As you probably know by now I am looking for a job. In fact my job at the moment is to find job.

Day 3 here I come. Or do I? The phone rings. All stop!

What I haven’t explained is that Mrs F is on her summer school holidays (yeah yeah, heard it all before!) and is looking for work herself for the holiday period.

So the phone rings, Mrs F is not even awake. It’s an agency offering her some temp work if she can get there in 45 mins. Considering we live 30 mins away it’s a big ask. So I take my life in my hands and wake her up. To save money on the rip-off parking charges that are imposed in the particular part of Berkshire where the job is, I decide to drive her in. I don’t get back to my desk until 1030! The rhythm of the day has now been shot to pieces!

But still I have a job to do. So what first?

Email first. Have there have been any overnight or early responses from anyone? Nothing. This is not really a surprise. If everyone took the time and offered the courtesy of responding to applications in person there wouldn’t be so many complaints about candidate care would there?

There are many “excuses” or “reasons” for not being able to respond to every application, especially when most are inappropriate. If they are inappropriate I can sympathize, however I assure you I am not applying for anything remotely inappropriate. Disappointing. Let’s see how long it takes, shall we? I won’t do anything about it for anyone who responds within 5 working days and that is being generous.

I do feel another blog/rant coming on as a result of this and no doubt other candidate experiences I’ll have over my journey. We’ll see.

One thought that came to mind today, was my little adventure into Candidate Land will give me loads of insight and no doubt opinions. Potentially I’ll have the ability to present my thoughts on the use of Social Media and other sourcing mechanisms, but from a candidate’s perspective, rather than the recruiter’s perspective; or both. Should be interesting, being very aware of both sides of the process in today’s job hunting and recruiting world.

I had lunch with Katherine Robinson (@TheSourceress if you use Twitter) to discuss her participation at the forthcoming Direct Sourcing event that The FIRM has organised. Not only did I find out something about the use of Twitter I was previously oblivious to, but I had great company for nearly 2 hours. Really is very clever the way Katherine uses the tools of her trade to give people in mine the result we are looking for. Hope to learn more in October.

This was the tonic I needed to get the day moving a bit faster. Over the next two ours I found, registered for and started to use a cloud based Contact Management tool from SalesForce.com. So far so good.

I found and applied for one more job online; found I might add through an online Social Media platform – I did get an auto response to that one! (Time stamp - 21:51 Weds 4^th August). Having just written that last line, I received an email from the Head of TA at this company proposing we speak! That’s what I call getting the job done, like them already.

I had a 2^nd interview for what sounds like a really good job. Hope to hear more on that one over the next week. Fingers crossed.

Lesson learned today – do something, anything and speak with everyone to move the process along in a positive direction. If you can end your day having done something positive to help yourself, tomorrow will be a bit easier.

Music of the Day – Everlong by The Foo Fighters

Oh and the idea I had from reading yesterday’ blog will just have to wait

In Day 4 I aim to buy a laptop!