It was confirmed that I was to be made redundant on the 7th April just over a week ago. I had worked that out many weeks prior but the company dragged their heels letting us officially know. SO not it back to producing and updating CV and submitting application to job agencies. But here is a bone of contention and it is not a new one, it is feedback from the job agencies or the business advertising the job.
Lets go back a few year, before I left school we used to have Career lessons, once a week it would teach you how to apply for a job. The teacher would tell us every week that unemployment would reach 1 million (this is obviously in the days before unemployment reached the million mark).
Our careers teacher next favourite comment was his friend who owned an engineering business. If he received an application letter that was not written with a fountain pen or did not contain a stamped addressed envelope (sae), it went straight in the bin. I thought at the time how pathetic that was. I soon found out that including a sae does not guarantee a reply to an application letter.
Having left school I sent 10 application letters all with sae and did not get one reply. The cost in those days was 8.5p for a first class stamp. My 10 letters a with sae cost £1.70, cheap by today’s standard but damm expensive back then. I soon stopped sending sae (and wrote my letters with a standard ball point pen).
Now a days you rarely send an application letter. It is all done by email and electronic messages delivered as emails. Social Media and Job Agencies are now the main tools for the job hunt. But those old traits of not being given feed back are still. Very rarely will I get any feedback from a business I have submitted an application to. I may get a auto mail saying thank you for applying. Job agencies will chase you to see if you want to apply for a job they have and then unless you get an interview, you hear nothing more from them. Getting an interview does not guarantee a reply if you were unsuccessful in getting the job.
How are we (the job hunters) supposed to improve ourselves if the job agencies and business do not bother to give us feed back and to be honest some of the feed back was not even right. For example, I went for a particular job, applied via an agency, got an interview, on the day of the interview got sent to the wrong site (business had 2 sites within 7 miles of each other). When I was informed I was at the wrong site I phoned the agency to advise them and to see if I could still be interviewed as now I am likely to be 30 minutes late. I asked the agency which entrance I was supposed to use as the industrial site had two entrances but you could not drive all the way through. The agency again gave me the wrong information, went to the wrong entrance, then had to drive another 2 miles to the correct entrance.
I was grateful that the company were still willing to see me. I unfortunately did not get the job but the feed back I got via the agency was I never stopped complaining about my previous employer. The interviewer asked me one question regarding my previous employer, why I left. Despite it being in my CV which he had to hand, I told him once. But what do I do who is the agency going to believe. I never got an apology for send me to the wrong address twice.
I am not full on job searching yet, that will start in April but it not something I am looking forward to simply because the way business and job agencies treat you.
Sorry for having a whinge, I have not had the start to 2023 I was hoping for.