Obama transition sees eye-popping 300,000 resumes
[cnn-photo-caption image=http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2008/POLITICS/12/22/obama.jobs/art.changegovpicture.jpg caption="Job seekers can apply for a job in the Obama administration by logging on to Change.Gov."]
Lisa Desjardins
Just weeks after opening shop, the Obama transition team has been flooded by what looks like an unprecedented wave of hundreds of thousands of resumes from people who want positions in the new president's administration.
"We've actually had more than 300,000 expressions of interest," Obama transition spokesman Nick Shapiro told CNN Radio.
That is roughly equivalent to the entire population of Iceland.
It dwarfs the 44,000 applicants reported by a Bush transition spokeswoman to the San Francisco Chronicle just days before George W. Bush was inaugurated in January 2001. The Clinton transition team in 1993 put its number of applicants near Inauguration Day at approximately 100,000. And the Obama boom has another month to build.
Meanwhile, it's creating a sort of business boom for job-search companies in and out of Washington.
In Macon, Georgia, CareerPro Global, a national and international resume-writing company, has seen a surge.
"We have a tremendous amount of interest," said Scott Kirk, who manages the company. "High-level people in private industry want to go all of a sudden into federal government and be part of this administration."
Filed under: Barack Obama • Raw Politics
soundoff (5 Responses)
Annie Kate
300,000 resumes for 8,000 jobs. Wow. With that number of people applying Obama's administration can get the cream of the crop at all the different levels of jobs that it has to fill. We might for once have a government that really works!
EJ (USA)
That's only because I sent my resume 100,000 times.
earle,florida
I'm curious of the 300k applicants what percentage have the countries best interest at heart? I'd like to think 1% but my instincts say less,..
JC- Los Angeles
On the surface, 300,000 resumes seem like a lot, however, seeing that we live in a morally bankrupt nation, it's probably safe to say that 299,999 are fraudulent; it shouldn't take the Obama team long to review the one resume.
Teresa, OH
re: The bad news for Obama hopefuls is that there are fewer than 8,000 presidentially appointed jobs for the 300,000 (and growing) applicants.
I had no idea that many people were directly employed in presidentially appointed jobs. That's a heck of a lot of people to pass background checks and be approved. Do Democrats have more applicants because standards are lower or they think they have a better chance of getting in?