Sunday

I took the day off in the sense of fixing the laptop of a flatmate. Haven't had much luck aside of that. I've read a forum topic on gumtree, looks like it's not only me having problems with agencies. They most probably are after the commissions and you, as the candidate have nothing to do with that unless you match the job they have exactly.
And that is the smaller problem. They don't seem to ever get back to candidates to tell what the problem is exactly with their application, they just hum along and pretend to have never heard of you before.

Pathetic.

I am taking another approach, as in addressing companies directly.

Day 4 : High Wycombe

I had an interview yesterday which went quite smoothly in spite of all my fears. High Wycombe turned out to be a lovely town after all, I like how the whole thing feels.

The company is doing VoIP and resells of BT landlines, so the job would be mainly about supporting other resellers, I wouldn't say it is hard at all, but speaking in english for 8 hours a day would definitely take a toll.

I crunched some numbers and looks like I can move to High Wycombe if it is inevitable, but give me a straw and I'm hanging on to in in London.

Still no answer for my applications. I would advise everyone to keep away from the 'big' jobsites, waste of time and motivation.

Day 2: update

While I haven't made any applications, or at least not any considerable amount I still think that today has been a great success. I accompanied a friend as she was applying for a nanny vacancy. I had a little chat with the agent and she offered me a few answers to my swarm of questions. She was pessimist about what the future might bring on the job market, recession has been a great success so far, better than wars at burning excess money for sure.

Today I was contacted by a company located a few miles outside of London. They were about to hire my girlfriend as a programmer but we couldn't solve commuting so we had to turn the offer down, now it seems the coin is showing the shiny side, because they contacted me, that they have a job tailored for my CV. I answered a few questions about my approach to people and work and now am waiting for them to get back to me. There is one possible spot I can fail on and that is my spoken english.

Day 2: Revving the engines

Fighting with some hangover I might say that yesterday was a success overall. I got a bit distracted by family members greeting me for my birthday, what a sweet distraction :)

I still managed to send 25 job applications in various areas and called 2 agencies at the morning. In my experience calling agencies is not going to work, because they tell people to send their CV to an email address you can find on their home page. It is not really productive to work that way but I might pull that trick later on different set of agencies that do not necessarily keep their pages up to date. You know which ones I mean. Today I am aiming at 40 applications made and I might just not call any agencies yet.

We'll see if this shotgun approach of job seeking works.