My blog

Tag: Job Hunting

  • Chloe Ward: the publishing sector is now the preserve of a ‘privileged few’

    Chloe Ward: the publishing sector is now the preserve of a ‘privileged few’

    Chloe Ward

    The publishing industry is crucial to society. It gives us new perspectives, encouraging much-needed understanding of the world around us. The content being published has the power to change perspectives and narratives in real life. However, what the industry publishes is a reflection on who is purchasing that content. 

    Currently, the core audience for publishers in the UK is white and middle-class. The whole industry is essentially set up to cater to this one particular audience.

    Being mixed-raced means subjects or content in contemporary publishing that relate to my own lived experience feel few and far between.   

    I have always loved books and stories, finding it easy to be whisked away by dragons or follow heroes into battle. However, it has always felt to me like someone else’s adventure, someone else’s journey. To this day the content I consume, though wonderful, has very little to do with me or the cultures I am familiar with.

    When I started studying publishing at university, it was originally because I wanted to be the one to discover stories like those I’d loved before first-hand. However, throughout my studies, it became clear that this lack of diversity in both industry staffing and output was an issue – and not just my issue, but an issue for publishing as a whole. How much of an audience is this current industry reaching? I knew I wanted to make a change for others like me. 

    When I handed in my dissertation and final major project back in May 2020, despite the global pandemic raging on, I entered the real world with a sense of naivete about how easy finding a job would be.

    At any given time, it is difficult to get a toe in the door of the publishing industry due to its competitiveness. One role at a Big Five publisher can have over 1,000 applicants. But what made it worse was that during the uncertainty of the pandemic no one was hiring.

    I became frantic, spending hours writing and re-writing my CV. Cover letter after cover letter. Adhering to the advice of tutors to just keep on trying… and trying. Tailoring everything for each new role. Endless optimism…only to find hundreds of job rejections in my email.

    It is evident that publishing companies have put some useful initiatives in place for potential graduates, however if the industry wants to transform and diversify, it needs to make far greater and more fundamental changes. Putting more support in place for potential graduate employees is a must. Having a BAME internship available is all well and good, but when only 13%[1]of the workforce identifies as minority ethnic, this leaves a lot to be desired. The goal should be recruiting in a balanced way from all backgrounds, reflecting the demographics of real-life, to prevent gatekeeping of our published output becoming the preserve of a privileged few.

    More needs to be done by the industry once the pandemic is over to ensure that minority groups have a chance to gain employment and in turn make the change needed for a more diverse workforce. It is our job as the young voice driving the next generation to find these solutions and drive for them to be implemented; I have so many ideas and such a thirst to get going – what a difference we can make for our future. I’m excited to see the view from the other side.

    The writer is a graduate, seeking her first job in publishing

    [1]https://www.publishers.org.uk/publications/diversity-survey-of-the-publishing-workforce-2019/#:~:text=13.0%25%20of%20respondents%20identified%20as,yet%20reached%20the%2015%25%20target.

  • Diary of a pandemic job-hunt

    Diary of a pandemic job-hunt

    Georgia Heneage left university in 2020 with the plan to become a journalist but is already widening her horizons 

    Leaving school or university and stepping into the category of the unemployed is daunting at best, terrifying at worst. As a generation born into a consumerist, perhaps even individualist society, we have been engineered to believe that our identities are irrevocably tied up in our career prospects: simply, we are led to believe that what we ‘do’ with our lives is central. 

    To some extent, that’s true. Jenni Russell recently wrote in a Times article: “Work is how society allocates so much of what we seek: money, status, social networks, mental challenges, companionship, prospects, marriageability, hope.” It’s hard to argue with that.  

    “Journalism – and print journalism, in particular – was a volatile and constantly shifting industry even before the pandemic.”

    But placing our work life on a pedestal can be damaging to the process of finding a job in the first place. There is overwhelming pressure on young people to achieve great things early on in their career and to hit upon the ‘perfect’ job straight away. This pressure can be stultifying, and creates an atmosphere of dog-eat-dog competitiveness which can hit hard as you enter the jobs market.  

    This has certainly been my experience as a postgraduate seeking an entry-level job in journalism: even at higher levels, it’s a ruthless and merciless industry, as seasoned journalists remind me all too often. As a graduate, that’s especially so.  

    Journalism – and print journalism, in particular – was a volatile and constantly shifting industry even before the pandemic. Now, newspapers are hardly hiring at all, and the few roles advertised are fiercely competitive.  

    That means that more and more journalists are forced to go freelance and accept a paycheck that is reliant on the next available commission. Much of the advice that I’ve been given has focused on freelancing, a process which can be demoralising and difficult for a little-known journalist finding her feet in the Grub Street world of the press.  

    The best advice that I have received so far has been to relax and remember that most careers are not a linear path to success, and that the concept of a ‘job ladder’ is a myth. 

    The direction of my career has altered slightly as a result, and I am now seeking the safety of a stable job and income. Having taken a moment of self-reflection, I realised that my knack for writing and researching and my interest in the big ideas shaping our world could land me a job which had similar characteristics to journalism, but which didn’t have to be confined to the industry. 

    I have now pooled my skills, values and motivations, and decided to broaden my job search to include the media as a whole and the publishing industry, which has resulted in my first interview with the How To Academy, an organisation which hosts talks and debates from some of the most influential speakers in the world. 

    The best advice that I have received so far has been to relax and remember that most careers are not a linear path to success, and that the concept of a ‘job ladder’ is a myth. Careers are twisting, fickle journeys, with unexpected bumps along the way which, once you’ve traversed them, come to look necessary in retrospect. Imagining my future in this way is liberating. It loosens societal expectations to dive head-first into the ideal job, and opens up the possibility of finding jobs which may not have been immediately appealing. 

    If I look at the data, I realise the scale of my challenge. The Office for Budget Responsibility reckons that unemployment more than doubled in 2020, and that 3.5 million are now affected. For young people entering the jobs market, this is disastrous. High levels of redundancy continue to mean that graduate-level or school-level jobseekers are now competing with a pool of skilled workers with years of experience and expertise under their belts.  

    It’s true that there are silver linings. For instance, the global transition to a remote-working culture and the development of the ‘gig economy’ may be what the future of white-collar working in a post-pandemic world looks like, and may provide more opportunities for those without work. Research has tended to find that working from home can have a significant positive impact on workers’ mental health and well-being, which in itself can improve productivity. A paper published in 2017 in the American Economic Review found that workers were even willing to take an 8 per cent pay cut to work from home.  

    But frankly, I find that cold consolation. The prospect of not going into an office every day strikes me as unnerving. The routine of commuting and mixing regularly with colleagues is attractive to me, and I don’t want to miss out through no fault of my own.  

    It has also been argued that the pandemic, for all its setbacks, presents an opportunity to rewire the world of work. Though this may be true for seasoned white-collar workers, at what cost does this come for those uneasy newcomers entering the workplace for the first time? 

    Georgia Heneage is an Oxford postgraduate and freelance journalist 

  • Desperate measures: how to get noticed in a crowded job market

    Desperate measures: how to get noticed in a crowded job market

    Georgia Heneage 

    If you scour the internet for ways to get yourself noticed, you’ll likely land upon generic advice about pumping up your CV, calling recruiters or improving your skill sets. 

    But the fiercer the competition, the greater the need to stand out. And sometimes, these are just not enough.  

    It turns out that’s especially so during global pandemics. The arrival of coronavirus has caused economic woe such as we’ve not seen since the Great Depression. Increasingly, employers are looking for that bit extra in their candidates. But what’s heartening is that there is an increasing number of instances where employees are providing just that. 

    Trevor Walford, a 63 year-old former butler for the royal family, had been working on a cruise ship when he was let go of following the first lockdown in March. In order to find a new job, he sent out over 700 applications. Having had no luck, he came up with the idea of standing outside the railway station in Leeds with a cardboard placard advertising that he was looking for a job. It worked. He was picked up by the executive of a restaurant group, and is now working as its training and development manager. 

    While the story of Walford is heartwarming, it’s also a sad reminder of just how competitive the job market has become. The explosion of the internet and social media has made it especially hard to stand out, and competition for entry-level jobs in particular has swelled alarmingly.  

    Amber Shrimpton, an HR consultant at Centrica energy, sees the trend of job-seeking stunts as part of a wider socio-economic context. The current economic situation, she explains, has engendered a ‘loose labour market’ where there are more people looking for jobs than employers offering them. She points out that there is a high number of applicants with university and other qualifications, meaning that jobseekers have more need to distinguish themselves. 

    “It’s the jobseekers who needs to make themselves more attractive,” Shrimpton tells Finito World. “My work in talent resourcing has shown that when you have 500 applications which look the same, having something which stands out is probably going to work in your favour.” 

    So is this trend born of desperation? “More and more jobseekers feel they have to do that extra”, continues Shrimpton. “It’s not okay anymore to just have a good degree. There has to be something else, and that’s the impetus behind it.” 

    Like marriage proposals, many eager and frustrated job seekers have resorted to unusual means of public advertisements. Liz Hickok strung up fairy lights to spell out ‘My wish- HR job’ and her LinkedIn handle, which landed her four interviews; Pasha Stocking used a billboard plastered “Hire me!: Unemployed and Seeking Employment” which gained her the media coverage to start her own PR company (which ironically specialised in helping people rent billboards). There was also high-school student Josh Butler who auctioned himself on eBay. His post went viral, landing him several interviews. He is now a successful city broker in London.  

    Even more creative examples might be cited. Lithuanian marketer Luka Yla found a job in his new home of San Francisco by dressing up as a courier to deliver a box of doughnuts to the companies he admired. The boxes carried the following inscription on the inside: “Most resumes end up in the trash. Mine—in your belly.” And, after writing a three-minute music video in place of a CV and cover letter, Alec Biedrzycki got his dream job at a marketing agency. 

    These success stories suggest that unusual methods of jobseeking may be the way forward for the millions currently facing unemployment. It might just be a question of changing one’s attitude towards what has become, in most industries, a deeply standardised and homogeneous application process.  

    When Lucy Martin, a 23 year-old graphic designer from London, first started searching for a job, she fell victim to this relentless process.  

    “I was at a point last summer when I was applying to so many jobs that I was becoming a number in the application process,” she said. “You just see thousands of people who are applying for the same job. I knew I just needed to get noticed in some way.”  

    This desire to stand out led Martin to pull a stunt in her application to the highly competitive advertising firm Saatchi & Saatchi.  

    Having got through to the second round of the application process, Martin was given a brief to come up with a design solution to the slogan “nothing is impossible” and told that she’d be notified if she’d been “picked”. Martin decided to take the second point quite literally. As well as fulfilling the brief, she headed down to her local sweet shop, bought a bag of pick ‘n mix, personalised some love hearts with her name on them, stuck a note inside saying “I hope you pick me”, and sent it on to the CEO of Saatchi. 

    “The concept was that he had no other option than to pick me- there was no one else in the bag apart from me,” says Martin, who got through to the next round and then finally got the job. “They really liked it. They thought it was really awesome” she added. 

    Part of Martin’s creative ingenuity came from her graphic design course at Edinburgh, where her tutors encouraged her to do “ridiculous things” to get noticed, and to “think outside the box”.  

    “I did this art installation where I froze flowers in ice cubes, and my tutor said I should go and give them to every single person I wanted to work for. There’s such a sense of urgency, because you’ve got a melting ice cube in front of you,” says Martin. “With any job, sending something physical is really effective, even if it’s not a creative job.” 

    It might seem like creative industries are better equipped (or more likely to be impressed by) such stunts. But across the job spectrum, people are finding they are having to think creatively when it comes to job applications.  

    Last year, Jack Nugee was working on an application – one of hundreds he’d produced that month – while listening to a cricket podcast. He decided to go off-piste and write his cover letter as a narration of an Ashes innings by Jack Leach innings, which had then acquired a kind of cult status, particularly in the cricketing world. 

    “I thought it would be interesting to try and relate my job experience to cricket, which I’m really interested in,” says Nugee. In an ‘Ode to Jack Leach’ he wrote: ‘I ask you to please engage your imagination as I attempt to equate myself to the English spin bowler Jack Leach’s innings in Headingly, highlighting, through his actions, the skillset at my disposal that align me perfectly for the account executive position.’ 

    In response to the letter, the employer said she wanted to speak to someone “weird enough to write a full page on a cricket innings, even though she’d never watched cricket in her life,” says Nugee. “She said it was the kind of thing they were looking for.” Having had no advertising experience at all, Nugee got to the final two and says “they were going purely off character based on the application.” 

    Though he didn’t get the job, Nugee’s current position was won through writing a similarly off-beat poem which begins; ‘I would like to apply for the role of Account Executive sat in the account management team/ You will find this application has a rhyming theme.’ 

    Though the need to be outlandish is more apparent now than ever, standing out doesn’t have to entail an eccentric application. It can come in the form of being proactive and presenting yourself to the bitter outside world.   

    Tibi Hodgson, a 23 year-old fashion stylist from London, never went to university and the sense that she lacked the right qualifications meant that she lacked confidence when first embarking on her job hunt.  

    Having had no experience in styling and facing rejection after rejection, Hodgson decided to contact someone she admired in the industry directly. “I said I felt an innate connection to her work and I could work for her at the drop of a hat.”  

    Hodgson says she didn’t know any of the “lingo” around styling and was launched straight into the deep end. She learnt the process just through doing it, and was soon styling high-end models like Adowa Aboah and Suki Waterhouse. 

    After her employer left for the US and Hodgson began working in a gallery, she kept an eye on her old job. “I was still being kept on the email loop and I noticed that some dresses and shoes hadn’t been returned properly,” says Hodgson. “So I volunteered to go pick them up myself. After that I just began going to different shops in Mayfair after work and seeing if there were items she needed to return, without her asking me to.” 

    Hodgson says that through doing this she made her own contacts in the industry, and this has led to other jobs. Now a seasoned stylist, Hodgson is a case in point that experience, qualifications and traditional means of job searching aren’t necessarily the be-all and end-all.  

    “I feel like with these unconventional ways it’s all about luck and for luck to happen you need exposure. So the more ways you can expose yourself, the better,” she says.  

    And, of course, the need to be outlandish applies not just to those seeking a job. The emergence of a gig economy and the sheer number of freelancers competing against each other is ensuring that freelance workers need to find alternate means to stand out from the crowd as well. 

    Rahoul Baruah, a freelance software developer from Leeds, was at a meet-up social with some fellow workers when he met a guy called Jamie who was “sort of famous in our world”. 

    Chatting over some beers, Jamie seemed excited because he’d just set up this agency called ‘Made in London’. The next day, “just for a laugh”, Baruah decided to set up a spoof of his website called ‘Maid in London’, featuring a picture of a barmaid with Jamie’s face and a link to the real company’s website. 

    The prank website ended up getting Jamie’s original company loads of business, and three months later Baruah was offered a year-long contract from them. 

    “I basically got a year’s work- which was really good pay- from just putting up a prank website,” says Baruah. “Me and my group of friends have always said that to stand out you’ve got to do stupid stuff.” 

    These stories all show that difficult economic circumstances can be traversed by imagination. You don’t always need to get noticed via outlandish means: it’s about putting yourself out there – whether that’s via personalised love-hearts, a cricket match for a cover letter or, like Baruah, just taking the time to show up. It’s about being bold and fearless in the face of the unknown.  

    “If you want something so badly, you have to make sure you respect it more than the next person,” says Hodgson. “You have to be that person who goes that extra mile.”