I’m after a professional job anywhere in the field of helping people. I’m mid 40s, when I was last job hunting it was really different.
How the fuck do I start?
It’s a shitshow quite frankly and it feels really degrading, so be prepared to test the limits of your mental fortitude. Unfortunately, it really is a case of apply to as many places as possible, get ghosted by 90+% of them until you eventually get something. Be prepared for it to take a while. My friend has been looking for over a year now, and it is just brutal. Not what you wanted to hear, I’m sure, but worth knowing now before you go in.
Yep i can imagine… thanks for the honesty
Your best bet is leads from people who know you. Reach out to everyone.
I’ve been mostly the hiring manager, so I’ll comment from that perspective. Last time I was job hunting was over 20 years ago and before that almost another 20 years prior. I know very little about being a candidate.
People who know you referring you is by far the most efficient channel. Candidates referred by people I trust almost invariably jump the queue. Use that to the maximum. This is how I’ve found my new jobs, save for the first one and one mid career.
Tailor your CV for each application. It is a lot of work, but it will increase the probability of getting an interview, which is the only purpose of a CV for you. Ensure you highlight experience that matches the role, picking key words from the job ad. I would recommend using plain English and ensuring all sentences are easy to read. Clunky text will easily send your CV to the no pile. For love of god, make sure there are no typos.
Prepare yourself for rejections and ghosting. The problem is not you. Every recruitment process has its flaws and good candidates get rejected regularly. Some of it is incompetence and some just random bad luck. Also, you have no way of knowing what is being used to filter CVs and prioritise candidates. A candidate who gets an interview will already have been very lucky, avoiding accidental rejection and somehow matching the filtering and prioritisation criteria.
When you get an interview make sure you prepare well. I’ll highlight a couple of things I think are important. Pick four or five relevant examples from your career you want to talk about and plan ahead what key things you want to say. The examples will give you a great starting point to answer even tricky questions. You will likely be able to make a bridge from a question to one of your prepared examples and therefore will immediately know how to proceed. This reduces the risk of getting stumped and gives you confidence.
A good format in answering questions is explaining situation you are talking about, what you did and what was the outcome because of your actions. Situation - your actions - outcome. Try to be fairly succinct allowing the interviewer to ask about details that are relevant for them.
If you have gaps in your CV plan what you will say about them. There is nothing wrong in taking a beak, needing a rest, being unemployed, being ill, etc.
Prepare a few questions you want to ask. If you are not curious to learn anything that easily comes across as you not caring. If they don’t give you time to ask questions it’s probably a place you’ll want to walk away from.
Final point I’ll make is that there is nothing wrong in being nervous in an interview. It is not a normal situation and most people will have at least some nerves. I’d probably be super nervous if I was to interview for a job. I would probably simply tell the interviewer that I’m nervous because it’s been a long time. A good interviewer will help you ease into the interview.
Best of luck!
Great info thx so much mate
That’s really useful info thanks so much!
Do you need to sign on whilst looking?
gov.uk for universal credit.
They have their own in-house job portal and there’s other websites such as indeed.co.uk and glassdoor.co.uk
Update your CV, you’ll be uploading it and filling out a date few online applications.
You’re on Lemmy so I’m fairly confident you can use some sort of a computer
Do people use CVs? In my day it was unheard of, it was pure application forms even for senior jobs
They seem to want both. Application form so they can filter you, then a CV for the interviewer to have Infront of them in the interview(s)
Doing the work to update your CV means you can mostly copy/paste segments into the forms though.
(Knowledge more from tech job hunting - unsure about other industries)
Ah mate it does my fucking head in.
Upload the CV and then fill out a form with pretty much the same info on the CV.
I use Glassdoor for applying jobs in the down season - I work building bars at festivals in the UK so most of the new work I bag is word of mouth, and usually March - Sept.
During the off, I just use Glassdoor and the ‘quick apply’ option.
Bearing in mind this is glassdoor.es so I’m not sure if the UK one has a different format?
Depends on your field as well
Best advice I had, was to rewrite the job advert as your CV… so each application will be different.
Obviously don’t lie about your experience, but if they’re wanting a “dynamic self-starting highly motivated…” then, well, that’s what you are.
Now, whether that forms a CV or an online form, it doesn’t really matter as you’ll be just copy & pasting their advert anyway.
I have been unemployed for over a year here in the states and I have a rediculous level of education and experience in very tough areas. I have had to deal with looking for work regularly and it does sorta get worse and worse. I mean 20 years ago was 2005 so that was kinda the switch over from newspapers to online classifieds. Not sure which you used. I mostly use linkedin not because its necessarily the best but my profile is more comprehensive than my resume and I have both given and recieved recommendations from people on it. So what I have there is honestly the best collection of information for an employer to make a decision on if to hire me. I feel a lot of employers and job seekers don’t really get the power of the whole setup though. In particular people connecting with all sorts of people they have not actually worked with or posting on it like its facebook.
Some really good tips on here I agree with. Also you could check out LinkedIn jobs. Lots of companies post their jobs on there directly and also recruitment agents use it
It literally didn’t exist when I was last job hunting. Any tips?
You don’t necessarily have to make a profile. It’s just a section of the site to search for jobs but you need to be logged in. Some of them you can apply using your linkedin profile info (I think it’ll ask for anything missing) but mostly it just links to the companies own website advert where you apply directly.
Be careful with the adverts by recruiters. I have a specialist job and have actually had more luck with recruiters, which I found through these adverts but it depends on the industry. I still found some lied to get contacts or sent me stuff completely different to what I asked for.
I have to say, companies take the piss now so be prepared to be annoyed. You have to set up an account for each company, upload your CV but they still ask for all the info to be put in manually, each slightly differently. Half of them use Workday but you still need separate accounts for each, and they have slightly different questions.
Then they don’t bother to respond unless they want to progress or sometimes you get an automatic rejection after several months. You have no idea if the job already has several candidates in progress, if they have someone internal but their policy means they have to advertise the job, or god knows what else. Try not to get yourself down if you don’t get any responses. It’s really normal. It just becomes a numbers game so try to apply for x number of jobs each day or week, and you will hopefully find the right advert at the right time.
That’s great thanks so much 😊
