Fishing for Jobs
I have started looking for a new job (yes, again!). The severe boredom of the office I currently inhabit has me feeling like I’m stuck in a Groundhog Day-esque nightmare. Of course, I’ve been reminded by my peers that all jobs feel like this once the novelty of that “new job feeling” wears off, but I just don’t want to believe that. There simply MUST be an interesting, challenging (please for the love of god!), and rewarding job out there for me (am I being too naive?). I suppose it would be easy for me to wait until I have my Masters completed to begin job searching again, but my Groundhog Day is as unappealing as the thought of living at home for another year and a half.
I’ve learned quite a few things about job hunting since finishing my degree, some good and some bad (mostly bad).
A really handy tip whilst job searching is to register with Monster.ie and make sure to change the title of your CV regularly - it’s like hooking bait to entice the hungry recruitment agents (I assume their systems alert them everytime someone updates their CV). Over the past few weeks mine have included “Bored Graduate Seeks Challenge”, “Bored Graduate, Passionate about Technology, Seeks Challenge” and more recently “Graduate, Seeks Challenge, NO SALES”.
Unfortunately, recruitment agents have one major (very major) flaw, it’s that they are only capable of what I like to call “selective reading”. It’s almost as if they completely ignore the entirety of your CV and only focus on what is relevant to the jobs they themselves are trying to sell. For example, I spent months trying to get out of retail sales (successfully - horray!). Unfortunately I have over 5 years sales experience and although I’ve been working in an office environment for almost a year now the recruitment agents still go wild trying to make me take sales positions. The other annoying thing about recruitment agents is that they’ll waste your time. For instance, even though I have “E-mail contact preferred” listed on my Monster CV, they still call me, in the middle of my working day, and even when I ask them to e-mail me the details, so many of them insist on setting up a meeting with them instead. This, let me tell you, is another waste of everyone’s time. The best thing you can do is 100% insist that they send you a job spec (a long winded description of the job) before even going near their offices. Make sure that you are interested in a position they are recruiting for and that you can actually gain something from them and not the other way around.
Another lesson I have learned about job seeking in Ireland is that employers expect you to be a highly qualified individual with at least 2 or 3 years experience in your field, and this is for an entry level position. Seems to me like the job market is highly competitive at the moment. What I want to know is, where are all these people coming from with years of experience that are willing to re-start their careers in another company?
From abroad?
Could these guys please direct me to their old companies? Maybe they would be more willing to take a chance on an Irish graduate seeking some experience. And although I really don’t want to leave my partner, my family, my friends - I might just have to, and I recently applied for a User Experience Research internship in London. So, cross your fingers for me.