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The Census is Still Hiring (2nd update)

Published: Mar 09, 2010

Having focused recently on the fact that the Census Bureau is still hiring—and the reasons why it's a pretty attractive short-term gig—I fully expected all the positions to be filled within a day or two of the blog going up. As it turns out, though, I'm not nearly as big an influencer on nationwide hiring as I might have assumed. (Who'd have guessed?) Which means one thing: the Census Bureau is still hiring. All across the country.

Make no mistake about it: there will be no other opportunity this year on this kind of scale for people to get out and fill in an employment gap on their resume. And, as I mentioned in my original post, the majority of the hours canvassers would be working are outside normal business hours, meaning you'll still have time to conduct a job search on an almost full-time basis.

Let's not get too carried away: not many lifetime ambitions are going to be fulfilled by going door-to-door writing down information on people who haven’t had the wherewithal to return their forms in the mail. But try looking at it another way: you'll be knocking on the doors of hundreds of people in your own city: while it's unlikely that it'll lead to much in the way of professional networking (although you never know), you're at least brushing up on your all-important one-on-one communication skills. And how far can selling the benefits of the Census to a complete stranger be from selling your own value to a potential employer in an interview?

For proof that the census is still hiring, here's another half-dozen reports from local papers around the country saying just that:

  • The office in Phenix City, AL is hiring 500
  • The Columbia Daily Tribune in Columbia, MO reports that "the Census Bureau is still hiring census takers."
  • The Census Office in Knoxville, TN says they "have thousands of positions still available."
  • "Hundreds of positions" are available in Dayton, OH
  • In Green Bay, WI, Census officials "set a goal of hiring 7,000 people but say they're struggling to reach that number."
  • And job seekers in Brevard, FL are warned that they're "down to the wire," as there are only a "couple of weeks" left to fill positions.

Interesting side note: four of the six states above has an unemployment rate in excess of 10 percent, according to the BLS. Wisconsin (8.7 percent) and Missouri (9.6) are both under, Florida tops the charts with 11.8 percent.

And remember: those are just a smattering of the total positions on offer. (They're literally among the first ten results that came up in a Google news search.) There are many, many more out there--see my previous post for another list, as well as contact details for the Census Bureau.

--Posted by Phil Stott, Vault.com

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