A change of direction...different routes to a job

photo credit: Valerie Everett via photopin cc

                                      


If you are registered with the UK job centre, you will be familiar with a Job seekers agreement, of the things you are going to do each week to look for a job, and the book that a claimant has to fill in with details of their job seeking activity, which is then inspected and signed by a Job centre adviser.If the adviser is not satisfied that you have met the job seekers agreement then your benefits will be sanctioned....ie stopped. Other countries operate a similar system .

The agreement  of acceptable actions to find a job is not limited to sending off your CV to jobs advertised on job site banks such as Total jobs and Monster. 
Indeed it is said that this is actually one of the most inefficient ways to find a job, especially for the older job hunter. I have fired off my CV to countless jobs, many of which have a software  counter which tells you how many applicants there have been.....463 is not unusual. The majority of these CV's an employer receives will never be seen let alone read. Increasingly software is used which scans the Cv's for the required keywords for the advertised job.

Even a jobcentre adviser has admitted to me that for each job I apply for there are hundreds of applicants ahead of me .

There may well be certain aspects of an  older jobseekers application which will immediately rule them out in an on line application. An example of this is that usually there are questions to fill in along with pressing the button which uploads and sends your CV and one of these questions is to ask your age . It is actually illegal but job boards get away with it by putting it in the data monitoring section, claiming it is for their statistics.

There are additional job hunting techniques which may be more effective for the older job seeker and indeed should be attempted in any case in order to have the best chance of meeting the Job seekers agreement.Years ago, before the Internet  many job seekers found their jobs in the local or national newspaper and although certain newspapers now carry far fewer jobs than they might have done years ago, many , especially smaller businesses choose to recruit using this method.Also. because the application often involves the personal contact of a telephone call or sending your CV to the email address of a company directly , there is much more chance that your application will be noticed.

However, what happens if on a very limited income the newspaper has been the first victim of your budget. The weekly local paper is often delivered free  but other  daily newspapers are not cheap. Even the job clubs I have attended are I notice, taking delivery of fewer papers than they used to.However, there is a way to read the papers for free on line. They may not be the full version that you would buy at the newsagents, but often still feature a jobs section and even a facility to upload a CV to a jobs bank.

Some of the best sites where you can access online newspapers are:

 http://www.thebigproject.co.uk/news/#.UbYw-diwV5D

 http://www.onlinenewspapers.com/englanda-k.htm
This one allows you to easily search UK regional papers  by A-Z plus many worldwide issues.

 http://www.ipl.org/IPLBrowse/GetSubject?vid=11&cid=5&tid=8698&parent=7658

 http://www.thepaperboy.com/england/newspapers/country.cfm

 http://www.wrx.zen.co.uk/alltnews.htm

And  ....the London daily freebie... http://metro.co.uk/


Valerie