Job hunting has always irritated me. Everything about it, from the trips to the Job Centre and the general feeling of bleakness, misery and sense of impending doom that fills the walls of that place, to employers etiquette, unreasonable demands and, of course, the lack of opportunities that pretty much everyone currently has to endure.
In the past I have searched for jobs with a much more urgent attitude than I am currently. Thats because I've been out of work for prolonged periods of time, been in a financial state that demanded it, or had nothing else on the horizon other than needing employment. This time I am unemployed, claiming Job Seekers Allowance, but I am in training and attend a college every day. I am however still looking.
I do this every morning, and what I find always infuriates me. For the first few weeks I was finding around 4 to 5 jobs a week to apply for, in my desired field. Now I seem to have tapped every resource and what I'm left with is not much at all. I even started to broaden my parameters a little, into lines of work I am not studying to get into, just because there was nothing else available.
This morning one of the job sites I use informed me there was 2,048 vacancies within in a ten mile radius. Thats a decent amount considering the current climate really. It could at least be worse. After scrolling through page after page however it is all sales. Every fourth or fifth vacancy is a sales job. Even the vacancies that arent sales jobs actually are sales jobs. For example recruitment consultants, retentions etc are all sales and targets driven environments. Even the charity fundraising positions I was looking at are, in essence, paid sales jobs. You go around knocking on peoples doors and trying to collect funds for very respectable charities, but you are still out there, imposing, hassling and trying to pressure or persuade. I don't want to do that.
Fact is that employers can do this, just as they can demand very high, unrealistic, qualifications from candidates, even if the position does not require them, and they can pay pathetic amounts of money. I saw a terrible vacancy advertised for '3', the UK mobile network, who were paying absolutely garbage money and still attempting to make the position appear worthwhile. "Hey, come and work for 3! We'll pay you **** all but we'll give you a free phone and an unlimited tariff on the UKs worst mobile network where you may get a signal in about 50% of the locations you visit on a daily basis!"
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