The modern world of employment opportunities....

I still have not quite got my head around the "modern world" of how vacancies are filled.

I mean that advertised positions for most people are fast becoming a thing of the past. You either get blind dated to an employer through the necessary evil of recruiters, or bliss oh bliss! You marry yourself to your perfect partner ...the girl you think is prettiest and least likely to divorce you in the post nuptual period.

This was probably a status that evolved in the early 90s- a boom of graduates delivered on the job market in 1989-95 with far fewer traditional graduate vacancies available ! Advertising meant nothing- nepotism was rife and for second jobbers it was easy play to move using the slimy recruitment snake- there being so few yearlings in the big FMCG companies to go around suddenly yet no one interested in training new 'milk rounders'

Now the milk round must have set many an unsuspecting 1970s graduate off on a career of 'blamange development' or 'consumer strategy' from having studied medieval icelandic history as a major. Many intellectual soles got wed and familied up and were soon in middle management i P&G or kraft, or GE wondering what the fuck they had done with their imaginations. In the 80s it became marketing which was the big draw, no longer a wet kind of lunch at the ad agency, but a power dressed focus for driving the top line. ...to lead many of us to study marketing and seek it's nicer company car with AC and leather....and promptly dump us on the reject side, worse giving kid on job creations ...non graduate pay, shite, salesy, DMey crap.

So what began in the 90s carried on...big companies got used to nepotism and down sizing was rife anyway, and the internet boom was yet to happen. SMEs showed some promise but already recruitment consultants were used heavily to just dump the work load of piling through tons of CVs for jobs in call centres, field sales, retail management trainee etc..all the shite a self respecting graduate should avoid.

Then come the internet boom and the marriage of bliss was born. I just love what you are doing at AP, P and P internet.....eager beavers and savey industry insiders could present them selves to the yahoos, googles, ISPs and amazons of this world...or the start up 'lifestyle' companies not to mention all the agency-boutiques.

So on the one hand the networker could find his perfect partner, while on the other the experienced account manager would be on a blind date to some new internet start up, just standing with it's back to the prepasice and it's mouth blazing all guns on it's own meteoric, unstoppable growth in equity!

It is not just a skill set, but a very deep ingrained mind set which I need to change. My generation grew up in the blissful ignorance of the milk round expectation- some graduating in the mid eighties being lucky, most everyone else I know graduating in non professions in the later or 1990 being lost into shite or some of their own special interest but hole financially speaking. We went out thinking the world needed us and would with only a little bit of prompting, beat a path to our door wiht an application form merely a formality before blue-chip doors opened and took us to the bosom of heirarchical glossy towers.

Unlike the jim bob or swag man of days gone by, we don't like turning up at the factory gates or the down town street corner and asking for work. God we may get told to stuff our five year university education up our ass. We may get some gate keeper, jaded of being stuck a loser, just sneer at our attempt to marry ourselves to the lovely bride behind the port cullis of mediocre " little " people.

Then we actually have to influence people...in person, no longer just on paper. In other words those who are going to succeed most in changing jobs or from being unemployed, or of course fresh out of uni are those who can sell !

They can sniff the opportunity, network to the decision maker, get their elevator pitch time and sell them on themselves!

All the things I hate about sales and sales people. The presumption they are gonna win, the smugness,