Like most writers, I balance the endless joy of soliciting rejection slips with the demands of a daily occupation. My current one is desperately dull. It has some benefits – working from home for one, which means I don’t have to wear a suit and tie, I save money on travel and can take a tea break whenever I want. But it’s also stressful, soul-destroying and mentally exhausting. I’m effectively at work 24 hours a day, seven days a week, if not physically then mentally, and with very few holidays.

It’s called terminal unemployment.

Don’t ever think that looking for work isn’t a full time occupation. It is, just with 100% more daily dissatisfaction and 100% less salary. Don’t for one minute think that being (apparently devoutly) unemployed is all fun and laughter. I really wish it was. I wish it’s as depicted on TV or in books – eating Sugar Puffs from the packet, watching Boohbah and devising disturbing new forms of self-abuse. Sure, there may be some people who indeed do live that dizzying lifestyle, but I’m one of the hapless idiots who are actually, perhaps foolishly, trying get a job.

And I’m pretty good at it. I’m an expert in fact at bookmarking jobs I don’t want to do. That said, it does take all day and usually yields nothing. Occasionally some days even offer one or two vacancies you could apply for without the likely prospect of suicide in a few weeks. If you’re especially lucky that is.

Unemployment is not as easy a life as some might think – and it’s usually thought of as such by those with either the good fortune or intellectual vasectomy that enables them to enjoy what they do to earn money, day in, day out. You’re still always tired. You still have to take phone calls. Mostly these are from recruitment consultancy agents. People who think that estate agents are the most devious, duplicitious and downright demoralising form of life have clearly never before encountered this flavour.

The typical recruitment agent will more than happily respond via telephone to your initial application to one of their vacancies (or bait, as I’ve come to call them). However, this is merely an expert tactic to break you down, ultimately so you become so scared/depressed/desperate that you’ll accept any old rubbish they couldn’t pass off to anyone with an ounce of self-respect. They can, and will, go to ridiculous lengths to shatter your own bravado of self-confidence, just so that they can stuff your limp broken form into any box they want. Say no to what they offer you, and they’ll never contact you again, regardless of how well a job fits your own concept of your abilities, or the new ill-fitting suit they’ve stitched for you.

Buzzards, circling. Image by Conlawprof

Here’s an idea of what you’re dealing with: one agent called me back within minutes of applying for a vacancy. With predictable idiocy, the speed and directness of her reply foolishly raised my hopes, or at least until she very quickly informed me that I wasn’t remotely qualified. She then commented on the fact that the last few jobs listed on my CV were very brief. I replied that they were short term assignments. She said that I should state that on my CV. I replied that I had, in the (evidently) pointless description of said position beneath its title. In the very first sentence. The first few words in fact. She said that I’d need to make it more clear. She then asked what I’d been doing for the last six months. I told her that I’d been looking for work. She replied that prospective employers wouldn’t like that – that they’d prefer you to be working at the time of application. At this point the conversation essentially went out of the window, having realised I was talking to someone who couldn’t grasp the basic concept of cause and effect. Unsurprisingly, she then proceeded to put me forward for a job that even I could see I wasn’t remotely qualified for or experienced in at all, which surprisingly offered £5000 less than the one I had applied for. I said I’d get back to her. I didn’t.

Most of the time, this is the best you can hope for. It’s rare enough for a job agency to even acknowledge your applications. One particular media agency has to date not answered a single one, in a variety of roles including trying to register for temp work. Still I continue to apply, like a fool, every time. What choice do I have?

Another agency similarly denied my existence until one happy day when they called me in to register after applying for a full time job. To cut a very long story short, it turned out they’d mixed my CV up with another applicant with the same name. Someone eight years younger than me with a degree in Sports Science. Now I’m not an intellectual snob, but I don’t understand why someone with no experience of any description and a degree in Sports Science is better qualified for a junior editorial role than someone with an English degree and over four years’ varied work experience. They felt sorry for me, apparently, for dragging me all the way out there for no reason at all, and put me on their temping books by way of consolation – something I’d been writing to them about for months. I never heard a peep from them after that.

I don’t know which is worse for your confidence – recruitment agents breaking you down, or the mere glaring fact of your own evident unemployability – your four year degree and four years of work experience worth little more than a quick template rejection email, if at all, over and over. You’re even touched when they go to the trouble of doing a mail merge first – a personally addressed rejection adds that little special touch, but you’re always back to square one, again and again, a little more tired, bewildered and less yourself every time.

It’s not a big pool, especially now, but on my daily scan through the ludicrous amount of websites and email digests I’m registered with I’m much less inclined now to apply for a job if it’s with an agency, particularly if it’s advertised by an agency who have never once replied to me. It’s not as if they’re out of my league – I’d never apply for something I didn’t have a chance at getting. I just appear to be completely unemployable.

Maybe I should just stick to writing novels and short stories – an area in which I’m already more than experienced in not getting off the bottom rung. That and cut out the middle man: always apply direct if you can.

• This entry was posted on Thursday, November 13th, 2008 at 2:00 pm and is filed under babble. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.