Recruitment, Education & BusinessNewsTake my top ten tips and don't be another jobless statistic Take my top ten tips and don't be another jobless statistic
23/02/2009
Jan McGeachie's comments (article linked below) will be echoed by many over 50s who have experience of the Jobcentre system.
In the last five years I have had two periods of job seeking. At age 53 it took me 6 months to find a new job but at age 55 it took me 13 months to find employment. In those 13 months I had 33 interviews, a statistic that strongly suggests ageism is real!
My 10 tips for any jobseeker aged 45+ are:
1 Forget the Jobcentre, their systems are targeted at young people
who have no links to any community. When I tried it, their computer system's idea of jobs local to London was biased towards Aberdeen and Fort William. As an employer I once made the mistake of advertising a post through the Jobcentre system - something that I will not do again.
2 Forget the scattergun approach that Jobcentre's advocate. This week
we saw in the papers the story of a well qualified person who scattered almost 1,000 applications without any result. He only started to get somewhere when he spoke to an organization that could utilize his talents as a client. They recognized his potential and invited him to come in and talk about a job instead.
3 Be realistic about where you can work and target that geographic
region. Spending over 3 hours a day commuting is untenable in the long term. You will never have time for anything but your journey and work. Don't waste time applying for jobs at the other end of the country. It is never easy to sell up and move and right now it is likely to be almost impossible.
4 Be realistic about the time required to complete an application
form or tailor a CV. If you can manage 5 or more applications a week then you are almost certainly not providing your prospective employers with the information that they will be looking for when making short listing decisions. A realistic target is to get in just two or three carefully crafted applications in any one week.
5 Don't just look in the Situations Vacant columns of the papers.
You'll find most of those jobs and many more through online recruitment sites. Do some research. Find the right sites for the sector that you are targeting. Register and use the tools that these sites offer to help you find your target opportunities in your target region.
6 Think 'transferrable skills'. If you have ever haggled with a
vendor over the price of a car or a house then you have demonstrated 'negotiating skills'. If you recognize that '1 in 8' and 12.5% are the same number then you almost certainly can show that you have 'good numeracy skills' even if you never did a CSE or GCE in Maths.
7 Use your period of job seeking as a time to develop your skills. A
good way of doing this is by volunteering. Transfer and update your existing skills by applying them to a new field of work. Many organizations that have volunteer workers will also have a training budget that they will spend on you if it is in their interest. You'll also gain a good referee who can speak of you in the present tense to a propective employer.
8 See job seeking as a job of work. Keep a list of identified
opportunities with closing dates. Request an application pack as soon as you identify the opportunity. Prioritize your list of opportunities every time you get a new application pack on the basis of your match to the person specification and closing date. Allow sufficient time for postal applications to be delivered before the closing date.
9 Ask for feedback even if it is not offered. Use any information
gained to be critical of your own performance so that you do better next time around.
10 Don't give up! If you are following these ideas then you are
almost certainly doing a better job than many of the people who are turning down your applications.
Robert Harvey, Twickenham