u/Front_Astronomer9983

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.....

People act like I've failed at life, even my kids sometimes. The looks on people's faces when I tell them I got a job at Target are really weird.

To me, work is work, and you do what you have to do to keep your family on its feet. I haven't worked retail since the early 2000s. Before that I had a lot of awful jobs like telemarketing, selling coupon books, working mall kiosks, selling cable packages door to door, and selling cheap sunglasses at flea markets. I've been working since I was 15 in 1994, except for about 7 months when I was unemployed in 2011.

I was laid off in April, and now I'm on unemployment. I've cut my living expenses way down, and the only debt I have left is my student loan and my mortgage with escrow. Even with unemployment, I'm still short about $2,400 every month, and that's draining the small amount of savings I have left. I'm working part time so I can stay on unemployment and have time to apply for jobs and do interviews. Target will add about $365/week for me. After taxes, that should cover most of the groceries and slow down the drawdown from savings.

I've been a single parent for more than 18 years. And I still have 2 kids at home that I'm fully responsible for. I can't just keep sending resumes into the void with no one replying and pretend that hope is a plan. I'd rather act now and do what needs to be done. I've contacted my entire network. Nothing. I'm asking friends of friends and old coworkers too, and still nothing solid.

I have an MBA and 26 years of experience in my field. The funny part is that after I finished my first 3 shifts at Target, I suddenly got 3 interview requests, after removing 16 years of experience from my resume. Honestly, I'm really happy. I've applied to around 240 jobs since February when I got my WARN notice, and I'd only had 2 real interviews before this.

Don't be too proud to hustle and do whatever needs to be done. The comments and judgment made me cry, and I almost ran away from my first shift, but I pulled myself together and said fuck the haters and went to work anyway.

I have to give credit to a friend/former coworker, because her first reaction was: "I'm proud of you." I used to be her manager. She's the only person who didn't make me feel like garbage because of this. I'm not ashamed that I'm working at Target, so I'm going to keep saying that when people ask.

That's it.

ETA I'm a woman, a mother

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....

I just got off a call with a recruiter and honestly, I'm still furious. I went through an exhausting 9-step interview process with this company. A large take-home assignment, hours of preparation before each call, and several panel interviews that were 75 minutes each. In the end, I'm pretty sure I spoke with around 25 people.

The pay range in the posting was $120k to $160k. The process was messy from very early on. Around the fifth interview, they kept telling me I was in the "last step," and then, magically, another call would appear that same week. I already have a job, so I didn't have to do this, and that's probably the only reason I was able to put up with all of it for this long.

After I did everything they asked for, they dragged out the decision and postponed it 3 separate times. This morning, they finally called me. The recruiter said there had been an "error" in the job listing and that the highest they could go was $95k.

That number is insulting given my experience, especially since I match all the "required" skills and most of the "nice to haves" they had listed. Honestly, I'm shocked by the audacity. How are companies allowed to waste people's time like this with no consequences?

All I have to do now is find a suitable offer that matches my experience and skills. During my search, I came across some posts about interviews that I think might be really helpful. There were things I didn't know, and I learned a lot from them. One of these posts is this post that discusses the most common questions asked in interviews.

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....

I honestly laughed this morning, and to be honest, it felt nice to have even a tiny bit of control over this mess. I was interviewing for 3 roles and had talked about it here a few weeks ago. One of them was through a recruiter, and I went through 4 interviews, and I was basically just waiting to hear the numbers. The whole time, the recruiter kept telling me I was much more qualified than the other person they were considering, and that the job was basically mine.

But I kept interviewing because I didn't have an offer in hand, and I learned that lesson the hard way. I was in the final stage with another company when the recruiter told me they'd chosen someone else. Fine. Annoying, but at least I had other things in motion.

In the end, I accepted the offer from the other company and started the job at the beginning of this week. Then this morning I got a text from the recruiter saying: "Hey, are you still available? They'd like to put an offer together." Turns out the less experienced candidate accepted, then later backed out, so now they want me.

So now they don't have anyone. If they had chosen me from the start, I would've taken it and that would've been that. I won't lie, it felt really great to reply politely and say no thanks. You should have chosen me when you had the chance.