Become a recruitment consultant. Annoy the world.

The day after the Graduate Recruitment Company debacle, at 8.44am (I know, I checked the clock) I got another call from a guy who called last week to find out if I was interested in working as a recruitment consultant. “Oh did I already call you. Sorry I must have forgotten to take you off my list” he said. A lie, I’m sure. He then went on to ask if I’d changed my mind. He even said that they might have a job at a branch more local to me, Watford. Having had such a bad experience the day before and feeling somewhat demoralised I wasn’t prepared to dismiss him straight away. “How about I call you back in a couple of days time?” And he did. And, rather foolishly, I agreed to an interview on Monday. He’d already sent me over some details about the job, so I gave them a proper look. It really wasn’t me. Basically it was everything I’d hated about my previous job multiplied to the nth degree. But what other option did I have?

A short while later my phone rang once again. It was a recruitment consultant wondering if I was interested in a much better job working for a Media Monitoring company near the Tower of London. She described the job. Basically I’d be reading newspapers and checking the internet for stories about whatever client I was working for. It sounded great. I was definitely interested and eagerly awaited her promised email containing more information. She asked me to look it over and give her a call back by the end of the day. It didn’t come. To make matters worse my email started playing up. I called back. It turned out that she hadn’t sent it. I waited. It didn’t come. Thursday turned to Friday and I called back. She claimed that she couldn’t find the job spec and that she’d send it to me when she was resent it by the company. She did, however, say that they were very interested in me. Finally today (after I called twice) I got the information and a promise to arrange an interview for me on Wednesday. Hopefully she’ll call back tomorrow. Still, I’ve had to jump through a few hoops to get there.

Anyway, in the meantime I still l had this interview for the recruitment consultant job. When I’d called him up on Friday to make sure that the interview was still on, he’d promised to call me on Sunday at 4pm to talk me through the interview. By Sunday, when the phone call finally came, I’d had serious doubts about the job. It really wasn’t for me. I’d just be miserable. After consulting a number of friends I’d decided to be honest about my misgivings when he called. I was pretty up front with the guy about how I didn’t think the job was right for me. I first asked him what a typical day would be like as I figured this would be a good way of illustrating why I wouldn’t be suitable. Alarm bells started ringing when he told me that my regular hours would be from 8am -6PM (so you can bet that, in reality, I’d have to stay a fair bit later). He continued to describe what seemed like a nightmare day for me and as he spoke I was becoming even more convinced that this simply wasn’t for me. By the time he told me my basic salary (£16k, with commission not kicking in until after 3 months, by which point, if some miracle had happened and I’d got the job, I’m sure I’d probably have been sacked), I was utterly convinced that I would hate the job, even resent it in the same way I resented my last job for its low pay and long hours. This job was, just from the point of view of pay and hours, would have been even worse than my last. I would be spending even more of my time on the phone being interrupted by callers, and under pressure to hit targets. I’d probably have had a heart attack within 6 months.

So I told him the job wasn’t for me. Quite emphatically in fact, yet I couldn’t get him to say that he thought it would be best if I didn’t come in. Although he admitted that if I said all that I had said on the phone to him to the guy who would be interviewing me, I wouldn’t get the job. None the less, he kept insisting that I should go to the interview anyway. It didn’t seem to matter that I’d just told him how bad I was in a sales environment and how much I really wouldn’t like it. I emphasised the point by saying that, had I seen the job advertised, I wouldn’t have even considered applying for it. I simply don’t get a buzz out of making sales.

I even gave him a way of making the job appeal to me. I said, “I suppose you could argue that it’s a worthwhile job because you’re helping to find people work.”

“Nobody” according to him “does this sort of job to help people.”

By now, any shred of doubt I had in my mind about not taking the interview had evaporated. He was giving me a hard, but completely untargeted sales pitch for some reason. I felt sure I’d made that perfectly clear, yet he continued trying to say that it was still a good idea to go to the interview. “I can see you’re in two minds about the job” he said at one point. He extolled the virtues of his company, saying that they weren’t like any other recruitment agency. Oddly enough his hard sell approach to forcing the job on me made it clear that they were just like any other Recruitment Agency. Maybe they were a little worse.

We left it that I would call today if I wanted to cancel the interview.

I called, but he wasn’t available, so I left a message and sent an email, asking that the interview be cancelled.

It really is odd that he spent so long trying to convince me to come along when I clearly felt that I was, in so many ways, completely wrong for the job. I even said that I felt it would be a waste of time going but he shrugged this off, telling me that it wouldn’t.

I can’t exactly worry about turning down today’s interview. I didn’t want the job and would never have got it. If I had it would have just made me miserable.

Anyway, I’ve come to an important conclusion. Recruitment consultants really are full of shit. At least now I know that I’m completely unsuited to being a Recruitment Consultant. I’m just not that much of an arsehole.

“Hello there. I was wondering if I could completely waste your time.”

I do feel like I need to find something I can do in case the teaching doesn’t work out and I don’t make it onto the course. Besides, even if I do make it onto the course I’ve got another 6 months before it starts. And minus-no money in the bank. Clearly I need a job to take me through until September. Clearly recruitment consultants are the, slightly unpalatable, answer. At the beginning of February I emailed and called about 15-20 agencies. None gave me a particularly positive response. The guy at Hudson at least gave me some pretty good advice and the lady at Australasian talent (odd name I know, but recommended by a friend) suggested that she’d have some basic admin jobs if I was “desperate”. However, y far the worst response came from the Graduate Recruitment Company. After I’d submitted my CV via email they sent me a text requesting that I call. Straight away I got on the phone. To be frank, the lady at the GRC was pretty rude. She asked me what I wanted to do. I spelled it out pretty clearly. She said we don’t handle that sort of thing. I said that I’d be happy to do pretty much anything, perhaps something not dissimilar to my last job. She had a go at me for not being focused enough. I couldn’t believe it. I thought I was simply being flexible. Her whole attitude was patronising and condescending. She advise that I look thorough their website and apply for a job if I liked the look of it. Basically I was left with the overwhelming impression that they couldn’t be bothered. Arses.

Last month I had an extremely negative conversation with them, which is why I was so surprised that they called me back. I thought that they’d had a change in attitude.

Of course when, a month later, they called me back and asked me to come in, because they “may be able to find some jobs that I could do” I jumped at the chance. “They must have had a change of heart”, I thought. After all, they had my CV, so they should have known everything about me already. So, last Monday I went in for an interview with one of their consultants. To put it mildly, it was an unpleasant experience and a complete waste of time. From what I can gather they apparently just wanted to be nasty to me in person.

I arrived 15 minutes early, as requested, and filled in some forms. All the reception staff were pretty, young and very attractive, so I was looking forward to an interview with someone similar. As it turned out, my interviewer was almost entirely dissimilar. I’d been asked to wait in a room, fill out my forms and await my interviewer. About 20 minutes later she entered the small room. She was huge. I mean really fat. She made the already small room seem tiny. She was wearing a very low cut v-neck top which showed off (that’s really not the right phrase) her large, but saggy breasts. I tried to keep my eyes on her face but it was hard to stop my gaze from falling downwards on a couple of occasions. Not, I should say, because I found her breasts titillating. Really looking at her boobs had more in common with slowing down to rubberneck a particularly nasty car accident. Things didn’t get any more pleasant.

The cow made me feel as if I had no options. Deep down I know she’s wrong, but it installed in me a nagging doubt. I still can’t work out why she bothered if all she was going to do was pick me apart. She attacked me, my work history and my education for the whole interview. Perhaps it was all under the guise of seeing how I’d be in an interview, but, when it comes down to it, it wasn’t an interview for a job, it was an interview for an agency, so I’m not sure why she was spending so much of her time telling me how unmarketable I was by telling me all the reasons why I wouldn’t get a job as opposed to concentrating on how I could get one. Basically she turned every positive into a negative. A diverse range of qualifications and experience was, according to her, a bad thing. That was, as far as she was concerned, an un-debateable absolute. After having told me all the reasons why I would find it hard to get a job she went on to criticise me for having a gap in my employment since I left my last job. She, without a hint of irony, went on to ask, “Employers are crying out for candidates, so why haven’t you found anything?” She’d initially got me in to discuss possibilities in the technology sector, but then spent much of the interview telling me that I’d have a hard time against the competition who were straight out of university with Computer science degrees. If she thought that why did she bother to call me in at all? Does she just like wasting people’s time? The fact that she continued by making a comment about my age, which she followed up by saying that “of course, we’re not allowed to discriminate based on age.” And continuing by making it perfectly clear that age was a major factor in their rejection of me. In fact, having thought about it, I wonder whether every other negative comment was made simply to get her out of her allusion to age being a major factor on rejecting me. Otherwise the whole thing was extraordinarily nonsensical and contradictory.

She was even somewhat patronising. I was quite willing to do anything for which my skills would be a match and she attacked me for being unsure of what I wanted to do. As it all drew to a close and she’d told me they really couldn’t be bothered to help, she told me that “I should go and see a career service. Perhaps one at your university.” Given her previous comment alluding to the fact that I might be too old to get accepted by the agency I responded by saying that “So, you don’t think that I’m too old to go back to my university’s career service” She didn’t really have anything to say to that.

She actually said that my CV was too unfocussed to get anything at the moment. When I suggested that I could work on it, and re-focus it, I was virtually dismissed. Having said, just moments before, that my CV’s lack of focus was a big problem, she was now almost immediately saying (and I’m not remember it exactly as she said it, but it’s pretty close) “it will take more than a bit of paper to get you a job.” Oh, on the subject of CVs, she’d asked me to bring along a hard copy of my CV as well as email her with an updated version. In front of her was the old version of my CV she had received a month earlier. At no point did she ask me for the hard copy, meaning that I was carrying around a bag containing my CV for absolutely nothing. The whole thing really seemed like she wasn’t bothering.

I really thought that agencies were supposed to help you find work, not tell you why you’ll never manage to find a job. Ever.

You can see why I was so upset about the interview. It seemed like she’d simply decided to hate me on principal. She said, during the course of the interview that she had wanted to follow up her degree and masters in English with a PhD, but hadn’t been able to afford it. She said that she didn’t know what she’d have done if she hadn’t become a recruitment consultant. Basically she came across as being a bitter, patronising, condescending bitch. In other words she had all the attributes you’d expect to find in a recruitment consultant.

Those who can’t...

A few days later I drove up to Reading to meet a friend for lunch at a pub near where he works. I hadn’t seen him for a while so it was good to catch up> the food was pretty good too, and pretty substantial too, despite the fact that we’d both ordered “reduced size” portions. I shudder to think how large the regular portions would be. Of course, as with any friend I don’t see every week (and in fact most that I do) the subject of job hunting came up. At this point it really wasn’t going very well (unless you count random emails from companies who saw my CV on monster and want to offer me jobs as a computer programmer or Java scripter just because I have an A-Level in Computer Science, as going well.) This is where the potentially life changing bit comes in. My friends’ boyfriend is a teacher. He suggested that might be a good career move for me. He told me about how you could get a huge bursary (£9000 for the year as it turns out) just for doing the course. I thought about all the holiday time. He told me that it was a fulfilling career, something that would give me a sense of achievement. I thought about what I could do with 13 weeks holiday a year. He said that, as a key worker, I’d have access to affordable housing and get a salary that would allow me to buy my own home. This appealed more than the abundance of holiday time. The last five years that I’ve spent stuck in this boring, mediocre little suburb have bee torturous. I long to actually have a proper life of my own, something that was never going to happen whilst I stuck living in the same house as my mother in Harrow, the closest London equivalent to Tatooine. If there is a bright spot in London, Harrow is the place furthest from it. (For some reason it feels good to reference/paraphrase Star Wars.). So, teaching could offer me a good, fulfilling job, where I could feel like part of the solution, not part of the problem (the problem being selfish and extreme capitalism and the sort of people who engage in nefarious, dishonest practices. Like all my previous employers). Not only that, I’d get a decent salary (decent in the sense that it’s far higher than anything I’d got before), and have enough spare time in the holidays to keep writing. To be frank I doubt that I’ll ever manage to fit in at most commercial organisations. Making somebody else rich was never a particularly strong motivating factor for me to work. I’m not even that bothered about being rich my self. Just comfortable. Sure I’d like my own house (and, with house prices being what they are you kind of do need to be rich to own one.) and a nice car (I keep mentioning cars and driving. They’ll be something more specific on all that later), but I’ve never really had much enthusiasm for accruing wealth just to put a few more zero’s on my bank balance. Honestly, being happy and doing something that I think is worthwhile is far more important to me.

Of course I’m quite scarred about the idea of teaching. I’d initially discounted it because I thought I’d make a lousy teacher. Admittedly this was based entirely on my inability to teach my mum how to use a computer so that wasn’t exactly a firm basis for saying that I’d be awful. But, when it comes down to it, I’d really love the opportunity to impart knowledge to people. To educate them and shape their minds. All that stuff. I decided that I’d probably make a pretty good teacher. But what to teach. I certainly wouldn’t want to do primary school. I really couldn’t stand being around kids who know absolutely nothing. No, far better to teach secondary school and be around a bunch of kids who think they know absolutely everything. I’ve decided that I’d like to teach English. I ended up regretting not doing English at university. Doing history was a bit of a mistake and, I think in retrospect, I let my Dad influence me in my choice of degree too much. I’d actually justified my choice of a History degree in a purely logical way. I did well at A-Level and GCSE, so I was bound to get a good degree. Sure, I liked history, and I got pretty good grades for GCSE and A-Level (both As’ in case you’re wondering), but I get the impression that my interest and motivation to do well was influenced by my desire to please my dad. Once he died, and I went to university to read (as they persistently say on University Challenge) History, I lost all motivation. I just wasn’t that interested. Oddly enough I’ve realised that I would have been much better off doing a degree in something that I got Bs in, like English. After all, to get a B for English I didn’t even have to bother trying. How well could I have done if I’d put a bit of effort into it? In fact the more and more I heard about English degrees in my third year (I was going out with a girl who, along with some of her friends’, studied English) the more and more I realised that I’d chosen the wrong subject. Of course by then it was far too late. I only had a couple of months before my degree was over.

Of course to redress the balance (and stay at university for another year with my younger girlfriend), I decided to do my MA in Film Screenwriting. I somehow cajoled my way onto the course and all was well in the world. Until the girl dumped me. And then, when I finished the course I still didn’t feel like I’d made up for doing so badly ion my first degree. Clearly doing so badly at my History degree is going to haunt me forever. I felt as though I wasn’t good enough, and, perhaps, that’s caused more difficulties in getting a job than the actual result of my degree. In fact I thought that having an MA would imply to employers that I’d actually done well in my first degree. I found out the other day, at an interview with a recruitment consultant that it worked. She really thought that I’d got a 2.1 (at least that’s what she wrote in her notes, and I wasn’t going to correct her). I’ve actually got more to say about the recruitment consultant, but that’s for another section.

Anyway, perhaps doing this teaching course is simply another vein attempt to make up for my bad degree. But even if that’s the case at least it should help me to get many of the things that I’ve wanted for the past few years since I left university. I’ll hopefully have a worthwhile job, a good salary, plenty of holiday time and the means to buy my own place. Surely it’s worth the risk. It’s not even a particularly great risk since I’ll be paid to do the course. Not only that, I think, I’ll probably move into halls whilst I do it, so I’ll be able to get out of Harrow for a while. Then, at the end of it, I’ll have another qualification. It really is Win, Win, Win.

Now, I just have to get around to figuring out where I want to go (My first choice is definitely Reading. I’m not entirely sure why, though they were my original insurance choice for my first degree). Basically I have to make my choices based on where I want to go and where I’m most likely to get in. I think that fact that I have such a bad degree in History may harm my chances of getting on to an English course, so I have to be a little pragmatic and include a few ex-polytechnics in with my choices.

I’m pretty sure that this is the right course of action for me. Besides, it’ll be nice to be a student again. I wonder if students still get a 10% discount at HMV.

It's been a while

Wow, it’s been ages since I contributed anything to the blog. The irony is, when lots of stuff’s been going on in my life I don’t tend to have the time to blog it all. That said, I get the feeling that making time to blog it will be beneficial. Once I’ve written about it I’m sure I’ll be able to think more clearly.

So, the last couple of weeks have been pretty busy and pretty important. Well, some things weren’t al; that pivotal, but I’ll talk about them over the next few posts anyway. I’ll try to keep it vaguely chronological, but it’s mostly divided into topics. I’ll start with something frivolous.

A few weeks ago I visited a friend in Essex to, at his request, check out his Xbox 360. To be honest, it seems just like the original Xbox, only instead of being a big black box it’s now a slightly svelter white box with an external power supply unit that is, quite literally, the size of a brick. Apparently it’ll also break after a year (if anecdotal evidence is to be believed) so it’s also far more fragile. I’ve had my Xbox for a few years now, and the worst thing that’s happened is that it’s developed a slight, asthmatic wheeze when first started up. It goes away after a minute or so and then continues to operate completely normally.

None of the games look an awful lot better than regular Xbox games. Of course the reason for this is quite obvious. Whilst my friend had a new, ultra modern, ultra powerful Xbox 360 he had it hooked up to a decidedly un-modern CRT, non-HD TV, meaning that every single game was displayed in a resolution well below that which was intended. Any graphical fanciness was completely lost on the blurry old SD TV. In actual fact, the images were so un-sharp that I actually started feeling a little wonky just trying to play a game of gears of war. I don’t suppose this was helped by the fact that I had to play split screen, thus halving the screen size and effectively reducing the already woefully inadequate display resolution. It’s no wonder I had to stop. My eyes were really going funny and my head was beginning to hurt. It was becoming abundantly obvious that I was right all along about the Xbox 360. There’s no point in getting one if you don’t have an HDTV.

Oddly enough, as a result of the televisual shortcomings, all the new games held little appeal for me and I ended up spending most of my time playing Halo 2. Of course, none of the alleged enhancement made to Halo 2 for playback on the 360 were apparent because, you’ve guessed it, it wasn’t connected to an HDTV. It therefore looked exactly the same as it did on my near 5 year old Xbox. Since Halo and its many sequels are the only games I’ll probably end up playing on the 360 it really does render the purchase of a 360 completely pointless. Of course I’ll probably change my mind when I get my own, personal 360 and Halo 3 comes out, but for now, even if I had the money (which I don’t), I wouldn’t buy one. Besides, there’s supposed to be a new version coming out soon that’s black and has an HDMI port enabling it to be connected to an HDTV in a purely digital way as opposed to the many pronged analogue component approach favoured by the current model. Perhaps it won’t break down so quickly either. Of course all this is only a rumour, but I’m certainly prepared to wait and see if it’s true.

Besides, I really have stopped playing a lot of video games (though, inevitably, I’ve ended up playing Halo on the PC far too much) owing to the cancellation of my Xbox Live account, thus preventing me from playing Xbox games online and saving me up to £40 a year. I must stop playing Halo because it stops me from pursuing more worthwhile activities like writing and applying for jobs. Which neatly brings me to my next subject.