Qualification:Experience Relevance Quotient

Looking for work is arduous. Filling in application forms time after time after time with the same information, slightly tweaked to promote relevance to post applied for.

I must have filled in more application forms during this period of unemployment than I did during the last period back in the nineties. I suppose this is because everything is online now. You fill in forms, click send, then either you get a “Thank you for your application” or you get nothing. Leaving you to wonder if you have actually just spent the past half hour filling in a form with data that has now gone into the ether or to the great spam folder in the sky.

It has been 3 months now and out of over 100 applications filled only one interview and that…well that we’ll just ignore because nobody likes bureaucracy and, as first impressions work for potential employers conversely the same applies for potential employees.

Not being restricted to looking in one geographical area should mean, according to the laws of probability, that as a job seeker I should be getting a 3:1 interview ratio. But no. This is not the case.

Being a new graduate? At 36? I can’t help think that this is not the boon that I needed to find further employment but the detriment in that employers look at my CV and think “36? Only just graduated? And in a subject unrelated to their existing career path? Must be some sort of mong”

And so the search continues. My email inbox, once filled with playful notes from colleagues and friends, now replete with job vacancies. A surprising number of which duplicate. Indeed, the duplication often means that you could apply for the same job several times. Something that has happened. Several times.

This week  I shall be in one of the aforementioned geographical locations in an attempt to find work by going out and meeting people. Taking Norman Tebbit’s advice and getting on my bike to look for work. Work that, I am becoming increasingly under the impression that, does not exist.