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Okay! As background, one must remember that our life has been turned upside-down since last June when we first moved and has not ever regained equilibrium from the chaos, what with our camping in the half our house intended for MIL and dealing with two floods even before MIL's unexpected death in September, after which point we've been completely uncertain of our financial future pending the settlement of her estate.
I got a couple of envelopes from social security (KELA) over the last few months, then lost them without remembering to get around to opening them in the piles of stuff around my desk, because chaos and stress and forgetting everything, but I didn't think they were urgent because social security sends one of these when they issue any payment or alter or renew your employment status in their database or whatever... but I was wrong! They were urgent.
The first one was a notification that the employment bureau was temporarily rescinding my 'unemployed' status because someone offered me a job and I didn't take it (without any explanation of who, what, where, when, why, how, etc), plus a note that I could appeal this if I wanted to (but... appeal what? how?) but that social security would just appeal it on my behalf anyway. The second one was from some... social security judgment... processing... thing... and clarified (somewhat) that a specific company offered me a job on a specific date in September and I had failed to respond in writing.
Now, I was never aware of anybody having offered me a job, and it's not like you could forget being offered a job you hadn't applied for out of the blue. I'm sure this happens to people who already have jobs, or desirable CVs... but are people now going out headhunting people with no formal qualifications or relevant employment history who haven't even applied?
It just so happened that I had an appointment today with the social workers in charge of employment for the entire town we've moved to (because there's one employment bureau officer and one officer from the city's social work department who cover the entire city because it only has 15k people and they have plenty of time for you, unlike in Turku), as I'm now transferred to their jurisdiction. I presented them these letters and explained I had no idea what was going on with that.
So according to their records, I've actually gotten two paper job offers that I never received that came in the mail, and since I didn't respond to them my status automatically went to not-unemployed (the second one hasn't made its way through the appeal process at social security I guess?). Well! It turns out that I and apparently many other people thought that when you move you only have to notify the government officially of your change of address once, with a form to the magistrate which then distributes it to all the government databases. Actually, it only goes to all the databases except the employment bureau's, so they will have sent them to our old address. (The automatic forwarding period is up.) They've now updated my address manually.
I asked what I should do next, and the two social workers agreed the best thing would be to simply carry on and apply to the course I was planning to apply to. Not only did they print out the application for me because my printer isn't working at home right now, they filled out part of it for me and created a whole secondary backup plan for if the application takes too long to process, as well as taking my number to call me once they check how long the processing is supposed to take and how long the waiting list for the course is so that I will be able to instead do a work practice in the meanwhile at one of the stores that apparently wanted to hire me.
I have already almost cried about how nice and helpful they were, but in retrospect, I realized I still didn't learn anything more about how and why these businesses are offering jobs I didn't apply for. Because that still strikes me as at minimum somewhat unusual, and I'm kinda curious how they even knew to do that? Yeah, the employment bureau has a database of CVs, but I think the last time I updated mine was over two years ago and the last thing I heard about it was someone saying they were planning to phase it out??? And also nobody I've ever talked to has ever had anyone contact them at all on the basis of this database before???
I got a couple of envelopes from social security (KELA) over the last few months, then lost them without remembering to get around to opening them in the piles of stuff around my desk, because chaos and stress and forgetting everything, but I didn't think they were urgent because social security sends one of these when they issue any payment or alter or renew your employment status in their database or whatever... but I was wrong! They were urgent.
The first one was a notification that the employment bureau was temporarily rescinding my 'unemployed' status because someone offered me a job and I didn't take it (without any explanation of who, what, where, when, why, how, etc), plus a note that I could appeal this if I wanted to (but... appeal what? how?) but that social security would just appeal it on my behalf anyway. The second one was from some... social security judgment... processing... thing... and clarified (somewhat) that a specific company offered me a job on a specific date in September and I had failed to respond in writing.
Now, I was never aware of anybody having offered me a job, and it's not like you could forget being offered a job you hadn't applied for out of the blue. I'm sure this happens to people who already have jobs, or desirable CVs... but are people now going out headhunting people with no formal qualifications or relevant employment history who haven't even applied?
It just so happened that I had an appointment today with the social workers in charge of employment for the entire town we've moved to (because there's one employment bureau officer and one officer from the city's social work department who cover the entire city because it only has 15k people and they have plenty of time for you, unlike in Turku), as I'm now transferred to their jurisdiction. I presented them these letters and explained I had no idea what was going on with that.
So according to their records, I've actually gotten two paper job offers that I never received that came in the mail, and since I didn't respond to them my status automatically went to not-unemployed (the second one hasn't made its way through the appeal process at social security I guess?). Well! It turns out that I and apparently many other people thought that when you move you only have to notify the government officially of your change of address once, with a form to the magistrate which then distributes it to all the government databases. Actually, it only goes to all the databases except the employment bureau's, so they will have sent them to our old address. (The automatic forwarding period is up.) They've now updated my address manually.
I asked what I should do next, and the two social workers agreed the best thing would be to simply carry on and apply to the course I was planning to apply to. Not only did they print out the application for me because my printer isn't working at home right now, they filled out part of it for me and created a whole secondary backup plan for if the application takes too long to process, as well as taking my number to call me once they check how long the processing is supposed to take and how long the waiting list for the course is so that I will be able to instead do a work practice in the meanwhile at one of the stores that apparently wanted to hire me.
I have already almost cried about how nice and helpful they were, but in retrospect, I realized I still didn't learn anything more about how and why these businesses are offering jobs I didn't apply for. Because that still strikes me as at minimum somewhat unusual, and I'm kinda curious how they even knew to do that? Yeah, the employment bureau has a database of CVs, but I think the last time I updated mine was over two years ago and the last thing I heard about it was someone saying they were planning to phase it out??? And also nobody I've ever talked to has ever had anyone contact them at all on the basis of this database before???
