Rolling Through

Over my “working” life, I’ve accumulated an astounding amount of experience as a job seeker.  As a person with a disability, finding work has always been challenging – even more so when I stopped negotiating the world on crutches and started using a wheelchair.  I’ve had long .and frustrating periods of un- and underemployment.

When Australia started proclaiming a jobs boom as we emerged from COVID lockdowns, the news was full of employers complaining about how difficult it was to find workers.  

I was unemployed (again). 

I expected my Disability Employment Service to contact me in an effort to fill the ever-growing list of vacancies I presumed they were being presented with. 

That didn’t happen. 

When they next called to confirm that I was meeting my compulsory mutual obligations by applying for the required number of jobs, I reminded them that I was quite interested in gaining employment and asked whether they had any suitable vacancies.

In response to my prompt, they put me in touch with a recruiter, who was looking for someone to help her find suitable candidates to meet the needs of employers. 

After a few conversations, that became my next job. 

So my first tip is..

1. Ask the people who are (supposed to be) there to help

If you have an employment provider, ask them whether they have any suitable vacancies. 

Disappointingly, employment providers often settle into a routine as “compliance police”, checking that you are applying for the requisite number of jobs each fortnight and ignoring their responsibility to help you into employment.

I’ll admit that over the years, employment providers have, in fact, placed me in a few jobs.  I’ve found others myself.

It’s the months, sometimes stretching to years, I’ve spent between jobs that make me consider a government funded employment service an unlikely place to find a job. 

If they were really “employment providers” (as they are euphemistically called), finding work through them would be much more routine.   In truth, it happens occasionally, but it does happen. 

If you’re the client of an employment service in Australia, don’t expect much in the way of support.  Most of the employment consultants I’ve had are primarily “compliance police” and have little to offer in terms of useful career support.

But it is still their job to help job seekers into employment, so it’s worth suggesting every so often that they might actually do that.  Just sometimes, it works.

2. LinkedIn is a great place to network – and you never know who you might connect with

In my new job as a recruitment resourcer, I spent hour after hour after hour scouring LinkedIn, looking for suitable candidates to fill positions. 

As I trawled through LinkedIn, I discovered that sometimes people used it to promote ideas, like disability inclusion, and to build community. 

My job was remote, so I had little chance to connect with co-workers. 

I used LinkedIn to connect to other workers in my industry, and other disability activists, both in Australia and overseas.  I was able to connect with some people in high positions and others lower down the food chain. 

I learned what was happening for disabled people in other countries, met other disabled workers, other recruiters and, yes, even other disabled recruiters!  It helped me not to feel alone as I tapped away on the computer in my living room.

Occasionally, I would contribute to a conversation, and that led to more connections. 

In one conversation, I stumbled across a friend I had studied at university with years ago.  That eventually led me to the new job I’m in now – a fabulous outcome, initiated by reaching out to connect with a few new people!

I also learned that you can ask almost anyone to connect with you on LinkedIn and they rarely say “no”. 

If there is a particular company you’d like to work at, types of work you’d like to learn more about or a passion others share there’s usually nothing to stop you from inviting people who might be of help to connect with you. 

You can explore a new area.  You might be able to engage in conversations with people you hope to work with someday – or learn what is important to employers in the industry you’re applying to. 

Networking on LinkedIn doesn’t come with any guarantees of what it will bring but I found more possibilities there than I expected.  

3. Experience as a job seeker is valued in a recruiter

One of the difficulties with being unemployed for a long time is that your experience gets distant and out of date.  Employers get nervous about employing you.  They can start to prefer others simply because you have had a long employment break. 

That’s not necessarily fair or reasonable but it’s true. 

Even the valuable experiences you practise as a job seeker – like attention to detail or the tailoring of an application to suit the needs of a particular employer can be difficult to sell because you don’t really want to say, “I’ve been looking for work for so long that I’ve become quite expert at writing applications”. 

When you work as a recruitment resourcer, you do need to be careful how you present your experience as a job seeker, but it turns out to be valuable experience relevant to the job you’re applying for.

Part of your role as a recruitment resourcer is to support candidates as they go through the recruitment process.  It is incredibly useful that you know what it feels like to be nervous before an interview, to be anxiously waiting for a response or to have an employer come back to you with “just a few more questions”. 

People really appreciated the support and empathy I offered to them in these difficult parts of the recruitment process.  I could offer it because I’ve been through it so often myself.

4. It’s not a big deal to call a recruiter and ask for more information

As a wheelchair user, I used to hate positions advertised by recruitment agencies.  I like to know whether I can get to a business by public transport and whether I can access the building – which you can sometimes see by looking on Google Maps. 

I also like to know who I’m applying to because there are some companies I know I really don’t want to work for.  Recruitment companies are not upfront with that information and it used to make me feel put on the back foot.  I didn’t feel comfortable about calling, then having to back out if they gave me the wrong answers.

The reason recruiters won’t tell you the name and location of their client up front is not because they want to make life difficult for candidates. It’s to ensure that if they are instrumental in helping someone get the job, the application goes through them and they get paid for the placement. 

That doesn’t stop them answering questions about access to public transport, travel times from your suburb and wheelchair access if that’s what you need to know as part of considering the job.  And they will tell you who the company is before they put your resume forward.

Calling a recruiter to ask for a bit of information about the job is not on par with calling the employer.  You still need to make a good impression but an initial conversation with a recruiter has a different power dynamic to one with a potential employer.

It’s true that a recruiter has a gatekeeper role if you apply for a position, but they are keen to hear from a range of candidates.   They need candidates not just for the role they are currently working on, but also for the ones they want to fill in the future. 

If you decide that a job you saw advertised is not for you, that’s OK because there’s still a chance they’ll talk to you about one that suits you better.  Saying  “no “ to the first one you saw doesn’t mean your options are closed.  Your first contact with a recruiter is more like a networking opportunity than a formal interview. 

You don’t even have to be responding to an ad to call and talk to them.

5. Recruiters can give you well-informed tips for success

Recruiters can give you valuable feedback on your resume. 

That can be hard to get when you spend day after day alone in front of your computer shooting off applications to employers who often don’t respond at all. 

I’d often heard that it was important to have a resume no more than two pages long. It was a relief to hear that while two pages is good, three pages is quite acceptable. 

More important than the length of your resume is whether it clearly communicates the relevant information.  I was surprised when I saw one person’s resume list their contact details in yellow.  I guess they thought it looked pretty, but it made it incredibly hard to read. 

Recruiters can give you their professional opinion on whether your resume is well put together.  They look at a lot of different resumes and are constantly speaking to different employers about what they’re looking for. 

The feedback they offer is likely to be helpful – so ask for it.

Recruiters can also give you tips on how to put your best foot forward. 

If you’ve ever been fired from a position or left a job that was less than ideal, you’re not alone.  Those things happen to a lot of people and the person who ends up out of a job is not always the source of the problem.  If you did stuff up, you need to learn your lesson and then find another chance.

A good recruiter can help you figure out how to get past that bump in your employment road and back on track.  They can help you practise talking about a difficult past experience in a way that does less damage to your prospects.  If there’s a sticky situation that’s likely to come up in an interview, you can ask for their advice on how to handle it.

6. Recruiters are employment match-makers

Recruiters are paid by employers to find workers who are the best fit for the positions on offer. 

When they’re talking to you as a candidate, they are genuinely interested in what your ideal job and what conditions allow you to perform at your best because they’ve got more than one position to fill. 

They want to help you find the job that suits you best  

If they make a good match with one job, the employer is more likely to hire them to fill the next one. 

Their approach is very different to employment providers, whose priority is to shove you into a job – any job.  It’s not surprising that many of those job placements don’t last. 

When you’re a recruiter, job placements that don’t last can be bad for business.

7. If you can do 80% of the job, it really is worth applying!

This is something I’d heard occasionally as a job seeker.  I was sceptical. But now that I’ve worked in recruitment, I’m convinced. 

As a job seeker who had sent off a massive number of applications without success, I eventually started to feel as if every other applicant had submitted an application that was better than mine. 

I now know, from experience, that wasn’t true.

As a recruiter I was surprised at the variation I saw in resumes.  I saw some that were very impressive and lived up to all the standards I aspired to in my own applications– well written and showing off the candidate’s relevant experience. 

I also saw resumes that were a more ordinary list of job responsibilities and quite a lot of LinkedIn profiles that told me nothing beyond a job title.  Those more ordinary efforts didn’t always miss out on an interview. 

It depended on who the competition was, what the employer was looking for and what information came out in an initial chat with a candidate about their suitability for the job.

I was also surprised to learn that employers aren’t always the experts I had assumed them to be.  As a job seeker, I used to read job ads assuming that employers know the job and know exactly what they’re looking for.  That’s not always true. 

Sometimes it took several conversations between my manager and the employer to get a clear understanding of the kind of person that would make a good candidate for a given position.  Those employers were benefiting from my manager’s many years in recruitment.

A lot of employers recruit their own staff, so they’re on their own.  Sure, you can expect them to be experts in their business but not necessarily in recruitment.  They may not be expert at putting together an ad that pinpoints all the important points about a job in an effective and attractive way. 

Skills can look more important in the job ad than they are in real life.  I once questioned an employer about a listed skill only to hear them wonder why it was included in the ad. 

There might be valuable things you can bring to the job that won’t register as important for the employer until you suggest them. 

If you can do 80% of the job and it’s reasonable to think you could learn the other 20%, it’s legitimate to apply.

Besides, if you go through a recruiter, you can get their thoughts on the 20% before you apply.

I stayed in recruitment for 11 months. 

I learned a lot that makes me a better job candidate (and employee). 

I gained the confidence and skills I needed to move from that job to the next WITHOUT another period of unemployment in between.  Hurrah! 

Recruitment didn’t turn out to be my dream job but it was a good experience and an important step along the way.  It was worth giving my employment provider a push.

If you’ve got way too much experience as a job seeker, I hope these tips help. 

You might want to consider becoming a recruitment resourcer, yourself. 

It could be just the opportunity you need.

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