AtWork has no openings for intrepid Antarctic sailors
The most famous help-wanted ad likely never ran.
It’s still a great fable. As the story goes, explorer Ernest Shackleton was seeking sailors to join his ultimately ill-fated Antarctic expedition in 1914, and put together this brutally honest advertisement:
“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.”
His ship got stuck in ice and crew members endured horrible conditions, but it’s still a good story, and whether it appeared in print or not, it is indeed representative of the job ads of the time: Simple and to the point. This was illustrative of the job-board medium that served jobseekers and employers for some 300 years: The newspaper.
A cursory review of the classifieds section today yields only a few job prospects. That’s because job searches have largely gone digital. This has allowed recruiters to vastly expand the length of their job listings, and give candidates a taste of company culture.
Monster.com was established in 1999 with the merger of two job boards. Then came Careerbuilder.com and aggregating sites. By the mid-2000s, the bulk of job searches were made online. The advent of the two-way connector that is LinkedIn and other social media have further changed the recruiting industry.
But this hasn’t made staffing agencies like AtWork redundant. Temporary and temp-to-hire services weathered the Great Recession quite well, and as many as 20 percent of Americans today are employed as temporary or contract workers.
One unintended consequence of the explosion of job boards is the difficulty some have filtering the vast amount of information contained on job sites. The medium is pointedly impersonal, as well.
AtWork maintains our own database, and a professional recruiter is always just a phone call away. We can help winnow job searches based on your qualifications, saving you the chore of sifting through thousands of job listings.
And we won’t send you off into days-long darkness at the bottom of the Earth. Contact AtWorktoday to get matched with the best light industrial and general labor jobs in your area.
