Unemployed Contractor
The Unemployed Contractor Telling it like it is.
This was posted as comments after one of our articles.
Contract Interviews
I am an unemployed contractor and I had two interviews today.
One mandatory with what counts as ”the dole” in German-speaking lands but is really salary-insurance. The other is by choice (freiwillig) for a permie job-type job.
The aforementioned dole pays out at around 200-300 quid per day of unemployment. That’s with the thought of ”long term” invoking primal images and sounds of cash registers a ka-chinging in the way that contracting no longer does.
Jobserve Contracts
There are plenty of alleged contracts on JobServe paying less than that, and the only ”deliverable” for kraut dole is evidence that you’re looking for work.
Hitting the apply button a few times a day will overwhelm any sufficiently under-funded dole office very quickly.
You don’t even have to leave the house. lol.
Thatcher and IT Contractors
We had a similar situation under Thatcher back in the UK.
It was simpler then because there were no jobs to apply for. So you didn’t have to worry about inadvertently getting one.
But it had a complicating factor in that nobody was allowed to acknowledge that there were no jobs. That’s except maybe for Brent Sadler and that black bloke on News at Ten.
So three million of us, every two weeks, year-in and year-out, had to provide evidence enough to satisfy some pea-brained little Hitler in our local dole office that we had indeed spent the prior fortnight earnestly looking for work even though everybody knew there wasn’t any about.
Them were the days.
IT Contractor Untranslatable into German
Fortunately when you translate ”IT contractor” into German it is rendered meaningless and is not considered to relate to any kind of job, as it does when translated into most other languages as well.
So I only need to look for permie jobs, which I’m pretty much certain not to get.
For anybody else in the same position a good technique for guaranteed-fail HR interviewing is to answer those inevitable ”give a positive and negative” type of questions by drawing all of your positives from contracts that are on your CV, and all of your negatives from the permie jobs.
Be sure to add at some point that the reason you want to go perm now is that you think the contract game is played out, and there aren’t any more contracts, at least not in the numbers or rates there were before.
That convinces ’em that I just want to ride out the recession on their backs and will quit on the first contract offer I get.
Wrong Message
They are wrong.
If I apply for a contract I’d probably get one, but as far as I am concerned I already have a contract.
It only pays an average $250 quid a day to an unemployed contractor but it has the advantage of requiring me to do next to eff all, which I am expert at doing.
Pity it only lasts six months really for an unemployed IT contractor.
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