Friday 29 Feb 2008 by Orphi the AweKid.

Well, it’s been pretty damn quiet out here recently. In spite of my sister’s insistance that putting my CV on Monster would instantly land job offers on my desk, it’s actually damn quiet. I get maybe 1 email every week from a job agency. Monster keeps emailling me jobs in the USA and Canada. (WTH?)

Hmm, clearly I’m going to have to make more of an effort. It looks like I need to start contacting potential employers directly.

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Tuesday 12 Feb 2008 by Orphi the AweKid.

So, a few more days gone by, still no response from anybody. Now that I’ve reconfigured Monster, it still offers me jobs from Essex and Berkshire, but now it also offers jobs from the USA and Canada. WTF?

Anyway, clearly I need to take more positive action. Simply having my CV sitting online isn’t getting me anywhere useful. I think I need to take up Dan’s suggestion of attacking local companies with my CV.

To that end, I’ve just had a look at the Yamaha website. They have a big base in MK. (However, I’m not entirely sure what they do there. I did see an advert in the paper a few months back asking for piano tuners. Not sure whether they have any need for a high-level programmer at their MK site.)

Took a long old time to figure out how to navigate their site to find some contact details. The online shop is easy enough to find, but the “hey, come work for us!” bit is quite well hidden. Oh, by the way, don’t you just love web forms where the “required” fields are marked with a red star — and all the fields have a red star?!

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Saturday 09 Feb 2008 by Orphi the AweKid.

My job search isn’t going so well.

I’m registered with 2 jobs websites. The mighty Monster keeps sending me job adverts — but they’re all in Essex, Oxford or Berkshire. Hmm. Anyway, I’ve edited the search settings now. For what it’s worth, I did a manual trawl of the site, and found exactly 3 jobs under “programmer”. None of them looked promising.

The other site seems similarly empty at present. There’s maybe 2 or 3 jobs I could vaguely apply for, but that’s about it.

Hmm, I think I’d better think it out again…

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Thursday 07 Feb 2008 by Orphi the AweKid.

Well, after the minor flurry of activity where I posted my CV and applied for an actual job, it’s suddenly gone very quiet around here. Hmm, I’ll have to see about making another push tonight…

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Tuesday 05 Feb 2008 by Orphi the AweKid.

Well, I just spoke to the recruitment agency who tried to phone me yesterday.

Seems they have a couple of jobs that might interest me. (If by “interest” you mean “they want C / C++ / C# / VB / ASP.Net / other trendy technology that I don’t know anything about”.) The woman on the phone was also quite shocked that I have to give 3 month’s notice. Perhaps this will end up being a problem? Who knows!

I was quite impressed though. I was expecting to get the hard sell, instead I got a normal human being. Didn’t seem 100% on the ball, but seemed very honest and helpful. Quite refreshing, really.

Anyway, my CV is being sent to a possible employer. We’ll see whether or not they’re actually interested. (And interesting…)

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Tuesday 05 Feb 2008 by Orphi the AweKid.

At the weekend, I finally got round to putting my CV on Monster.co.uk. And also another site. I collected a bunch of likely jobs, and I even applied to one of them. (I should really apply to all of them, but I was shy.)

OK, so here’s the deal. When I graduated and left university, I applied to just about everything going. Every week I would send out 4 or 5 job applications. I did this for something like 8 months. 1 month = 4 weeks, so we have 8 × 4 × 5 = 160 job applications in total, very roughly. As a result of this activity, I received… 0 replies. Nobody ever contacted me. Not even to say “no thanks”. It was as if all the hundreds of applications I sent out didn’t exist. The entire world utterly ignored me.

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