WORK-LIFE BALANCE

GOING BACK HOME

After your degree, things can come down to earth with a bump. In today’s ‘boomerang generation’, more UK graduates than ever are returning to live with their parents on finishing their course, usually because of finances.

So, should this happen, portray it as a positive. It’s the new norm, the new smart way. Make out it is a win-win for both you and your parents. In fact, imply you’re largely doing it to please them: they ‘love having you back’, or perhaps you’re ‘house-sitting’ for them while they spend six semi-retired months in South America.

Appear active; web surfing can be represented as ‘applying for jobs’, which is why you spend so much time on the internet. Doing something vaguely useful-sounding such as ‘working on my Spanish’ (hanging out in a tapas bar) or ‘doing business studies online’ (watching The Apprentice on BBC iPlayer) gives the appearance of being fully occupied.

To the public, and especially parents, compare your situation favourably with that of vague ‘friends from uni’ who are now working in London. You are ‘saving for a deposit on a flat’; they are getting deeper in debt, thanks to exorbitant rents and season tickets.

GETTING A JOB

Getting a job is a zero-sum game at first: what money you earn is swallowed by rent, transport, bills and student loan repayments, and you may look back on your years of ‘hardship’ at uni with nostalgia. Nevertheless, it may have to be done, partly to reassure parents and friends that you are not merely drifting (i.e., enjoying yourself), but mainly to reassure future employers that you are following a methodical and amibitious career plan.

300,000 students graduate every year, and they’ll all be applying for the same job as you. Or so it’ll feel. With an average 46 applicants for every graduate position, and some organisations attracting 160 applicants per post, you will have to use bluffing skills more effectively than ever to get a job.

GETTING WORK EXPERIENCE

It’s hard to get a job without experience: roughly a third of all graduate positions go to someone who’s already worked for the hiring company or done the same sort of work. It’s a bit like getting a loan by proving you don’t need one: you can only get a first job if you can show that you’ve had one already. You don’t need to be an English grad to spot the Catch-22.

Work experience, therefore, is key to getting a job these days. And many firms offer such opportunities, in three types:

Shadowing

What it is Following someone around for a few days or weeks as an unpaid observer.

What actually happens See how inefficient most offices are. Hear shadowee moan about how busy they are and why nothing is their fault. You get chatted up by someone who confides about wanting to leave.

How you represent it in job interviews Valuable insight into business. Sat in on important meetings. Saw firsthand how decisions are made. Maintained close working relationships with colleagues.

Internship

What it is One to three months or so, often in your holiday time, of being a paid, or often unpaid, member of some project or team.

What actually happens Though they looked forward to ‘having your help’, your team are too busy to explain the intricacies of their work, and simply do it themselves. You get shooed aside to do photocopying, make tea, order stationery, etc. Any token creative work you do – the Twitter feed, or redesigning a company intranet page, perhaps – is blocked by some group of people you never meet. You get chatted up by someone who confides about wanting to leave.

How you represent it in job interviews Valuable insight into business. Took responsibility for a wide range of tasks. Helped set strategies for social media. Maintained close working relationships with colleagues.

Placements

What it is Six to 12 months of paid work with the intention of it leading to a permanent post.

What actually happens You get solid work experience, but only after you’ve spent the first three months waiting for the ID card and codes needed to get in and out, access the internet, use the toilet, etc., thus doing nothing for the first half of your placement and then too much for the second half. You get chatted up by someone who confides that the post you’re supposed to be in line for is actually going to be axed.

How you represent it in job interviews Valuable insight into business. Coped with deadlines, multitasked, worked on several simultaneous projects. Maintained close working relationships with employment law solicitors.

UNDERSTANDING JOB ADVERTS

Never take a job advert at face value. For instance, one requiring candidates who ‘think outside the box’ is not looking for originality. They are looking for plodders who can express themselves only in buzzwords and clichés such as ‘think outside the box’.

Here is a list of other buzzwords, and their real meanings:

Fast-moving People leave after three weeks.

Lively, bustling Chaotic.

Exciting, prestigious Badly paid.

Competitive salary As bad as everyone else’s.

Great perks Badly paid.

Vital work Boring.

Sleek, modern offices Beyond the ring road with no public transport.

City-centre offices Cramped and noisy, up seven flights of stairs.

Urgently required Previous post holder left in tears after three weeks.

Maternity cover She’ll still try to be in control.

Following a promotion He’ll still try to be in control. You must…

…be a multitasker. We’re disorganised.

…be a self-starter. Your manager is useless.

…take on responsibility quickly with the same salary (and be prepared to take the blame).

THE CV

There are any number of example CVs available online, many of them directly contradictory. Perhaps the best option is to find a friend who actually managed to get a job similar to the one you want, and mimic theirs.

Be careful that you don’t cut and paste too specifically, or you might end up unintentionally including inaccurate information about you. This is to be avoided. Your CV should only contain intentionally inaccurate information.

LINKEDIN, FACEBOOK, ETC.

Create a LinkedIn profile which lists your skills in detail, or at least the skills you wish you had. Ideally, have a look at people in a position you’d like to be in and learn from how they present themselves. You’ll never actually get any work or job offers from it, but it creates a good rapport with people LinkingIn, and sounds good.

It’s a good idea to have a sensible email address for job applications; ciderhead@shagfest.com may not convey a ‘professional’ image.

As for your Facebook profile, this is where you can really express yourself. Put up your holiday pictures, banter with friends and show your true character to the world. Therefore never, ever do it under your own name, or in any way that an employer, police officer, partner or any member of the public might trace.

It’s a good idea to have a sensible email address for job applications and professional use only; ciderhead@shagfest.com, for example, may not convey a ‘professional’ image, unless of course you’re applying to a computer games company.

THE APPLICATION FORM

Many companies now have compulsory online application forms. All are badly designed and take hours to fill in. It’s a good idea to have a text file somewhere with details of your previous jobs, academic record, exaggerations about your achievements, etc., expressed in various ways, so you can cut and paste. There’s little positive you can say about online application forms except that they hardly get read anyway. At least it gives a plausible reason for needing unlimited broadband.

Usually you hear nothing from them ever again. If you’re lucky, and there’s something they happened to like about you as they fast-forwarded through the 5,000 applications – usually a random factor such as you happen to come from the same town as their partner – you might get an interview.

THE INTERVIEW

You take a train somewhere awful and arrive two hours early, filling the time in with cups of tea in reception and trying to find something interesting in the company newsletter.

You eventually get called in and spend half an hour with someone who’s leaving and doesn’t really care, and an HR person who has no idea what the job involves and so is looking for someone just like them.

In an interview, you’re not judged on how good you might be at the job. You’re judged on how good an interviewee you are.

Interviewers rarely set you a task or test of your abilities, though there might be some sort of bogus ‘psychometric’ personality test they got off the internet. They’ll justify this by saying it works, because the candidate with the best score always gets the job, which proves it. English grads will recognise this as a classic case of ‘begging the question’. Maths grads with a background in logic will recognise this as a classic case of ‘bollocks’.

WHAT TO DO IN INTERVIEWS

The key is, don’t be yourself. Be the person they want you to be. Whatever the work entails, describe yourself as a team player, conscientious but flexible, able to multi-task, a good communicator and, of course, with excellent written English.

Mid-smart but comfortable is probably the best dress code, because the HR person will be in a suit while the other one could be in shorts and T-shirt, so if you’re at the casual or too-smart end of the spectrum, you’ll get looked up and down by one of them.

First impressions are vital: offer a firm handshake (but if you hear their knuckles crack, you’ve gone too far), maintain steady eye-contact, wait to be asked to sit down, don’t fiddle with your hair, and ensure that your fingernails are relatively clean.

Prior research on the company and the market is always a good idea. It gives you plenty of intelligent-sounding questions to ask about their challenges, future direction, etc., and hence leaves less time to fill trying to think of Examples Where You Showed Initiative.

At the end of the interview, which has been all smiles and reassuring nods, you’ll think the job is yours. The interviewers will assure you that they’ll let you know by the end of the week, or Monday at the very latest.

You won’t hear from them for three weeks, at which point you phone to ask. You are then told by a curt PA that the position has been filled, and ‘can I help you with anything else?’

The sheer unpleasant truth is that there aren’t nearly enough jobs for all the applicants. Most people end up disappointed. So, if all this happens, you have to turn it to your advantage, if only to reassure parents and friends. The mere fact that you got an interview is positive. Make up some finishing order: you were ‘second’ out of the 12 interviewees – what a near miss, that’s encouraging; or you were ‘shortlisted’ to the last two, but the boss’s goddaughter got the job (as she was always going to).

By all means, you can try asking for feedback about why you didn’t get the post, but this is rarely useful. You just get a vague ‘very good but another candidate had stronger skills in some areas’ kind of answer.

With so many applicants, every way of thinning them down imaginable is used, so you can plausibly cite some random and unfair fact as the cause of your non-appointment (‘the HR person said their ex came from the same place as me, and I knew right then…’).

Then it’s back to the next application.

NEW HOUSE, NEW LIFE

If and when you get that job, you can then become fully independent and your own person at last. You’ll probably move into a shared house near the job.

This will be a professional house rather than a student house. It is similar in many ways, such as the fact that nobody admits to having blocked the toilet, everyone ignores the cleaning rota and your milk keeps disappearing. But it has the added stress of everyone having to get up for work. This creates competition for resources in the morning, especially the queue for the loo.

On the plus side, young-professional house parties are much more interesting than student house parties, even if you’ll quickly tire of the My Awful Boss conversation.

After a few months, things will settle down and be a bit dull and predictable, so your education is complete. Now you know about life. You can then consider settling down with someone and perhaps even starting a family, for which enormity no amount of training can prepare you.