I am lucky enough to have a guest post from another job seeker, also wishing to remain anonymous about the joy she has had recently with another recruitment consultant...take it away other anonymous woman....
*********************************************************************************
There are few things more dispiriting than a 61-year-old recruitment agent peering over the top of your CV in his half-moon glasses and saying ‘you’ve moved around a lot, haven’t you?’
Honestly, it’s the equivalent of ‘had a few
sexual partners too many have we?’…
This recruitment agent, whom we shall call
Larry, then insisted I tell him about every job I’d ever had since I left
university. Which is two decades ago now.
There was no mention of awards won, achievements,
my significant professional reputation nor successful campaigns.
It was all down to the months I was
employed as a junior when I first left university.
Which meant I was in serious trouble.
All I remember from 1991 is that my hair
was still permed to within an inch of its life in a tragic attempt to imitate Julia
Roberts in Pretty Woman.
So I stumbled around, trying to remember
dates and employers as Larry painstakingly wrote them all down.
I’ve had two distinct phases in my career.
I worked for about a decade in the media and then another decade in PR.
Some jobs went for a long time. I had 4
years with one employer and 4.5 with another. Others were consultant or
contract roles for a limited period of time. Some jobs stretched for two years.
To be honest, I’ve never had to justify my
working life to anyone before because my reputation is really strong. I’ve
rarely had to hand over a CV.
I was only seeing Larry because he
approached me. I’d checked out the employer he was talking about and the role
seemed dull, but I was prepared to talk to him.
What I didn’t expect was to have to justify
my existence to a man who clearly knew nothing about my background. I even had
to explain a 3- month working holiday in the UK in 1994.
In the end, he said ‘I’m going to have a difficult time describing you to my client’. Then I finally snapped.
I said: ‘Look, I’m not going to beg you for
this job. I already checked it out and I was ready for you to try to convince
me, not the other way around.’
Larry backtracked quickly, but it was very
apparent he was never going to place me with a client.
Here are some of my theories on why.
- I’m a multi-dimensional peg who is difficult to fit into a round hole. I can do nearly any job that I’m thrown into but I haven’t concentrated on one field. Recruitment agents are employed to find a round peg that will fit seamlessly into a round hole.
- I am a vocational strumpet. I have moved around. I’ve been coveted by others and successfully seduced. I’ve flicked employers when life became miserable and found employers who appreciated me.
- I’ve reproduced, which makes me a liability. Like many of my friends, I walk into an interview, apologise for having children, sheepishly ask about flexibility and instantly downgrade my pay expectations.
- I’m divorced. I know this is strange, but I swear if I’d been wearing a wedding ring and glowingly talking about my supportive husband, it would have made a difference. I’m going to wear my Nanna’s ring next time and glow. It’s important to look stable and constant.
- Larry just didn’t ‘get me’ nor what I actually do. He even said I talked too much (true, I fear).
I came out of Larry’s office badly shaken.
Could I really be this worthless? Am I just hopeless at my job and no one has
had the courage to tell me?
Then I turned on my phone. There were
messages from three major broadsheet newspapers, a certain flagship programme
on a certain national broadcaster, and two significant radio stations – all
about a story I had been promoting that morning. I know I’m good at my job.
It’s been tricky to write this, because I
am certainly very critical of myself and I keep imagining what people might say
about this post. So be gentle!
The Larry experience has been sobering, but
I’ve decided to look at it as a positive.
I clearly have things to learn. I now realise that I may be good at what
I do, but perhaps my CV needs to tell a more seamless story so that someone who
has never heard of me still understands my background.
No comments:
Post a Comment