Jobs and Applying for Work

Story · all 20 words

Forty-One

In the spring after I finished university I sent forty-one applications and received four replies. Three of those were no. This is not a sad story, but it did not feel like a happy one at the time.

I was unemployed for five months. I told people I was “looking”, which is a word that covers an enormous amount of sitting in a room.

My first mistake was the CV. Mine was four pages long and contained everything I had ever done, including a fortnight in a shop when I was sixteen. A friend of my mother’s who hires people looked at it for about ten seconds and said: two pages, and put the things they asked for at the top. She also told me that almost nobody reads past the first third, which is either depressing or extremely useful depending on the day.

My second mistake was sending the same covering letter to everybody, changing only the name of the company – and once, memorably, forgetting to change it. My third was applying for every vacancy I could find rather than the ones I actually matched.

The adverts all wanted three years of experience, which nobody leaving university has. What I eventually understood is that the list in an advert is a wish, not a rule, and that the honest thing to do is name the skills you really have and be straightforward about the ones you do not. My qualifications were never the problem. My confidence was.

The job I got was one I nearly did not apply for. It was part-time and temporary – six months, covering somebody on leave – and I remember thinking it was not worth the effort of a new letter.

There were six candidates at the interview and I was the youngest by some distance. They asked me why I wanted it and I said, truthfully, that I wanted to find out whether I was any good at it. Afterwards they telephoned my old manager from a summer job, who gave me a reference that I have never been allowed to read and have always suspected was better than I deserved.

I started on a Monday. For the first two months I worked the early shift and understood approximately nothing. At six months they made it permanent, at eighteen months I got a small promotion, and it turned into a full-time job I stayed in for four years.

When I finally left I had to give a month’s notice, and I spent most of it training the person replacing me. Nobody in that office has ever been fired and almost nobody ever resigns angrily, which I did not appreciate until I worked somewhere else.

Forty-one applications for one job. If you are somewhere in the middle of your own forty-one right now: that ratio is normal, and nobody tells you.