Looking for a job when times are tough.

Well, we’ve all been there, looking for a job in a market that doesn’t exactly call out for you. In current circumstances, with the newspapers screaming ‘recession’ and the companies cutting jobs (Virgin media announces 2200 job losses last night) it’s not the best time to be looking for a job, or maybe it is. I don’t know, call me mad, but I like to be able to look at the up side of it all.

In current circumstances, the market is highly competitive. There are usually more applicants than jobs, and supply exceeds demand.   See this as a plus.  Companies will only hire the very best – because they can. If that’s you, you are in demand still, and a few companies will be interested, not just one.

Remember that  job hunting is sales, and although you’re probably not a salesperson, the person that best know you is you, so sell you good attributes.  You more than likely are an accountant, a factory worker, a technical specialist, or a manager.  Even if sales is unfamiliar, uncomfortable territory, look at it as an opportunity to tell people about what you‘re really good at.

Focus on companies you really want to work with, and approach them. It’s likely they’ll be trying to save costs by not using recruitment firms at the moment, so your pro-active approach will make them sit up and notice you hopefully. Also, it’ll save them money, which means you could negotiate your package higher, based on the savings they’ll be making.

Make sure your CV / resume is well written, concise, and has contactable references. It’s also important to ask around all your friends to see if they know of any positions available that would suit your skill set. That’s networking, and friends are generally quite happy to help out friends.

Surf the web for companies that are advertising jobs on their corporate web site.

Use the web as a reference to learn about the company before you go to the interview, and make sure you get the interviewer’s name right. Use it in the interview a few times, and make sure they know your name.

There are a lot of resources on the web when you are hunting, so use them all, and the best advice is to go for the job you love doing , it’ll make all the difference!

Ridiculous numbers

When is inflation not inflation, and just a silly number?

When you look at Zimbabwe’s numbers I think.  Reading an article this week it stated that “Zimbabwe’s annual inflation rate soared to 11.2 million percent in June” quoted the state media. HOW is that possible? Here we sit in Britain, and we are complaining about 4.6%, and everyone losing their jobs and the state of the economy, and teh credit crunch.  What do those poor Zimbabweans do?

Not only that, but they state that it gained 9 035 045.5 percentage points from the May rate of 2 233 713.4 percent. How does someone actually measure that.

Here is a map of world inflation rates. Note, Zimbabwe is in the +10 range because I don’t think they knew how to depict +11,000,000!

So, when does one intervene in situations like this, isn’t this the reason for the G8 countries (and I think they named the G8 because they wanted to call themselves GR8 really, but knew how naff that would sound…)?

So, if I equate that to Bingo tickets, then today’s 1p would cost £ 22 337.13 in May….and in June would cost
£ 11 268 758.00 per ticket.  That’s if my maths is right – Ouch! I wonder what the bingo bonus payouts would have to be to make that work. The Jackpots would be worth playing perhaps?

Wow, imagine how much you’d have to win to be able to pay for a bingo ticket in June given these numbers!

I’ll stick to my own UK bingo room ,and the  free games and linked games thanks very much, and when inflation hits 6% I’ll remember not to moan so much as others have it FAR worse than we do!