Wednesday, December 08, 2010

The Silence is Deafening

Oh people....how I long to hear news of an interview request.

Surprisingly, I have been completely unaffected by the jobs I see vanishing into Wiki thin air (as in they've clearly moved on with other candidates). No big deal, I just check them off my list. The torturous part is that the two schools that requested my dossier still have yet to schedule MLA interviews. GAHHHH!!! It's the end of the semester, already. What else are you people doing if not trying to figure out who to interview?!

I haven't yet been obsessive about the Wiki or the interviews, but I'm starting to feel a bit anxious about a Plan B. That is, I think my chances of landing a job in the spring market are even worse (for various reasons), which leaves us with two options: go home and *hope* something pans out over the summer or stay here for another year and *hope* we have better luck on the market next year. Yeah, um, neither of those sound appealing to me. I know we'd save lots of money, have plenty of time to focus on our work/research, and we wouldn't really be "expired produce" yet. But I want to have a HOME. A home that is mine, one that I can tear down, build onto, paint the walls of, pick out furniture for, and raise my kids in. I'm ready to put down roots and return to our "normal" American lifestyle. I feel like we've paid our dues, fulfilled our contracts, and achieved our professional goals for the time we've had here, and now it's time for the rest of our plan to fall into place: get jobs back home!

I'm making slow but steady progress on the essay that's been accepted for publication, but a sick toddler has taken up some of my work time. We leave in 9 days for the States, and I still have to finish a rough draft of this essay (I'm 1,300 words away) before next Wednesday, grade the final papers for my comp class, purchase the two "big" gifts we're getting the littlest ones, and start a packing list. This is all overwhelming right now, but if I just had some good job news, I think I could take everything a little bit easier.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I've been on the hiring side. You cannot imagine how every little thing can interfere, even for weeks. You can have a stack of resumes to go through to eliminate those who never should have applied. You want to make calls about a few, find out a little more about them.

Scheduling for interviews is time-consuming. Busy people, who also have their own job to be doing, just put it off.

To the one who is seeking work, it feels personal. To the ones trying to find THE ONE who will play well with others, who will fit into the team, it can be an overwhelming task to find the smallest minute to do the work that goes into hiring.

LOL, one of the questions we used in interviews was "what is your favorite fast food." People who said they prefer to pack their own lunches were OK, but anyone who said "Oh, I always leave the office to clear my head" or "I run at lunch" or anything like that pretty much eliminated themselves, because probably three days a week we all ordered out because there were just too few hours in the day to get our work done. Lunch was a real luxury.