“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.