兼职员工越来越多，原因是什么？

如果你依然认为兼职工作主要是煎汉堡或者沃尔玛门童之流，那你就过时了。职业网站FlexJobs.com最近调查了涵盖5.1万名雇主的数据库，并得到了一份今年一季度发布兼职岗位最多的50家企业清单。上榜雇主不乏知名的苹果、CVS Health、TD Ameritrade、美国红十字会以及美国司法部。它们寻找的是拥有各类技能的人员，从金融和会计一直到医疗管理和社交媒体品牌，只要是人们叫得出名的岗位，它们都需要。

这是一个大趋势的一部分。美国劳工统计局将兼职工作定义为每周工作不超过35小时。它指出，总的来说，美国从事兼职工作的人数在过去10年中保持在较为平稳的水平。如今的区别在于，过去很大一部分兼职人员在劳工统计局调查中称，他们从事兼职工作的原因是因为无法找到全职工作。作为对比，当前从事兼职工作的人越来越多，原因在于他们希望如此。目前，全美有2200万兼职雇员，其中仅有约300万是“非自愿的”，也就意味着其他1900万都是自愿的。

在当今的工作市场，鉴于失业率已经降至49年的新低，而就业机会也已经连续101个月（仍然在继续）增长。我们并不难理解，为什么各大公司宁愿招聘兼职员工而不是让之前的全职岗位空着。FlexJobs的资深职业专家布里耶·雷诺兹表示：“雇主看到，基于各种原因，优秀的天才可能不愿意或无法从事全职工作。招聘兼职人员对于初创企业和小型企业来说也是一个不错的选择，此举在提供更多团队成员的同时还可以让公司以低廉的成本保持增长。”

虽然有限的工作时长必然会导致薪资（有时候还包括福利）的下降，但依然受到了求职者的青睐，其原因也不用多做说明。全职工作，尤其是智能手机让很多人处于全天候的待命状态，往往会冲掉陪伴家人的时光、从事副业的时间，或任何其他主要的业余爱好，例如参加奥林匹克铁人三项团队培训。缩短工作时间，并将更多的时间和精力投入其他活动，这个理念听起来颇有吸引力。

需要注意的是：兼职工作，哪怕只是从事聊聊数年的光阴，可能会对自身长远的职业道路造成不利影响，这一点对于男性来说更是如此。2016年，在斯坦福大学教授社会学的大卫·裴杜拉发布了一项调查，其中，他共计向1210个真实的工作岗位提交了2420份虚构求职申请，这些工作遍布美国五大城市。随后他跟踪了雇主对每份申请的反馈。每一位虚拟求职者都于同一年毕业，年龄在30岁左右，拥有6年的所在行业工作经验。各份简历的唯一区别在于性别以及是否存在兼职工作经验。

裴杜拉发现，首先，雇主对于半数虚构求职信毫无反馈，这一点与性别以及是否从事过兼职工作无关。对于男性求职者来说，雇主回复率甚至不到50%。其次，在裴杜拉和他的团队跟踪其中的903名收到此类虚构求职信的招聘经理之后，他们发现，这些经理认为，对比那些在职业生涯中一直从事全职工作的员工，有兼职经验的男士“能力较差”，而且“不够投入”。奇怪的是，在这些经理眼中，拥有同样工作经历的女性只是“能力较差”，但不能说“不够投入”。该调查在总结中指出，“兼职工作会严重损害工作前景”，对于男性而言尤为如此。

当然，这只是一家之言罢了，而且其结论可能也不再适用，因为越来越多的公司都难以找到他们所需要的人才。然而，对于那些最终打算在随后步入全职工作的人士来说，我们有必要记住这一点。（财富中文网）

译者：冯丰

审校：夏林

If you still picture part-time gigs as mainly the burger-flipping or Walmart-greeting variety, think again. Career site FlexJobs.com recently dug into its database of 51,000 employers and came up with a list of the 50 that posted the most part-time listings in the first quarter of this year. Among the top 50 are well-known outfits like Apple, CVS Health, TD Ameritrade, the American Red Cross, and the U.S. Department of Commerce. They’re looking for people with all kinds of skills, from finance and accounting, to medical administration, to social media branding, to just about anything else you could name.

That’s part of a bigger trend. Overall, the number of people working part time in the U.S. has stayed fairly steady for the past decade, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which defines part time as 35 hours or less per week. The difference now is that a huge proportion of part-timers used to report in BLS surveys that they were working part time because they couldn’t find full-time jobs. These days, by contrast, many more people are working part time because they want to. Of the the 22 million part-time employees across the country right now, only about 3 million are “involuntary”—suggesting that the other 19 million are working limited hours by choice.

In this job market, with unemployment at a 49-year low and job creation on the rise for 101 straight months (and counting), it’s not hard to see why companies would rather hire someone part time than leave a formerly full-time job unfilled. “Employers understand that, for a wide range of reasons, great talent may not be willing or able to work full time,” notes Brie Reynolds, senior career specialist at FlexJobs. “Part-time jobs are also a great way for startups and small companies to bring on additional team members, so they can keep growing while keeping their costs low.”

As for why limited schedules appeal to job seekers, despite the inevitable drop in pay (and sometimes benefits), that hardly needs saying. Full-time work, especially now that smartphones keep many people on call 24/7, often cancels out time for a family, or a side business, or any other major outside commitment like, say, training for the Olympic triathlon team. The idea of putting in fewer hours at work, and having more time and energy for everything else, sounds great.

Just one note of caution: Working part time, even for just a few years, might throw your career off-track over the long run—especially if you’re male. In 2016, David Pedulla, who teaches sociology at Stanford, published a study wherein he submitted 2,420 fictitious applications for 1,210 real job openings in five U.S. cities, and then tracked employers’ responses to each one. Every hypothetical applicant had graduated from college in the same year, was around age 30, and listed six years of experience in his or her field. The only differences among the resumes were gender and a spell of part-time work.

Pedulla found that, first, employers didn’t respond at all to about half of the hypothetical candidates, male or female, who had part-time jobs on their resumes. For men, the response rate was even less than half. And second, when Pedulla and his team followed up with 903 of the hiring managers who had received those made-up CVs, it turned out that the managers viewed men who had held part-time jobs as both “less competent” and “less committed” than candidates who had been employed full time for their whole careers. Oddly, those managers saw women with the same employment histories as less competent, but no less committed. The study concluded that “part-time work severely hurts the job prospects of men” in particular.

Of course, that’s only one study, and its findings may no longer apply as more and more companies struggle to find the talent they need. Still, it’s worth keeping in mind—especially if your ultimate plan is to step back into a full-time job later.