Job searching on the internet

Another coffee at my side, I switched on the laptop and waited for Google to load. I typed in 'job vacancies' and was rewarded with 52.9 million results in 0.14 seconds.

There at the top of page 1 were Totaljobs, Monster and Fish4jobs. They seemed a reasonable place to start so I set about filling in the search criteria. It soon became apparent that most vacancies are replicated on all the sites and that it was easy to get bogged down trying to filter through them so I decided to register my CV with them all but focus on using one site as my main search. The key thing it did give me was the names and contacts of all the agencies for me to approach.

I struggled to find where companies advertised their vacancies direct, surely not everyone uses agencies these days, the fees can be quite limiting for some firms. By the end of the day my CV had been submitted for a variety of vacancies and in general I had received an email reply saying 'thankyou but no thankyou'.

This soon became a worry as I was more than capable of doing any of the jobs I was applying for. I needed to know what was causing the constant flow of 'no thank yous'.

I started to ring a number of the agencies and discovered it was my lack of qualifications and specific job experience. With the number of people looking for work, the agencies were telling me, the companies were getting very picky about the experience they were looking for and with so many qualified people job hunting they were tending to be more focused on the qualification than the fact that someone has worked in the industry for over 25 years.

OK. I had a new barrier to getting back into work - in my view the agency staff were so blinkered in their recruitment method they were now a barrier to me getting back into work. That was a big worry now that it had become apparent that agencies were controlling the way the vacancies are filled.

My best way to find a job was for a firm to see how good I was, I needed to get through the door. I decided I needed to get some temporary work sorted out as soon as possible.

I rang a number of agencies and by the end of the day I had appointments to see several scattered within a 10 mile radius of home. Over the next 3 days I drove in all directions but felt I had made some good contacts who understood me better than they did from reading my CV. Once more my hopes were raised.

While I waited for the phone to ring I set about making use of one very strong piece of advice I had received. I needed to alter my CV big time. The content was too strong and was putting me out of consideration for most of the jobs I was applying for. People couldn't seem to grasp that although I had previously worked at a senior level, I didn't want to go back into the job market at that level. I needed to delete huge chunks from my CV and have a number of different CV's to suit different roles.

In the middle of doing all this editing and re-writing the phone rang. One of the agencies had an interview lined up for me for a 3 week temporary assignment - was I interested?

Too right I was interested. If nothing else, it would give me some interview practice. I hadn't been for a job interview in over 20 years. Having found out how much looking for a job had changed I was now quite sure that everything else about the process would have changed too.

Tomorrow I would find out!