Florida: You are not part of the solution.

   Regardless of the fact that I do not presently have a job, and I am not drawing an income, according to the state of Florida, I am not unemployed.  Make no mistake; I am very actively looking for work.  In the past I was considered unemployed by the state because I had drawn on unemployment benefits.  I no longer draw on those benefits. Since the state of Florida measures the “unemployed” by those who are receiving benefits, I am officially not unemployed, despite the fact that I do not have a job. Confused?  Just wait it gets so much better.

As part of the process to file for unemployment benefits in the state of Florida, you are required to go to a website called Employ Florida and sign up for job searches.  For all intents and purposes, the site requires you to enter all of your work history, your personal information, date of birth, social security number and I am pretty sure they asked my favorite ice cream flavor.  This whole process can be a pretty grueling one that takes over four hours to completely finish.  I was happy to do it at the time because I believed that by entering all of my information accurately, and carefully crafting my profile, it would make it easier to facilitate my job searches in the future. 

I spent last weekend in a flurry of resume tweaking, sending, writing, foot kissing, begging and generally using every tool at my disposal to try to find a job.  Employ Florida was one of the sites that I had combed through to find job listings that might fit within my skill set.  Then, there it was.  A great looking local job, seeking someone with knowledge of AP writing style and media contacts.  It was generally laid out as a position with my name on it. (For the sake of argument, we will say the position was with the Acme company.)  Down at the bottom of the page was the button that said: “Apply now”.   I clicked the button believing that I would be, well, applying for a job.

NO SIR!  You most assuredly can not apply for that job without logging in first.  Okay, I had to retrieve my login and password from my email archive because the state would not let me pick my own.  Instead opting to assign me some weird jumble of characters I can never remember.  All logged in, I once again had to search for the job at Acme and click the apply button.  As soon as I clicked the button, I was redirected to Careerbuilder.  For those who do not know, Careerbuilder is a third party, for profit job search website.  At this point, I was a bit flummoxed.  I had spent hours creating and tweaking my profile on the state owned website, to be redirected to another search engine.   It made me a bit angry to realize that tax dollars were being spent on a site that simply redirects patrons to other employment sites that are going to require an entirely separate login and account.

    Now, I would not be a serious job seeker if I did not already have an account on Careerbuilder.  And wouldn’t you know it? I was required to log in to Careerbuilder before I was allowed to click on the “Apply Now” button at the bottom of the page.  Keep in mind, that I had also spent several hours setting up a profile on Careerbuilder in order to facilitate the job application process.  After logging in to the new site, I again clicked the apply now button.  This time it opened another webpage.  Now I was staring at the Acme website with the job profile listed.  “Finally”! I thought “Some progress”. 

I noticed the new “Apply Now” button at the bottom of the page.  I clicked this time with some well earned trepidation.  No, no, no.  You can not apply without first creating an account on the Acme website.  All right then, let’s create that account.  Name, address, phone number, desired username, password, re-enter password and ENTER!  “Aw, tough luck, your password did not have an “@” symbol in it so you will have to pick a new one.  Just for laughs, we also erased all the personal info you typed in, so if you could go ahead and retype everything you just entered all over again, that would be awesome."

At this point, if you are keeping track, between three websites, I have a total of about six hours of my time invested to apply for a job opening.  By now, it has already become clear that none of that time was spent fruitfully, but I think I see a light at the end of the tunnel.  With my Acme account created, the website asks me if I would like to connect my new account to my Linkedin profile.  DEAR GOD YES, PLEASE!  For those who do not know, Linkedin has quickly grown to become the best place to keep an online job search profile.   I, like many others have spent many hours building and tweaking my Linkedin profile in an attempt to make myself more appealing to prospective employers.  If Acme is going to access my Linkedin account, then they will have access to all of my work history, my references, my skill set and any other information they wish to know at a click. 

You would think that at this point, the application process would be nearly finished.  You would be wrong.  I found myself staring at a 6 tab webpage.  The website was asking me to manually enter my entire work history, references, contact information(again), criminal history, blood type, and favorite ice cream flavor.  All of this information, by the way, was readily available on the linkedin account that I had just given them access to.  By my math, at this point, I have well over 10 hours of labor involved in filling out personal information, and refilling out the same information.  All so that I can get to a website, where I can go fill out the same information again, in the grand expectations that I will never hear another word from the Acme Corporation again.  Except when they sell my information to a third party, who will use it to send me spam emails, offering to sell me drugs that will enhance my sex life.

 If you work for any company that is involved with this process in any way, you are most certainly not part of the solution,  you are a part of the problem. Congratulations on finding a way to use time saving technology to waste more of my time.  Resolving to remain “not unemployed” for another day, I slammed down the cover to my laptop, and went to fetch some of my preferred flavor of ice cream.  I would tell you what flavor, but by now, the whole world must already know, chocolate is my favorite.