Funny I’m a hiring manager in Chicago also. The job market here is rotten. We offered a traning session for 12 people for a 14 dollar an hour job. They told there family and friends. ..over a 100 poor unemployed folks showed up.
NO kidding? I'll be darned. Yep, the job market here is absolutely pathetic.
Can't say who I work for (you'd know the company name if I said it) but even though I'm relatively secure in my current position, I've been looking for something else for over a year. Positions such as mine don't come along very often, but when they do there's well over 200-300 people applying for it. Hard to compete with those odds.