing, opioids, and families living in cars.  Don’t worry, I stopped that, but it had to be a turn off for the Human Resources staff coming back from a nice Caesar Salad for lunch.
    
36. I sent some honest cover letters out.  I hope that they don’t share those with other employers.  Like this one to the nursing homes saying, “I saw that there were hundreds of these similar jobs available and you have decided to call your job an executive so I will take your job if you pay $75,000.  If you don’t pay that amount don’t even contact me.” I never heard, but what if they spread those around saying, “Don’t hire this smart-mouthed jackass?” I needed something to keep me occupied while sending out so many e-mails and applications.
37. The first gate keeper in getting a job are by people who have no imagination and are safe middle manager types who cannot see dedication, a hard worker or the art of solving problems from what is written on a resume.
38. I think that I am intimidating and many managers might feel that I am just trying to take their job.  “This guy was a previous executive director and may be able to do my job better than I am doing my job.”
39. There are so many people out in the workforce who know who I am and are afraid that I will point out that things would be better with better management or someone who makes better decisions.
40. Community organizing and social justice is taboo in certain sectors of our society today.  Just listen to right wing talk radio and they use the words “social justice” as a profanity.
41. I really thought that my previous employer had a national reputation for civil rights, voting rights and taking on government at all levels.  I was wrong.  People forget quickly.
42. There are many who are embarrassed by their past mistakes, and I was around for all those bad decisions. I can point out where all the skeletons are buried and when individuals hired people who harmed our community.  I remember the racist decisions made in the past and the programs that were tried and failed. 
43. It seems some groups post jobs as a backup to hiring internally.  This way if the person they have in mind does not want the promotion for far less than they deserve, there are 80 resumes waiting back at human resources for that job.
44. I was too cocky.  I really thought all the success in keeping the numbers down for those on the streets, improving the conditions for those experiencing a housing emergency and the thousands of registered voters would make me extremely desirable.  I was wrong.
45. There are so many incompetent people who have jobs that matter and have an impact on others. For example, I have more common sense to know that telling people that my flawed blood testing equipment would revolutionize the industry, was not going to end well.
46. Maybe the job site that I am using is intentionally avoiding sending me good jobs so that I will continue to use their site. If I find a good job then I will not login to their sites anymore. If they send bad jobs then I will be forever connected to them.
47. With the election of some of the dumbest people in history to lead us, has that trickled down to management in the rest of the country?  Are smart people no longer valued?
48. I may be a man out of time.  I am sure that my talents for community organizing would be valued in the 1970s and 1980s, but today we seem to be content to manage misery and not work on solutions. 
49. The columnar cypher code that spells out “Hire Me” on my resume as a subliminal message to a potential employer is not working.
50. I was never taught how to display confidence without being cocky.  When did they teach that? I must have been out that day.

I feel like the high school baseball phenom who spent the last 15 years in AA baseball and I am now realizing that I will never make the Biggs.  I feel like all of my knowledge and experience over the last 20 years was wasted.  It holds no value in our current society.  I will have to come up with something else to do for the last 15 to 20 years of my work life.