Looking For A Job

I've no idea how I'm going to handle full time work, but as there is no way short of a miracle that I will pass another WCA, I have little choice. I'm not even sure of the point of attending and, given that I don't have three forms of ID (as required), I doubt I'll even get in the building. The receptionist at the place is a stone faced haridan who has a habit of deliberately making people wait - all part of the test no doubt.

Consequently - and for a long time now - I have been searching on the still-appalling Universal Jobmatch website. This site is so broken and so poorly designed as to be completely useless. In fact it's beyond useless to the point of actually being counter productive.

Nothing is stored correctly, adverts are mislabelled and misrepresented, out of date and in some cases, don't even provide the means to actually progress forward. I would have used the word apply, but since clicking the link takes you further down the rabbit hole of online recruitment website links, one after another, it would be erroneous to do so.

The overwhelming majority of adverts pertain to telesales in one form or another, often mislabelled as 'customer service' or even 'sales assistant'. So jobs that should be retail, which is the most likely gig I'm going to get, are never actually shop work. All of these jobs require someone that is committed to being a profit hungry sales jockey. That is most assuredly not me and there is no way on god'd green earth I can fake it. Nor should I have to, it's absurd to expect a successful labour market to be built on such mendacity.

One of the worst features of this site is that, instead of moving through the adverts as you click next page, it reshuffles the existing adverts. Consequently you just end up looking at the same adverts repeatedly. Given that most of them are the same kind of job, all mislabelled, it's like a terrible hall of mirrors where nothing is real. Since none of these agencies ever bother to respond to emails the whole thing, really, is a massive waste of time.

Of course the government won't give up this system any time soon. The contract may be up for renewal soon, but the site requires more than a change in ownership, it needs scrapping and a complete overhaul. It is utterly broken at the most fundamental level and functionally useless.

This just leaves dealing with jobs advertised in real space. Unfortunately this is no better. I saw that WHSmiths (do they still exist?) wanted part time staff (everything is part time). But the application requirements called for a five year checkable work history - for a job selling magazines and Top Gear dvd's! Hardly Fort Knox! Waterstones too had a couple of adverts; you might think they'd be a good place to work, but no. The first was for a 'bookseller barista'. Their shop now, inexplicably (though probably due to the exorbitant price of books these days), has a cafe and as such they need someone to man the espresso machine while on hand multitasking flogging paperbacks. Unfortunately, the barista required someone with coffee shop experience. Such is the nature of the job that it requires an exotic moniker to make it sound more exciting than the reality of making tea and serving it to yuppies at silly prices.

Annoyingly they also listed a vacancy that turned out instead to be a CV gathering exercise. I asked about the position (my CV is useless and I don't carry a copy around with me since there's no point). But they said that not only did they not actually have any vacancies at present, but they had lots of CV's on file anyway. What is the fucking point of that? Why even bother? I complained on social media, which of course is the equivalent of pissing into the wind. What can you do? Had I made a fuss in the shop it would have had the opposite effect.

The reality is that jobs like this, shops and business in the city, will get their staff from the local student population. I've no doubt they have similar adverts regularly placed in student unions and that loads of kids, who make ideal part time staff (the least likely to complain about shit terms and conditions as well), will give their CV's in. You can see this in the make up of the staff in these places. Someone like me doesn't stand a chance.