Well I’ve now been unemployed for a grand total of 11 weeks from the week after I completed my degree, although it’s only 3 weeks if you go from when I actually graduated so I suppose it’s not that bad really. Have been literally doing it full time as if it’s a job in itself, from when i get up to when I have my tea in the evening.
It’s for this reason I feel I should share some of my insights into the whole graduate job hunt process as I feel I have learnt a lot about it in recent months thanks not only to the obvious places such as the Jobcentre and the Uni careers service but also less likely places such as Omega Resource Group () who I actually contacted looking for a job in the first instance who then later replied with
Would you like to come on this course we run for Graduates and Professionals who have recently become unemployed? It’s free for anybody on JSA.
Of course I said yes, not sure whether that was just the student in me going “oow free things” or the more sensible side of me thinking this could be really useful but suffice it to say it really was well worth the effort of going.
It went over things like CV’s both online and offline, covering letters, where to look for jobs (online), using internet job boards and the two most useful parts that I felt was showing us how recruiters look for candidates for jobs on job boards, literally showing how the search is done, what keywords are used and how to tailor our own CV’s to increase visibility. Also competency based interviewing was covered which although I have had some experience of this from all the job applications I’ve been doing was nevertheless useful to practice it.
Anyway kind of went off on a rant there but I felt it was important to advertise it a bit due to how good it was. My next topic is Recruitment Agencies! When I began my job hunt all those weeks ago the first thing i did was go looking for jobs on all the usual suspects such as Monster, Milkround and a dozen others but this yielded some interesting things, firstly most jobs had an associated recruitment agency which in many cases tended to be the same agency of each type of job which led me to start approaching them instead of the jobs themselves. Now I’m signed upto 3 temp/perm agencies in my local area and a further 4 IT-specific agencies in about 30 miles radius of home. Now I had herd some not so good things about agencies before but having dealt with a fair few recently I have to say I’m quite impressed with regards their efforts to finding me permanent positions as I have received 3 interviews/telephone interviews in the past few weeks, all of which have been job types very close to what I want to do.
My basic job requirements are £15,000+ and either Web Developer or IT Support within a 30 mile radius of me so this isnt all that bad considering I’m over 30 miles from Birmingham City Centre. Theres one particular job that I’m at the 2nd interview stage for now that I’m really very interestd in getting because it’s a position in ‘Internet Development & Marketing Administrator’ which means I can use my academic and practical experience in web development and work my way into the more general IT area with the help of the head of IT there. The interview is 11:00 Thursday 13th August 2009 and if I’m successful I would be starting the following Monday, 09:00 Monday 17th August 2009! 😀