I have now been unemployed for two weeks. Ten working days. In the last three months I have applied for 102 jobs. I have heard back from six of them. Five of them rather negatively.
I went to one interview for an investment firm that would require me to write FPQ's. (Or something like that, that probably says a lot - essentially I'd be digging pieces of information about previous trades and investors and writing to people explaining why the company made the decisions that they did. Enthralling.) The recruitment manager put me forward for it because he said that the brief he had received said they were looking for a writer to refresh their style, and that, and I quote quite ferociously, 'No investment knowledge is needed.' Just as well really.
SO. I put on my suit for the first time in a year and went to the first interview, which was an hour long test which included a spelling and grammar exam and then to write a mock FPQ letter. I sat down at the long table in one of the company's many boardrooms and took a nervous sip of water waiting for the lady with the kind face to return with my test.
When she did, I couldn't help but notice that she was carrying what can only be described as a 'wad' of paper. Like an ostrich burying my head in the sand, I refused to look at part ii until after I had completed the Spelling and Grammar section, that off cause I obviously breesed thru.
I then turned with the eyes of a dying calf to the mock letter. The lady had said to 'just skim through these and try and write a suitable answer'. Right yeah, I'll just skim through Swann's Way and translate it into Chinese.
The first thirty pages were FTSE graphs and the like. I looked at them in blank dismay, my eyes surveying the jagged line as if it were a forty mile mountain trek that I was about to embark on with nothing other than boots made of broken glass and snakes.
I considered what I knew about finance and some of the terms I'd heard at the end of the news.
'The Market' always seems to come up a lot. 'Upturns' and 'Downturns', although I wasn't sure which of those two were positive. 'Float'. I was floating.
The lines started at the bottom of the left hand side of the page and made their way up almost uninterrupted to the top right. That's got to be a good thing.
Then it struck me. Think GCSE French.
In my GCSE French writing exam there were twenty dictionaries out of the 90 that with each word came a sentence using it. I had scrambled like a two legged caterpillar through a hairbrush to a respectable mark in that exam, even if it did mean I had to write to Jean-Pierre explaining that the reason I couldn't go to the zoo was that I my father was gang-raped by a group of savage monkeys.
So, with no French dictionary to hand, I just sat about taking full sentences out of the bumf that was in front of me, and putting them into an order that didn't make it sound as though I was reading the shipping forecast.
Three days later, I get a call from my man in recruitment saying that the company would like me to go back for a second interview. He then asked me what sort of investment knowledge I had. 'None,' I replied, 'you know that, that's why you put me forward for the job? Because they wanted a more journalistic style?' I thought the inflection on my voice would perhaps make him reveal that he was joking.
'Ah, right' he said as though he'd burnt his toast. 'Yeah, okay, well in this interview they're really going to grill you on you knowledge.'
Perfect. You bastard cretin.
I went to one interview for an investment firm that would require me to write FPQ's. (Or something like that, that probably says a lot - essentially I'd be digging pieces of information about previous trades and investors and writing to people explaining why the company made the decisions that they did. Enthralling.) The recruitment manager put me forward for it because he said that the brief he had received said they were looking for a writer to refresh their style, and that, and I quote quite ferociously, 'No investment knowledge is needed.' Just as well really.
SO. I put on my suit for the first time in a year and went to the first interview, which was an hour long test which included a spelling and grammar exam and then to write a mock FPQ letter. I sat down at the long table in one of the company's many boardrooms and took a nervous sip of water waiting for the lady with the kind face to return with my test.
When she did, I couldn't help but notice that she was carrying what can only be described as a 'wad' of paper. Like an ostrich burying my head in the sand, I refused to look at part ii until after I had completed the Spelling and Grammar section, that off cause I obviously breesed thru.
I then turned with the eyes of a dying calf to the mock letter. The lady had said to 'just skim through these and try and write a suitable answer'. Right yeah, I'll just skim through Swann's Way and translate it into Chinese.
The first thirty pages were FTSE graphs and the like. I looked at them in blank dismay, my eyes surveying the jagged line as if it were a forty mile mountain trek that I was about to embark on with nothing other than boots made of broken glass and snakes.
I considered what I knew about finance and some of the terms I'd heard at the end of the news.
'The Market' always seems to come up a lot. 'Upturns' and 'Downturns', although I wasn't sure which of those two were positive. 'Float'. I was floating.
The lines started at the bottom of the left hand side of the page and made their way up almost uninterrupted to the top right. That's got to be a good thing.
Then it struck me. Think GCSE French.
In my GCSE French writing exam there were twenty dictionaries out of the 90 that with each word came a sentence using it. I had scrambled like a two legged caterpillar through a hairbrush to a respectable mark in that exam, even if it did mean I had to write to Jean-Pierre explaining that the reason I couldn't go to the zoo was that I my father was gang-raped by a group of savage monkeys.
So, with no French dictionary to hand, I just sat about taking full sentences out of the bumf that was in front of me, and putting them into an order that didn't make it sound as though I was reading the shipping forecast.
Three days later, I get a call from my man in recruitment saying that the company would like me to go back for a second interview. He then asked me what sort of investment knowledge I had. 'None,' I replied, 'you know that, that's why you put me forward for the job? Because they wanted a more journalistic style?' I thought the inflection on my voice would perhaps make him reveal that he was joking.
'Ah, right' he said as though he'd burnt his toast. 'Yeah, okay, well in this interview they're really going to grill you on you knowledge.'
Perfect. You bastard cretin.
Insightful work banter a la Mike Judge 'Office Space'. More please.
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