Job Hunting Tips for The Recessionista

Been hit by the ugly stick of the recession? Walking version of Woolworths? A recent Guardian article suggests that women may be the real victims of the recession, so it’s time to prepare yourself for the re-entering the world of work… Here’s how!

De-Latte yourself

Make an (honest) list of your outgoings. When you’re employed it’s easy to gloss over your statements and pass off those £60 Saturday night withdrawals as “I needed a good night out” and the £20 lunch dates with friends as “I was cheering her up, she’d temporarily lost her Filofax…” but seriously, now you have no income, you need to get all those expensive coffees, taxis and nights out in check. Did you ever wear your poncho? No? Then you will not get any use out of that playsuit. Step away from the credit card.

All Change!

If you’ve accepted the pay-drop reality, this is probably a great time to start the career change you’ve been thinking about… If you’ve always worked as a legal secretary but spend every weekend at the theatre, make the pay drop work for you and apply for assistant roles in a box office or production company. Your high-end skills will be valued as transferable, and you can start doing something you love rather than something that generates more than just new clothes, a pair of Jimmy Choos or a killer hangover.

Be Flexible

Unfortunately, this is an employer’s market. So if your salary has been steadily increasing over the last five years, it’s unlikely that this will continue for the foreseeable future. If you were on 25-30K, expect anything up to a five grand pay drop for a role that you were previously employed in.

Your New Best Enemy – The Recruitment Consultant

Recruitment people get a bad rep for ignoring candidates, pressurizing desperate people into jobs they’re overqualified for and then going AWOL after you’ve spent two hours writing a covering letter.

This reputation is entirely justified - they are all of these things and worse. However, used with a bit of savvy, recruitment consultants can be entirely useful to your job search. Help yourself out by using mass job search engines such as totaljobs.com and guardianjobs.com and banging your CV out to a few ideal jobs. The agencies will then be able to see that you’re easily matched up to their vacancies and are more likely to have you in mind when things come up.

Self-Promotion

It’s likely that this will be the first time you’ve updated your CV in a fair few months, even years. Sites like www.alec.co.uk give some helpful tips but the key is not to let it get too generic. Employers will receive anything up to ten times the amount of CVs for roles than this time last year and it’s up to you to make yours stand out. Any volunteering or even helping out at a friend’s promotional event counts as interesting and relevant experience and will add to the usual skills gained during your previous role. Now you’ve got time on your hands, use it to brush up on your Excel or PowerPoint skills. It may be as painful as watching repeats of Will and Grace on Living, but knowing your Macros from your macaroni does give you the edge in a lot of job roles.

The most important thing is, don't let it get you down. With the UK unemployment figures set to reach two million at last count, loads of other savvy, intelligent people who were great at their jobs are in exactly the same boat as you. Keep the temptation to watch daytime TV and surf Facebook down, and the motivation and persistence up. There's an employment prince at the end of the tunnel; you'll just have to (metaphorically) kiss a lot of recruitment consultant frogs to get there…