|
![](/i/fill.gif) |
OK, so nothing focuses the mind on job hunting quite like imminent
unemployment. (!)
Deciding to get another job is easy. Getting one is another matter.
When I first heard the news, I thought "great, now I can leave". Right
now, I'm just a little bit concerned that I might be unemployed for the
rest of my entire life. After all, I've only had one job in my entire
career. What if they were the only company on Earth stupid enough to
employ me? I'm screwed! o_O
In the past, the problem I've always had is being utterly unable to find
any jobs even remotely worth applying for. Everybody says "Computer
jobs? Oh, that's easy! Jump onto the Internet and get searching. There
are *millions* of IT jobs!" Well, uh, no there aren't.
I'd log in to Monster.com and spend hour after hour wading through
thousands of jobs which are all located in London, all have titles like
"senior systems architect" or "lead development coordinator" or "UK IT
that I have no hope in hell of getting (even if I actually wanted them,
which I don't).
What I /never/ found /any/ of is jobs anywhere near I live, with words
like "junior" or "trainee" or "graduate" in the title. It's as if these
jobs somehow don't exist or simply aren't advertised.
At least, these jobs aren't on Monster, and don't appear in any Google
search. But every jobs site I tried did some combination of:
- Every search returns zero results, or returns less than 6 results.
- Every search returns miles of utterly irrelevant crap. (E.g., "finance
administrator" and "office administrator" both contain similar lexemes
to "systems administrator", but they're utterly unrelated jobs.)
- Every search returns jobs in London, regardless of the selected
geographic region of the search.
That last one is by far the most common; apparently the vast majority of
jobs websites don't comprehend that "London" is *not* "within 15 miles
of Milton Keynes". (Hint: It's roughly 35 miles to the M25, which
circles the outside of London.)
On top of that, I had to battle with utterly /systemic/ levels of bad
quality job descriptions. I mean, seriously. Who writes this crap? A
trained monkey??
Probably the reason half the geographic searches utterly fail is because
whatever idiot copy-pasted the data in didn't fill out the location
field. So you see a job, it says "Location: unspecified". And then in
the actual text, you find out that it's in... London. Again.
Add to that the horrifyingly broken grammar, and levels of waffle and
power-speak matching what you might expect to hear from a dodgy used-car
salesman trying to sell you an illegal cut-and-shut, and it's just a
horrid, horrid experience.
(I especially love the job adverts that just say something like "SQL
Oracle 11g Agile PHP RDBMS MCP Java.NET TCP/IP". WTF does that even
*mean*?? And phrases like "must have detailed knowledge of Oracle
(preferably with RDBMS experience)". Erm... you have absolutely no idea
what the sentences you're writing actually *mean*, do you?)
I can only imagine that the jobs agencies [because /all/ job adverts on
the Internet are /always/ from agencies, never the actual employer]
receive an MS Word document from the employer stating what they want.
They then pass this on to a highly trained monkey who blindly
copy-pastes fifty of these things per hour into the input forms of
dozens of online recruitment websites. I can't think of anything else
which would explain the shear, utter BROKENNESS of what I have witnessed.
On top of that, on the few occasions that I've actually /spoken/ to an
agency, the person I'm speaking to quite obviously has /no clue/ what
the hell I'm talking about or what any of the words in the job-spec
mean. They just see a bunch of word-like things, and see which words
sound similar to which other words. That it literally the summit of
their analytical powers.
In short, it has always been a completely mystery to me how anyone,
anywhere on Earth, *ever* finds any jobs at all to apply to. All I seem
to find is utter crap.
But after the announcement of the site closure, my dad started bringing
me printouts of jobs he thought might interest me. Now usually when
people do this, the stuff they bring me is actually no good at all. But,
surprisingly, this stuff /does/ look good - and there's a /lot/ of it.
I noticed it all seems to come from Total Jobs, so I headed over there
to take a look. Apparently /this/ is where all the jobs are actually
hiding. Seriously. Today alone I've applied for 30 jobs. Oh, I don't
expect to /get/ many of them. But get this:
- ALL of these jobs were within less than 10 miles of my front door.
Some of them are near enough for me to realistically /walk/ to work.
- They're all programming jobs.
- Many of them only want A-levels or maybe a CS degree. (Although some
of them do demand commercial coding experience.)
So, uh... where the HELL have these jobs been hiding all this time?! o_O
I'm actually not sure if there's been a radical change in the market, or
whether I've just been looking in the wrong place. But it's staggering
that every single jobs website could be so utterly useless, and then
this one is /actually useful/.
All is not perfect, of course.
Currently, I'm at the stage of simply applying to everything that looks
vaguely plausible. 2 weeks ago, I applied to about 25 jobs. Over the
coming days, I got a handful of phone calls from various agencies.
(Weirdly, /all/ of these people, without exception, seem to actually
know WTF they're talking about. They don't talk like used-car salesmen.
They seem /actually helpful/ and stuff...)
I did have one telephone interview with an actual employer. I very much
doubt I got that job, and I don't particularly want it if I did.
(There's a face-to-face interview plus a C++ coding test first. I'll
presumably fail that.) They're talking about being on-call 24x7,
short-notice travel to other continents, etc.
What seems to happen is that I send out a bunch of applications, I get a
few phone calls the following week. I ask some of them to forward my CV.
And after a while, the calls peter out. And then I go back to Total Jobs
and apply to anything and everything that looks remotely plausible. I
don't study them too hard; I just read each one and hit apply.
I'm ambivalent as to whether this is actually the best strategy. On one
hand, the more stuff I apply to, the more likely it is that somebody
will call me. OTOH, if I apply for something totally unsuitable, and the
recruiter phones me, they're not going to be amused at having their time
wasted.
Another problem that keeps biting me is references. I don't have any.
Oh, I mean, I've been told to quote the HR department of our USA head
office. So that's one. (I've already happened upon one website which
demands the name of a /person/, not simply a department.) But many
systems demand 2 or even 3 references. Apart from my employer, nobody
knows me. So I'm rather stuffed there. :-S
I've applied to Google again. On past experience, it'll probably me 6 to
12 months before I hear back from them. I really want to get into the
Open University, but it's a nightmare to apply, and they have very, very
few computer jobs going. I got turned down on my last application
without even being interviewed. And the application I'm trying to fill
out today demands 3 references. And than there's Network Rail. A friend
of mine works there and insists it's the best job in the world... But
they have ZERO computer jobs listed.
It's all rather troubling...
Post a reply to this message
|
![](/i/fill.gif) |