Job searching

After watching the news where they discussed the plight of the unemployed over-50's who are trying to get back into work and reading something similar in the Law Society Gazette about prospective trainees who have trouble finding work I thought I'd mention my recent search for staff.

There are a two jobs on offer, first for duty solicitors.  There's no upper limit to how many we'll employ at the moment.  We have adverts in all the local court robing/advocate rooms and are putting an ad in the Gazette.  So far we have had zero applications. 

The second job is for a 3-day a week receptionist/office junior.  We ran a single small ad in the Evening Standard for one day only.  At the last count we had received approximately 1,200 applications.  The vast majority of the applicants have been wildly inappropriate (e.g. people massively over-qualified, those living in inappropriate places by which I mean it would cost them more to get to work than we would pay them such as Brighton and Pakistan, we've also had quite a few applying to be waiters, cleaners, chefs etc. but not receptionists).  Of the remainder, I am told that a large number have said that they are not willing to work in Hackney, which is unfortunate as that's where we are based.  Very few people have bothered to add a covering letter and those with covering letters are usually non-specific general non-sense that clearly hasn't been thought through properly.

The problem with having so many applicants is that we just haven't been able to properly consider even half of the applicants.  Will all the applicants get a reply?  Definitely not, we would have to employ somebody else just to respond.  Will we miss some excellent applicants?  Probably.

Comments

  1. Anonymous13 April 2011 at 13:00

    I'd like to apply for this job. I am a trained chef at NVQ level 1. Can I work two and a half days though? I won't work in Hackney either, but I am happy to work from home.

    ;-)

    ReplyDelete

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