Been looking for a job but they are hard to find.....

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.

Apologies for my tardiness

Hello loyal readers.

I have been quiet lately. Mainly because I'm trying to write a novel and that's taking up my creative juices. But I have joined a writer's group which requires you to write 500 words on a given topic. I thought I'd share the two most recent pieces I've written. Enjoy.

St Patrick's Day

James hated when St Patrick’s Day fell on a Sunday. He had very few pleasures left in life and one of those was to call into the Irish Club in Mount Albert for a pint on his way home from mass. Most weeks, it would just be him and Mary the barmaid and she was clever enough to let him enjoy his beer in silence without frivolous conversation about holidays and the weather.

But if Ireland’s patron saint was celebrating his birthday on a Sunday, then the club would be packed from 8am with backpackers dressed as leprechauns and twelve year old girls with fake tans and gaudy Irish dancing dresses.

James would go along none the less.  It was better than staring at the walls and waiting for the evening TV to kick in. Mary smiled and waved hello as he entered and pointed to a chair in the far corner with a “reserved” sign in front. She brought him a pint and apologised about the noise. 

“It’s just one day a year James. We’ll be back to normal next week”.

The band were murdering a Van Morrison ballad but James did his best to ignore the racket. He flicked through the ‘Irish Echo’ that he had picked up on the way through and skimmed through stories from a country he had left fifty years earlier and could barely remember. 

A sweaty hand reached across the table towards him. “Happy St Patrick’s Day” its owner said. James stared at the hand and then upwards along the green rugby jersey dressed arm to the Guinness hat wearing head. It was young fresh faced kid, clearly just off the boat like thousands James had seen before. 

“Yeah, same to you” he said and then buried his head in the paper.

“So what part of the old country are you from?” the fresh faced kid asked.

James hated this. The pointless conversation that would lead invariably to him talking about Jenny and how her passing had left a hole in his life and left him dangling like a loose tread at the other side of the world.

“If you don’t mind, I’m reading the paper. You lot have it so easy compared to us who came out in the fifties. This is just a big holiday for you. There was no skype or email in my day son.”

He returned to the paper and pretended to be interested in a story about Ireland’s latest boy band.

“You really think it is easier now? I think it’s harder”, the fresh faced kid said as he leaned closer. Do you know what it feels like to see your family on Skype but not to be able to touch them?  To be able to read all your friend’s updates on Facebook and feel that you are so close but not quite there. To have your nephew raise his hand to the screen and yet not be able to hold it? But listen, can I get you a beer?”

James put his paper down. “That would be very nice. And when you’re at the bar, can you ask Mary to get the band to turn the sound down?”

Letter to my 17 Year old self 

Kia Ora,

You won’t know what that means and you’ll wish you had a hand held devise in your pocket with access to all the knowledge in the world. But that’s just science fiction, huh?

It’s good to see that you are still working on your poetry, even though you think it’s maudlin and self-indulgent. I know you are struggling to find words to rhyme with forlorn and rejected. Don’t worry. Those words will come, along with many other words similar to rejected, but that’s another story.

I picture you sitting at your bedroom window looking at the forest to the north. There is a light beyond those woods, my man and one day you will go there to see what makes it shine. But there is plenty of time for that.

I can hear your mother screaming at you to get your hair cut and I can see your rebel scowl of defiance. I hate to break it to you, son. But the most crushing disappointment you will face in your life is the day you wake up and realise that your Mother was nearly always right.

Anyway, you’ll be getting your first passport soon and that hair will follow you around for the next ten years like a Police mug shot. Imagine the 27 year old you and your first overseas business trip when your boss sees that hair in your passport? And don’t get me started on tattoos.

And when you get that photo taken try to find something sensible to wear. I know you tell your friends that the woollen, sleeveless, pattered vest you wear with that chaffed, collarless shirt is a fashion statement. If not for today, then at least for some future date.  Well, all I can say is that it’s been 34 years and I’m still waiting for that look to come into fashion.

I like that Che Guevara poster in your bedroom but you shouldn’t expend all your energy protesting at visiting American presidents. You may not believe me, but there are many worst American presidents to come and you will need some of that passion for the future.

I know you are sitting there with no money, having just been dumped by your first girlfriend and facing a tsunami of exams. But you will come to remember this as the best year of your life. When most things were still a possibility and not a disappointment, when mountains were there to be climbed and not avoided and where your default emotions were curiosity and wonder.

You liked Leonard Cohen even back then. Why don’t you slip one of his cassettes into your Walkman? Put on Tower of Song and you’ll hear a lyric that will no doubt dismiss with youthful bravado. But one day you will come to understand its meaning.   I ache in the places where I used to play. 

So play on, young man. Play on.

Welcome to New Zealand

I first came to New Zealand in December 1995 and stayed for four months. I wanted to move here permanently at the time but couldn’t get a work visa. It’s only taken me twenty years to rectify that issue. 

A lot has happened in my life in between and New Zealand has changed too. They have electric trains now for example. But one thing that hasn’t changed is my love for this country. It feels like I’ve finally come home.

We arrived late at night on 15^th December 2015, twenty years and three days since I first set foot on these fabled islands. I remember my arrival date in 1995 because it was the day before Ireland played Holland in a play-off match for Euro 96. In those pre internet days, it was hard to find out where the game was being shown. But the kindly gent I was staying with at the time made a few phone calls and before I could say Ole, Ole, I found myself at the counter of an Auckland pub at 9am on a Thursday morning, wearing shorts and a tee shirt and watching them shovel snow from the Anfield pitch on TV.

I don’t remember much about that morning (apart from the fact that Ireland lost) but I do recall the friendliness of everyone I met and the offer of a pint of Guinness and a full Irish breakfast for ten dollars.

Things have become much more expensive in the intervening twenty years, but the friendliness is the same. I met a lot of lovely Australians in my seven years there but I met plenty of abrupt and rude ones as well. There is an Aussie stereotype which could best be described as attempting to balance a number of chips on their shoulders.

Kiwis are much more relaxed about their place in the world. They don’t feel the need to prove that they are the best in the world at everything. New Zealanders pick a small number of activities such as Rugby, dairy farming and tourism and excel at them.

Arriving just before Christmas had an unintentional benefit. This country closes down for a month at this time of year, in the way that France closes in August. As a result, I’ve had to put off finding a job. This has forced me to have some down time which is something I’m not great at. I’ve been working for thirty three years and the only substantial breaks I’ve taken are the above mentioned 1995 excursion and the enforced three month break I took when I was made redundant in 2014. That one wasn’t particularly enjoyable as the stress of finding a new job, moving to Scotland and selling or giving away most of my possessions was pretty uncomfortable.

This time, as I wait for the recruitment agencies to return from holiday, I’ve been spending most of my time at the beach. My in-laws live in Pauanui, a sleepy little seaside town on the Coromandel peninsula. It was designed and built in the 1960s when all Kiwis wanted a summer home (known as Bach here) and is the sort of place that first year town planning students or SimCity aficionados would come up. The streets are not parallel, they curve in graceful arcs and houses are unique and built at odd angles to each other. It is clear that the original designers discouraged fences and it is normal to walk through somebodies back yard on your way to the beach.

I’ve been coming here for eight years now and I can some conformity starting to creep in. Originally the houses were owned by Waikato farmers who had cashed in on the various dairy booms of the last fifty years and retired to the coast. They all fulfilled that Kiwi dream of buying a boat and retiring to the seaside.

But over the years, the houses have been snapped up by Auckland doctors and lawyers as second homes. They seem far more interested in conformity and the fences are starting to go up. But they share a common obsession with their farmer predecessors. 

And that is a love of fishing. Every kiwi over a certain means owns a boat and this is the perfect time of year to get it out of the garage. Not all of them are proficient however and my father in law likes nothing better than sitting on the beach on a windy day, watching the city slickers try to make it over the bar that guards the opening to Pauanui harbour. On a windy day, only the brave make it and my father in law seems to take a sly pleasure in those that don’t.

But it hasn’t all been beer and skittles. We want to rent somewhere for a year and that is proving to be more difficult than expected. Auckland is going through a property bubble, not unlike the one in Ireland before the tiger crashed and burned. Property is hugely expensive so that pushes up rents and also the demand for rental property, from people who can’t afford to buy.

It doesn’t help that I don’t have a job yet. It’s hard to get an employer’s reference 

when you don’t have an employer. It’s also hard to get a tax number until you have a job offer and hard to get a job offer until you have a tax number.  But that’s just the sort of karfaesque nonsense that you get when you move to a new country. I’ll work it all out in the end.

In the meantime, I’ll enjoy being back in shorts and tee shirts, eating BBQ food most nights and drinking white wine in the sun. Most of all though, I want my daughter to be happy. She has lots of cousins here, including some who are of a similar age. She appears to have already adapted to the outdoors lifestyle and has become an expert sand castle builder. She will grow up a Kiwi and I think that’s one of the best gifts a parent can give to their child.

Farewell Edinburgh and thanks for all the fish (and chips)

I went to a poetry workshop in Edinburgh last August. It was called ‘Nothing but the poem’ and they were discussing five works by WB Yeats. I was a bit intimidated until I realised that the group consisted of retired Scottish school teachers who knew as little about WB Yeats as I did. The first twenty minutes was spent debating how to pronounce ‘Aengus .

I mention this because the Annual Book Festival (of which the poetry workshop was one small part) was my highlight of our eighteen months in Edinburgh. It attracts a galaxy of writers to tickle the intellect of all and sundry. I attended interviews and readings with my three favourite newspaper and book writers within the space of a weekend. And is this is my memory of Edinburgh list I thought I’d start on a positive note.

But unfortunately not all my memories of Edinburgh will be tinged with such golden light. I arrived with an ache to get back to the Southern Hemisphere and that meant that I never quite threw myself into the Caledonian lifestyle and perhaps was more likely to notice the negative aspects of life in Scotland as a means of justifying my longer term lifestyle ambitions.

Let me start with dogs. I’ve never liked them it must be said. But Edinburgh takes canine adoration to fetish level. On manys the wet day (and there were plenty of those), I’d sit on a bus and have a dog sniff at my shoes as we trundled along before nuzzling my groin with his soggy snout. The owners invariably thought this was adorable. Dogs in cafes were also popular and they would sit staring at you mournfully as you struggled to finish your food above the aroma of soggy mutt.

But mention of cafes does remind me of the food, which I really enjoyed in Edinburgh. It’s not quite as eclectic as Melbourne, but as a British city, Edinburgh benefits from the fruits of the empire, in particular Indian food.  I also ate more fish and chips than was good for me, mainly due to living within 100 metres of “Scotland’s best fish and chip shop” (although in my eighteen months there I noticed at least ten places that made claim to this title). A friend of mine in Melbourne once looked at me sadly when I told her I was about to visit Ireland and said “Ah, real chipper chips”. I never really understood what she meant until I lived in Edinburgh. Chips in Britain and Ireland are infinitely better than anywhere else in the world, particularly down here in the Southern Hemisphere. I believe the difference is due to the liberal use of beef lard in Northern Hemisphere cooking, but just in case my doctor is reading this, I’ll say no more.

Edinburgh is a rich city and they certainly collect enough in council tax to make you think that they could run a clean and efficient city. But if you saw the litter on every corner you’d think otherwise. They don’t allocate bins to each house as they do in every other city I’ve lived in. Instead, a number of covered skips are placed on each street corner, one for general rubbish and the rest for various forms of recycling, apart from glass which needs to be brought to remote parts of the city, accessible only by car. Like many of our neighbours, we didn’t own a car, so trips to the glass drop off had to be planned with the detail of Scotts trip to the Antarctic and given the Scottish climate, was often done in similar weather.

These skips were emptied on Mondays and by Wednesday they were full to overflowing. Plastic bags would build up around them which the fat and frenzied seagulls would tear apart. The city gets 4 million tourists a year and yet it allows the streets to look like downtown Mogadishu.

But if you didn’t like the dogs and litter, at least it was easy to get away, whether it was the train down to London or a budget airline flight to somewhere in Europe. In our time in Edinburgh, we visited many places but I especially liked getting to Ireland regularly to visit friends and family.

There was also the Scottish countryside to enjoy. I have always been proud of the rugged beauty of the West of Ireland but I have to say that the Scottish highlands are even more spectacular. Glencoe in particular will live long in my memory. If God designed a back garden, I reckon this would be it.

Our Scottish adventure is now over and we have set sail for New Zealand. The rest of life’s adventure starts now. The trip over was pretty exhausting. Adults can adjust to time zone changes. Kids less so. But we’re over that now and getting used to living in a warm climate again. I became a complete woss while living in Australia and really struggled with the weather in Edinburgh. They say that there is no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing. But no amount of clothing can stop the icy wind that whips off the North Sea from percolating into every fibre of your body. The rain seemed to be incessant in our time there and the daily commute in buses fogged up with condensation and reeking of wet rain gear wore me down.  I longed for the sun and the chance to wear shorts and sandals again.

It has been roasting since we arrived and too hot in fact to leave the house between 10am and 4pm. Ironically, it rained today and we welcomed it like mana from heaven.

Happy Christmas to all and I hope 2016 brings everything you hope for. From my point of view I’m hoping for a good job and to find a nice house to live in. It’s not much to ask for, is it?