Jobless

Sashinka's photo of job-seeking David

Even after having been crapped on last week by the jobs market (and one company in particular) I still find I have a problem with the kind of story and image posted by sashinka.

Now fair enough, I understand that David feels he can’t get a job. But really, is anyone going to stop him in the street to interview him? And offering to work for free for the first month – well that just smacks of desperation.

I understand, I’m not someone who wants to work “In The City” (ever noticed how City workers always capitalise it, even in spoken conversation?) so I don’t get some of it. But if you’re dedicated enough to want to work there that you’ll sack around in a Sandwich board for a while, you should be prepared to walk your arse into every single job agency going.

Equally, if you’re desperate to work, you’ll take on anything. I’ve been there and done that – worked in some of the shittiest jobs known to man in order to make ends meet. If I’m that hard-up, I’ll do it again. OK, I might aim to not work on the bins again (did that one summer in Oxford for a month. *shudder*) but if that’s all that’s going, I will.

I have a related problem with the people who whine that they’ve sent off “hundreds” or even “thousands” of CVs and never got a response from an agency or company. Now I’m sorry, but if I’ve sent off even twenty CVs and not had a single response, I know I’m doing something wrong. If I send out ten CVs, I’ll normally get at least five responses from agencies. It’s usually higher than that, but I’m trying to be equable here. (For once)  My CV is good enough that it gets a response. It’s simple to read, lists my skills and experience, and that’s it. It breaks lots of the ‘rules’ that CV-advisors give out (I’ve never yet bothered with wasting space on a paragraph describing myself, for instance) and yet it gets responses – and, by extension, jobs.

Yesterday was a perfect example of that. I sent in my CV to an agency for a role they advertised, they called me back, and I’ve got an interview for it this morning. The company involved took less than an hour to come back from seeing the CV with an interview request. I’m in there today, and we’ll see how it goes.

The same happened with the one that fell through – CV to agency, from agency to company, and a phone interview on the same day. Two days later I had the interview, and had an answer by the end of that day. Sure it fell through, but that was a funding/project thing rather than a “me” thing. I can’t do anything about that.

But if I’d sent a hundred CVs and not got a response at all? You can bet that I’d be doing a few things including:

• Rewriting the damn CV – big-time
• Calling agencies, if only to use the “checking it got through to you as I hadn’t heard anything” line
• Asking those agencies for feedback, why the initial CV didn’t get a response
• Reconsidering how I was doing things.

Ah well, rant over with for now. There’s more I was thinking about, but I haven’t quite got it strung together in my head yet.