The Contradictions of Jobhunting: My Year After Graduating.

I wanted to write a little something about the year I spent looking for a job after university. Although on the surface it might seem like an insignificant, purgatorial space filled mainly with back-to-back episodes of Breaking Bad and experimenting with fonts on my CV, I realised that it was actually a pretty enlightening time in which I learnt a lot of hard truths they don’t mention in those university career talks.

I hesitate to write this, because I’m desperately trying to avoid sounding like another one of those patronising, corporate articles plastered on graduate job websites about ‘How to write a cover letter’ or ‘How to research your employer’ or ‘How to appear relaxed and positive in an interview when you’re approaching your overdraft limit and your family think it’s your fault you haven’t got a job yet’. But they are practical at least, whereas my advice, I warn you, will be no more than a concoction of rambling and feigned wisdom. But, as a brilliant article in the Chicago Tribune once said: ‘Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.’ So I will write what I’ve learnt and what I believe, because it’s the kind of stuff I wish someone had told me when I was fresh out of university.

Firstly, being a graduate jobhunter is full of contradictions. The one that struck me the most was the exhausting façade of positivity that pervades every aspect of the job application process. It’s an absolute necessity to be enthusiastic and confident and so very, very passionate in your interviews, when in reality you’ve never felt more anxious and insecure in your entire life. Let’s face it, jobhunting is a tough and lonely time, where your self esteem is crushed, your financial situation is in peril and the palpable pressure from your family who assume you’re not trying hard enough and from your peers already in stable jobs only increases the longer you remain unemployed. On top of this, you’re trying to accept the fact that whilst all your hard work at uni was at least rewarded by good results, all your painstaking interview prep gets rewarded with nothing but a slap in the face and a return ticket to square one. So you’re feeling miserable, insecure and frustrated, and then you’re thrust into some stifling meeting room in front of two or three important-looking people with sympathetic eyes and furiously scribbling pens and told to smile and wow them with your passion and oh so positive attitude. Well, good luck with that.

I won’t pretend I’m an expert on creating a perfect positive mindset, but I think you have to become completely objective and believe that if you throw enough mud at the wall then some of it will stick. And this is really the only thing that will make you keep trying. After my first few rejections, no matter how much I tried to prepare myself for the worst, I couldn’t help but feel bitter, assume that something must be catastrophically wrong with me and resign myself to my inevitable Benefits Street future. But then when I plucked up the courage to ask for feedback, employers often came back with a response like ‘you were great but another candidate was a bit more enthusiastic’, or ‘you had all the qualities we were looking for but this candidate just had a bit more relevant experience’, which actually made me realise that a job wasn’t too far away and gave me a slight confidence boost. I then became so immune to rejections that I began to see every interview as a mere practice for the one after. And it was only when I started seeing things like this that I suddenly landed a job.

As unnatural as this positive attitude might seem for you in a pretty miserable situation, it is also really important to extend it to wherever you’re within earshot of potential employers and contacts. It’s the most tempting thing in the world to tweet a negative comment after you’ve been ignored or ‘unsuccessful’ yet again, but just be aware that industry contacts and future employers will probably be having a little nose on your profile. So even if you’re not feeling too positive, it’s crucial that you at least act like it. Remember: fake it til you make it.

The next contradiction is the fact that you’ve probably spent three years working ridiculously hard, passing assessments with flying colours, becoming a genius in your field, welling up with pride at how much you’ve achieved at your graduation and framing your degree feeling like you’re ready to take over the world, but a month later you find yourself competing with a thousand other applicants for the honour of making tea. My first TV job was as a Runner on The Valleys, and there was a moment, as I was changing bed sheets covered in vomit, when I had to stop and question how my dissertation on the politics of Keats’s poetry could have prepared me for this. The producers might be asking me to go on my third Starbucks run of the morning, but I was smiling like Nick Clegg himself had offered to pay off my student debt and telling them that it’s absolutely fine, I’ll get it sorted right away. You absolutely have to be humble and willing, because you’ll be the one who the bosses will appreciate the most, and you’ll be the one they’ll think of when a job becomes available on the next rung of the ladder.

Which brings me to my next contradiction: you are desperate for work, but sometimes you need to know when to say no. I have a rough idea of where I want to go with my career, and yet I felt a huge pressure to take anything and everything that was within my grasp, just to remove that huge ‘unemployed’ label that felt like was burned into my head. I very nearly took a six month admin job at a recruitment agency for this reason alone, and it wasn’t until the employer started asking me if this was really what I wanted to do before I admitted to myself that it was far from it, and declined the offer. Lo and behold, I did get a small TV job the week after, but it takes a lot of courage to have faith in yourself. Having said this, taking a job such as this might be a good way of getting some relevant experience and building some confidence if you’re really struggling, but it can be very difficult to distinguish the line between being grateful and being desperate. The writer Neil Gaiman gave an amazing speech on this predicament, and his ‘walking towards the mountain’ technique did help me during these times. He says it much better than I can so I’ll just put it here:

‘If you have an idea of what you want to make, what you were put here to do, then just go and do that. And that’s much harder than it sounds, and sometimes in the end so much easier than you might imagine, because normally there are things you have to do before you can get to the place you want to be. [. . .] Sometimes the way to do what you hope to do will be clear cut, and sometimes it will be almost impossible to decide whether or not you’re doing the correct thing because you’ll have to balance your goals and hopes with feeding yourself, paying debts, finding work, settling for what you can get. Something that worked for me was imagining that where I wanted to be, which was an author [. . . ] - imagining that was a mountain – a distant mountain: my goal. And I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain I’d be all right. And when I was truly not sure what to do I could stop and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain.’

You can see the full speech here – it’s truly brilliant.

So make the most of any opportunities, but always keep your goals at the front of your mind and set yourself a few boundaries so you don’t get too sidetracked. God knows that in this job market it’s extremely tempting to take any job whatsoever, but don’t sacrifice your happiness in the process.

I could go on with all the little details about thank-you emails and networking, but this can be found on a million websites as it is. I’ll just finish up with a couple of last points:

• Play the hand that you were dealt: make the most of every contact and every opportunity. When you feel like you’re on the verge of begging, you’re probably doing it right.
• Don’t give up: a bit cliché, but it’s so important to have faith in yourself because if you don’t, employers won’t either.
• If your feeling really depressed, stop and think about all the things you have managed to achieve that you’re probably overlooking. You did well to get that degree, to win that award, to get that work experience, to go travelling, to run that marathon – it’s so easy to focus on what you don’t have but make sure you make time to enjoy and feel proud of what you have done and achieved.
• Don’t panic, and don’t take things too seriously.
• Remember: 'freelance' is a great way of saying unemployed.

And one last thing - my English teacher gave me this poem on the last day of school and it's been stuck behind my desk ever since. It's helped me through all of uni and beyond, so I thought it might be worth putting it here too. 'If', by Rudyard Kipling:

I hope this post didn’t sound all doom and gloom, but I just thought a bit of honesty would be the most helpful thing. Sure, a job isn’t going to land on a plate for you and there won’t be any flashing sign telling you which path to take, but as long as you think smartly, act persistently, have a thick skin and a big (let’s face it, purely fictional) smile, you will get there, I promise.

This blog was inspired by Erica Buist’s 'How To Be Jobless' blog, which is brilliant. Give it a read if you feel like you could do with a laugh. 

Where the youth pined away with desire.

Ah! sunflower, weary of time,

Who countest the steps of the sun,

Seeking after that sweet golden clime

Where the traveller’s journey is done;

Where the youth pined away with desire,

And the pale virgin shrouded in snow,

Arise from their graves and aspire;

Where my sunflower wishes to go.

                                     - William Blake

This is a story about change. 

The above poem has always been one of my favourites. I first heard it a few years ago in school and liked it instantly, although I wasn’t sure why because I couldn’t understand it. On the surface it seemed to be nothing more than a few lines of pretty imagery, but there seemed to be something missing:  where is the traveller going? What is the youth pining for? Where does the sunflower wish to go? Everything in this poem seems to direct attention away from itself and point to something else… something else that didn’t exist.

A few years later, I suddenly realised that this absence is key theme of the poem. Everything reaches towards an impossible goal; an imaginary place of fulfilled dreams. The sunflower always faces the sun as it grows, seeking an eternal warmth and light that, in reality, it can never reach. The traveller is constantly seeking his destination, but his identity as a ‘traveller’ suggests that he will never rest. The youth desires some unobtainable goal whilst the ‘pale virgin’ offers a distant image of perfection and beauty that cannot last. I thought the poem was beautiful.  It was about ambition and always reaching for your goals without letting anything distract you from them. But the other day, as I was agonising over some minor aspect of my future for the seventeenth time, someone said something which made me stop and think: ‘sometimes you just have to live in the moment’.

Recently I’ve been worrying a lot about my future. All I’ve been focussed on is reaching after my ‘dream’ job rather than appreciating the one I have, thinking about building ‘contacts’ instead of socialising, obsessing about how I want to be perceived rather than accepting my own self.  Every time I take one step forward I’m looking ahead again, always staring into an unforeseeable abyss. I realised that I haven’t taken one moment to look around to enjoy what surrounds me and take notice of the goals I have achieved.

Now I see the poem differently. There is an air of tragedy in the poem as much as there is hope. The sunflower is ‘weary’ and wastes time by continually striving for something it can never grasp.  The traveller is so focussed on his destination that he cannot see and enjoy the surrounding landscape, or ever be satisfied in settling in one place. The youth wastes away in pining, and although the virgin offers an image of eternal beauty, she is cold and dead inside. 

I have realised, by seeing the poem in this way, that constantly striving for your dreams doesn’t always allow you to engage with reality. Ambition is healthy so long as it doesn’t become a delusion, and dreams don’t provide freedom if they don’t allow you to live.