Bouncing Back

Searching for jobs is bleak. I'm not going to re-quote all the statistics I vomited at you previously. I'm not even going to tell you that supply vastly oustrips demand and there are hundreds (in some cases thousands) of people vying for a handful of positions.

I'm going to tell you about the single hardest thing I've come across in my 4-month-and-counting job search. Bouncing back.

Now I'm reasonably well educated, I have a good string of exam results to my name, I even have some 'relevant work experience'. For me finding a job shouldn't take four months. But I don't want any old job - as I have told you before, I want a job in the media. Of the experience I've had within the media I look around the offices and think 'it's not as if these people are vast intellects, it's not even as if they all have oodles of experience'.

So what is it? Well for a start, they networked, and got themselves a lucky break. They dotted the right 'i's and crossed the right 't's - in other words, they jumped through the right hoops as instructed by their ringmaster. This really frustrates me because it's not like these companies are looking for the best candidate, they're just looking for a specific candidate that knows how to mention all the right keywords in the application and subsequent interview.

In some ways it's like GCSE science exams. You have a question which requires an extended written response: 'how does the heart work?' for example. Now the examiner isn't interested in the way you decide to write the question - whether you use sibilance or the rule of three - all he's looking for is the right processes in the right order. Applying for jobs in the media (or anywhere, for that matter) is much the same.

So I put my heart and soul into an application and I know that it's good and it answers the questions well. I send it off and then I wait. After waiting a considerable amount of time I then get a 'thanks but no thanks'. In all the time I've been waiting I let myself hope that this particular job will be the one I get. You can imagine why bouncing back is the hardest part for me.

Fair enough if I'm not an adequate candidate, but when I know that I could do the job well and my application reflects that, I've just not put in the secret codeword that these employers look for, that's when it hurts.

So forget trawling the internet for jobs, spending ages filling in applications, waiting weeks for replies, and practicing your best interview techniques, the hardest thing about job hunting is bouncing back time after time, after time.