The Job Search in 2020
This Job Search is unlike anything you’ve ever seen before and hopefully will never see again.
Each day all over the UK, there are millions of people trying to get started with the concept of a brand-new Job Search, when there are quite frankly just not enough jobs to go around.
A Job Search at the best of times is hard, it’s never an enjoyable experience – for years it’s been a necessary evil for many people, but this time around with so much riding on it, it’s may even feel like an impossible task.
Job Boards aren’t helping, and Recruitment Agencies are pretty much a redundant resource. Why? Because the agencies don’t have any job vacancies, and a job board with no jobs is as much use as a chocolate fireguard.
As the days turn into weeks, and the weeks turn into months the motivation begins to dwindle and resentment, anger, sadness, anxiety and exhaustion begins to set in.
It’s easy to feel that this is pointless.
I want to tell you a secret, though.
This is not your fault.
None of it.
Being unemployed, getting nowhere in your job search, being rejected, being ignored, not wanting to try again and feeling anger and bitterness toward the situation.
It’s NOT your fault.
The market is failing you. It was never designed to support this level of job search activity.
People, businesses, HR teams, business owners, recruitment agencies and job boards are all lost. Nobody knows how this situation will pan out, or indeed what to do to make it better.
Uncertainty is rife and everyone is suffering. But suffering with a job is a lot, lot better than suffering without a job.
That suffering is evident for many in their job search BUT we want to help. We want to be a friend at a time in need.
The Great British Job Search is different.
We started out on this journey as recruiters and as far as it goes, we were quite good at recruitment. But recruitment is very much a one to one type relationship, and our job has always involved helping one person at a time.
Fast forward to 2020 and recruitment, like almost everything else in our lives, has changed and helping one person at a time is no longer enough. Helping one person at a time isn’t going to make a difference and spending time with people to understand their ambitions, hopes, fears and desires isn’t going to help either. Especially when the only hope and ambition you have is to FIND A JOB.
We had to do more. A lot more.
Headline after headline tells you the story you don’t want to read. Unemployment is already at terrifying highs and it is absolutely going to get worse. The employment market is changing in front of our very eyes and most people don’t know how to react. They don’t know what to do. They are lost.
They are, in many senses, on their completely on their own.
Families, relationships, mental and physical health will start to erode. An inability to do something that so many of us used to take for granted, is keeping us awake at night worrying.
Without a job or work our ability to ‘live’ and ‘function’ is held back at best and destroyed at worse.
So, the normal reaction or the easy answer is to grab your CV, sit down at a computer, hit some job sites and begin your job search.
Until now.
There are no jobs. Correction, there are jobs, but they aren’t on job boards and the ones that you can find are not what you’re looking for. They’re specialist, they’re unique, they are, for the moment at least, roles that will bring in income, help businesses survive, maximise restructures, or deal with problems.
Normal recruitment is on hold.
But enough of this doom and gloom of what your job search isn’t. Lets instead turn our focus to what we can do. What can be achieved.
Welcome to the Great British Job Search
The job landscape has changed, so the search needs to change with it.
GBJS is here to help you, here to support you, here to inspire you, here to educate you and here to motivate you.
GBJS has been created to be the friend you need right now. You are not on your own. You are not the only one suffering and community is the best way out of this situation.
As part of our activity, we are going to leave no stone unturned to help you change this.
Working across the obvious topics like CV creation, job boards, and how and when to apply, to the not so obvious ones like mindset, resilience and strategy.
We’ve been working on plans to show up every single day and share with you the tips we’re learning from world-leading experts, advice on news and reports, and weekly ‘Ask a Recruiter’ sessions – something we’ve been busy practising.
And the good news is we’re already seeing results from our work, with real people who have embarked on their job search during the 2020 lockdown. We’ve helped people find job vacancies that weren’t listed (more on that later), we’ve helped prepare them for interviews and (drum roll please) we’ve helped a number of people find jobs, even when they thought there was no hope.
I will tell you now that this is NOT easy. It’s not like anything we’ve ever done before and it’s like no other job search you’ve run before.
What is different about this Job Search?
At the start of the COVID lockdown we predicted that with so much available talent in almost every vertical market, that recruitment agencies would themselves face redundancy and this has been confirmed in a recent report from Hays, one of the World’s biggest recruitment agencies that have warned of a drastic cut in profits: Hayes announcement.
As the world, markets and people continue to adjust to these unprecedented times, we’re beginning to see new trends and some of these will make the challenge of running your job search even more difficult. One of the most challenging is that jobs are not being made visible – this means they’re not appearing online, they’re not on job boards or company career sites – so unless you’re ‘in the know’ you may struggle to even find the jobs.
But worry not, we’ve got this type of thing covered. In fact, this type of thing is EXACTLY the reason we’re here doing what we’re doing.
So, who are we?
A husband and wife team, we’ve worked together for nearly 20 years and have worked in one-off type recruitment. We’re lucky that we’ve done some crazy recruitment over the years and we’ve helped transformed many a job search in our time too.
We’ve recruited for Billionaires, house-hold names, CEOs, Global Investment banks, Luxury brands, fashion icons and many others in between.
The one thing that is always part of our work is that the role is always unique. The people who are part of the job search have one chance at success. The roles are not always six figure jobs, they’re sometimes entry level roles but they are ALWAYS unique.
Get it right, it could be a career-defining moment. Get it wrong, and your chance is gone.
So, we go ALL in. Every single time. We have to, to do our job, to serve the people we work with, we put everything in to help each person stand the very best chance they have of getting the job that they want.
And then 2020 came along, and two people who spent most of their working lives working under the radar suddenly had skills that people need.
Skills YOU need.
Because in 2019 you may have had a ‘practice’ interview. You may have one that didn’t quite go as well as you’d have hoped because you were a bit ‘rusty’ but in 2019 that was OK because if you were good (within your industry and job type) there could be 2, 3, 4 or even 5 other interviews to go on.
But not now.
Find one job that you can get an interview for then you’re already winning.
But in recruitment, there is a harsh reality.
Success and Failure are sides of a coin – success is ‘Getting the job’, failure is being told no thank you, and in 2020 not getting the job when you’re in a recruitment process is a hard failure to take.
Getting close. Getting to the start line is an achievement.
But you don’t want an achievement. You want a job.
We’re here to help.
When you get that one opening, that one opportunity, we want you to have the VERY best chance of getting the job.
We’re here to help you nail this job search.
Ready to get started? Join our community today.