How easy is to find a job during the Pandemic?

over 3 years ago

I was wondering the other day how badly Covid19 affected us in terms of finding a job, starting a new business or maintaining the current one/ones that we are having.

To tell you the truth in this post we gonna talk briefly about how easy or hard is to find a job worldwide as well as in Greece, the country i am from.

Especially, in Greece, i will talk from personal experience and share with you all what's the situation there is and how people are trying to deal with it.

Situation in America

To begin with, it's a fact that Covid19 changed our everyday lives a lot. Many people lost their job and businesses or in general faced new difficulties that they hadn't faced before.

I found a study that compared USA's Great Recession that happened from 2007 to 2009 with the Covid19 crisis we are facing nowadays. The results are quite fascinating and sad. Fascinating from the perspective of statistics and information you gain from this!

During the Great Recession, the unemployment rate increased from 5% in December 2007 (the
start of the recession) to 9.5% in June 2009 (the end of the recession) (see Figure 2). The
unemployment rate peaked at 10% in October 2009, four months after the recession officially
concluded. In the current recession, the unemployment rate increased from 3.5% in February
2020 to 4.4% in March 2020, peaked8 at 14.7% in April, and then fell to 6.7% in November

So as you can see for yourselves during the pandemic the numbers of unemployment are much larger than 10 years ago. Also, if we do a fast check on the population between 2010 and 2020 i bet we gonna see a rise in 2020. Adding the unemployment to that, it means way more people actually are unemployed than 2010 even if we had the exact same percentages

As shown in Figure 5, part-time workers experienced a higher peak unemployment rate (24.5%
in April 2020) than full-time workers (12.9% in April). For the first time since the onset of the
pandemic, the unemployment rate for part-time workers in November 2020 (5.9%) was less than
the unemployment rate for full-time workers (6.8%). Although part-time workers experienced
worse impacts early in the recession than full-time workers, this gap has effectively closed

You can now clearly understand that this pandemic affected the economy a lot more than you think. The exact same situation is happening in Greece right now.

Situation in Greece

Some people lost their jobs, others lost their businesses, and don't let me start about how difficult it is to find a job. To begin with, it's very sad to walk around your neighborhood and see small businesses that were there forever, to close down for good.

That means that the pandemic not only affects the economy slightly bad badly. These stores managed to remain open during the economic crisis in Greece but closed down during the pandemic, so imagine how tough the situation is.

Difficulty of Finding a Job

Regarding the job aspect, I'll speak from experience, both personal or what my friends tell me and what i see. I tried to search for a job, not that i have the need to find one now but i was curious to see how hard it will be.

Before i start saying more note that in Greece, we have corruption everywhere and that means that the "more people you know" the easier it is to find a job, if you know what i mean.

So i searched through popular job sites as well as Linkedin. I was searching for jobs that were close to my studies(business administration with a minor in marketing).

I may have sent over 50 times my Resume and from those 50 they called me for an interview only 4. Given my HR background, i know one thing or 2 so from that 4 interviews, in 2 of them, they had already found the "right candidate". They just kept on interviewing for the sake of "transparency" and to write down on their report that they had done X number of interviews for that position.

I have many similar stories for friends as well. The only jobs that we can find and not with much ease either, are jobs related to delivery or storage facilities. Even the IT industry slowed down a bit.

Conclusion

As you can see the situation is quite tough globally and to tell you the truth i think people are getting more and more sick and tired of this. They just wanna work under at least "normal" circumstances and provide for their families.

They don't find opportunities that's why many of them are turning to cryptocurrencies and i am glad they do so. Here they can find many opportunities if they do their research first. I don't know if they can provide for their families but at least they can buy something to eat, for the time being! Then it's up to them, their effort, and lady luck!

Do you have any examples of how difficult it is to find a job in your country?

How much the pandemic affected you in terms of work?