Back in August 1982, I sheepishly returned to my old school, whose doors I had vowed not to darken again when I finished my last exams two months earlier.
I had been planning to go to University without giving a second thought as to how I would fund it. My grant application was knocked back at the last minute and as jobs were as rare as Irish gold medals at the Olympics, I was forced to eat humble pie and seek out the help of my old careers guidance teacher. He suggested that I speak to a local Accountancy firm that was looking for trainees. The rest as they say is history, or geography to be more precise, as the accountancy qualification I went on to attain has brought me all over the world.
This month I celebrated 34 years as a working man. I say celebrate but perhaps endured would be a more accurate verb. I’ve had good jobs and bad. Ones that paid more than the effort I put in and many that paid less than I deserved. I’ve had great bosses and terrible ones and worked with lots of fun people and more than my share of psychopaths. And ironically, sometimes the fun people and the psychopaths were the same person.
I’ve never really had to go looking for a job; they have usually come looking for me. I am lucky in that I’ve built up a network of friends and colleagues throughout the world who have helped me find work. New Zealand has been no exception. I have a friend who gave me the email address of the CEO of a Trustee Company. It took a few months but I eventually got a reply from the CEO and I’m now happily working away.
It took six months for me to find this job and in that time I met every agency in Auckland, applied for 72 roles, had 10 first round interviews, 3 second round interviews and 1 personality test. And in the end I got this job after a 10 minute chat with the boss over coffee.
I never like to speak ill of people or reduce an entire profession to a cultural stereotype, but the people who decide to become recruitment agents make estate agents and used car salesmen look like choirboys. And as we’ve also bought a house and a second hand car in the last six months, I’ve had experience of them too. But I’ll leave that for another blog.
Most of the recruitment agents I met took great delight in telling me that I’d made a dumb decision to come here in the first place. They misunderstood my experience and ambitions and made commitments for future communication that the rarely lived up to. But the most irritating thing was the smug sense of self-importance that they displayed. It was bad enough being patronised by them but I also had to put up with their outrage when they discovered that I’d been whispering sweet nothings to another agency or had the cheek to approach a company directly. Hell hath no fury like a recruitment agent scorned. I wouldn’t mind so much if I was the only candidate that they were putting forward for a particular role. But of course, that chat up line they gave you about how you are perfect for a particular position is being repeated to others. It’s like having a girlfriend who cheats on you with all and sundry but goes ballistic if she finds a text on your phone that wasn’t addressed to her.
It’s ironic because recruitment agents in 2016 are about as obsolete as VHS players. These days, everything happens ‘On-line”. A company called Seek have the market pretty well sown up here, but Linkedin are muscling in on the business too. It means that it’s very easy to apply for a job and if your CV is already in the database, you could apply for 100 jobs on your phone before breakfast. And many people do. By being on the internet, you’re advertising to the whole world and as a result, a relatively low key job in Auckland will get 2,000 applications from people looking to move here from India or China.
Needless to say, nobody reads these 2,000 applications. The same technology that allows them to be delivered seamlessly, allows them to be deleted just as efficiently. The backend software reads your application looking for key words or compares your most recent role to the job advertised. It’s an algorithm designed to get rid of 98% of the applications immediately. Of course, they don’t want to appear callous, so the software allows you to set a time frame before the rejection emails are sent out. Local legend has it that a large Insurance company installed this software but forgot to set the time delay. So after carefully crafting a cover letter and agonising over the structure of your CV, you would load it into their system and get an email back two seconds later that started with the line “We have carefully considered your application but regret to say…..”
It took me a while to figure out the algorithm but when I did I started getting interviews. I would rage against the inequity of this system but the truth is that I employed similar tactics when I was recruiting. I was once trying to recruit a book keeper and received 400 hand-written applications. Knowing I wouldn’t have time to read them all, I discounted all those not written with a black pen.
And at least it is unlikely that on-line algorithms will have class or gender based filters built in, such as discounting candidates from rough suburbs or because they are female. Unfortunately, these filters were often unconsciously applied in the “good” old days when job applications were reviewed manually.
The job I have now is a contract role but I’m talking to them about a permanent position. If I get it, I’m tempted to stay here until I retire because I think I’d rather eat my arm off than meet another recruitment agent.
