Reaching out for work

Skills

Excellent at taking the blame for stuff with having over 30 years of experience in being blamed for all manner of misfortunes from the loss of data from floppy disks to the breakdown of marriage.

Have a good golf swing. Never played golf on a proper course but have been shown the correct stance by a colleague.

Can deflect embarrassing answers with the skill and dexterity of a politician while not actually telling a mistruth or being misleading.

Have experience swanning about looking important having been a prefect at school and many years of work experience in the area of walking up and down corridors with a large bunch of keys.

From good family stock. Father has a double barrelled name and I am a member of the Masons. Yes I am!

Skilled at appearing to be busy while actually not having much to do other than attend meetings at gentlemen’s clubs for lunch.

Looking for

Any chief executive job or position within a company requiring a fall guy for any failings which, of course will naturally turn out to be entirely my own fault. Examples: Oil rig leak, employees mucking about with accounts, leaks of embarrassing financial or political misconduct. 

The position will offer excellent remuneration (but I’m willing to take a fraction of what all the other fall guys get paid) and a tasty pension and share options on successful completion of role.

 

If you are an employer looking for someone like this, please get in touch. I could save your company a great deal of money by undercutting your current fall guys by at least 75%.

Job hunting

The plan today was to look around the city of Liverpool and pop into a few recruitment agencies. I’m never sure whether this is the right thing to do as most of the time recruitment agencies just say “Email  us your CV” which to me means “Fuck off and don’t bother us with your worklessness”. Smaller scale recruitment organisations tend to be a bit more accommodating in that they’ll sit you down, get you to fill in forms, pass the time of day and get you to do a typing test before telling you that they’ll be in touch as soon as something comes in. Which again is code for Fuck off and don’t bother us with your worklessness”.

At least that’s the impression I get from recruitment agencies. Another impression I get is how that even though if you  have a million years of administrative experience but follow it by 3 years of potato farming, they end up saying “Not enough relevant experience”.  Those last three years are crucial. It’s as if all the stuff you’ve done in the past matter not and that some how your ability to function wanes depending on how long since you last did that thing. If that makes sense.

Conversely, to me at least, it appears that this rule does not apply to call centre work. You could have been a world class surgeon for the past 30 years and maybe earned a bit of pocket money for a couple of months working in a call centre back in the early nineties. However if you put that stint on your CV you are marked for life. All recruitment agencies will offer you is chuffing call centre work.

Anyway, the laws of probability mean that not registering with recruitment agencies is probably a bad idea. After all, the more walls you throw something at, the more likely something will stick.  However, some recruitment agencies will tell you to only register with one to prevent your details being circulated multiple times.

But the impression I get is that recruitment agencies tend to be ultra selective. That could just be my paranoia or it could just be true. I don’t know.

So there I was, trudging round the centre of Liverpool, rain dripping off my face, clothes sodden and hair drenched. But something has happened to Liverpool over the past 5 years. Weird stuff. Stuff like…new shops….retail palaces….bars….boutiques….where once there were offices now stand posh restaurants and stuff….

After failing to locate 5 of the 6 agencies I’d set out to find….I came home. More despondent than when I set out. Guess the old ways of walking in will no longer work if you can’t find the agencies in the first place.

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.