#I don’t want to fill out applications online and trawl dating sites for someone! | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

themightycaz · 7 years

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Rant time. I spent most of my adult life believing that I had to have a job, ANY job, with any employer that would take me on, no matter how awful it was. I would work at these jobs for as long as the company lasted or as long as I could physically stand it. I've never been sacked but I have failed probation periods because I "clearly wasn't happy being there." I've lost jobs that I didn't want because I was unhappy working those jobs. Thing is, I was TAUGHT that "nobody enjoys their job" and that my happiness didn't matter. All that mattered was making money. (This is what capitalism is, after all.) So after the total clusterfuck of my last job (doing paperwork for sexist, racist, homophobic cunts that cut my hours, talked shit about me and spied on me) I decided that, for the first time in my life, I was going to decide who/what/where and how I WANTED to work. If I was going to sell my precious time and energy to some other arsehole then I was going to do it on MY terms. Like coming out of an abusive relationship, leaving a shitty job where I was bullied by a manager has left me feeling like the last thing I want to do right now is get another job. I need time to re-group, recover and work out what kind of a job it is I actually want, what kind of people I want to work for, what kind of work I want to do etc. I guess I have a pretty good CV, because I've had a few employment agencies contact me about roles that they have available (my CV is up on job sites for employers to view.) Now, I know, in my gut, that I am still messed up by my last job. I got really close to old supervisors that left before me because THEY were treated like shit by management too. I lost friends I'd made and found that people I thought I could trust just could not be trusted. The work itself was boring but doable, the pay was crap, the only things that made me stay as long as I did were the friendships I made. With my friends gone, there was nothing left but the same old misery I'd felt in every other job I'd ever worked, only with the added self-loathing of letting cowardly bigoted fucks push me around for minimum wage. So occasionally an agency might call me about a role they have. I should mention here that employment agencies, like any kind of sales job, work on commission. It's their job to hook employers up with potential candidates for jobs that they have available and, depending on the agency, they will get paid commission based on either the amount of interviewees they send and/or successful candidates. The way most agencies source potential candidates these days is through trawling job sites for CV's with search terms or key words that line up with the role they're trying to fill. This means things like your location, your qualifications and your work history. It's pretty much exactly like online dating, only with a job agency acting as a matchmaker. Now, imagine that matchmaker is being paid just to get set up dates for people you know NOTHING about. It doesn't matter if you even really have anything in common with the person they're trying to set you up on a date with, all THEY care about is sitting you down with someone that's paying them to find them dates. There's no profile, no pictures, no indication of the kind of person they're trying to set you up with (some agencies don't even give you the name of the company at first!) just a blind date with someone in your area who's looking for someone that kind-of-vaguely matches your description. They will give you the vaguest of details about this person in return and then use all their powers of persuasion to get you to say yes to the date. Only once you've said "yes" will they send you the other persons profile. Sounds sleazy right? Welp, that's because it is. So in the past I would say "yes" to these interviews, get the company name and job description/person specification, read through them, panic until I wanted to throw up because my skills didn't match with ANYTHING they were asking for and discover that the company/industry was awful and not somewhere I'd ever choose to work for anyway...but still go to the interview because I needed a job and everything is awful anyway, right? Sometimes I'd get the job, most of the time I didn't and I'd spend the rest of the time feeling like a worthless sack of shit after tying myself in knots of misery and anxiety in the lead-up to the dreaded interview. Now, imagine I wasn't talking about employment and instead I was talking about relationships. Imagine being harassed into going on blind dates with people you don't know anything about, just to get into a relationship with ANY one of them, because you're constantly being told you HAVE to be in a relationship, even if you're not remotely attracted to that person, even if that person is just not a good or interesting person or even if that person straight up abuses you. Suddenly, it all seems so utterly fucked up. So I've started kicking back. If the agency refuses to let me know who the company is I hang up on them. If the job description doesn't match what the agency has told me about them I refuse the interview. If, when investigating the company, I get any kind of gut feeling that it'll be an awful place to work, I refuse the interview. I am not ready for another job yet. However, the people around me don't seem to get this. I'm being told that I'm wrong for refusing interviews. That I shouldn't dismiss a role until I've at least met with the employers. I don't know a single person that enjoys job interviews. Employers and agencies reject people hourly on the basis of their CV's and application forms, without ever meeting that person face-to-face. I would like to know why *I* am in the wrong for treating potential employers EXACTLY the same way that THEY treat the rest of us.

#personal #employment #relationships

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