Workforce Musings
What You, Your Parents & In-Laws May Not Know About Job Hunting
Behind some of the Scenes in Recruitment for Job Seekers | For Family’s Understanding | Mental Health & Safety | Stop Pushing & Pressuring Your Unemployed Family Member | Be Kind
Again, I need to remind you that I am not a University Graduate of Human Resource or Recruitment. However I had the opportunity to learn a fraction of this component like a HR Generalist role in a short timespan before the pandemic.
I sat in 2 free seminars or courses between 2018–2019. It was conducted by SAMH Singapore Association for Mental Health & another was conducted by a freelance Psychologist. The room was filled with huge unemployed people.
Don’t fret yet. Don’t take it as a Discouragement immediately. Don’t close the door of Hope immediately by concluding negatively.
In the room, the common remarks from participants was “I had sent multiples of Resume and applied 50–80 jobs but none called me for an Interview…”. Are you one of them? Do you ever wondered why?
This occurred when you had curated your Resume appropriately and relevantly. You already went for so many Resume courses, online or in-person, from all different training vendors.
All you get was a string of “Unsuccessful” responses or “The Job Post is Closed” replies. What could have happened?
Let me list 2-points about the backend scenes I observed and studied when i was playing multiple roles in a company. I was paid barely enough to survive the last week of the month before the next pay!
1 — The job opening that was initially posted had been automatically re-published over another 2-cycles.
This occurred after the company paid for the advertisement & hit the publish button for the 1st submission. In other words, you did not apply the job openings from Newly Published job advertisements.
Look out for “New” sign on each job ads when applying for a job in the online portal like Jobstreet. You might want to use filter function too on jobs being advertised within 24 hours ago or so on.
Some other job advertisement might have vacancies filled up in 10 days but the advertisement was paid to run for a total of 30 days. So why didn’t the portal or company make an effort to switch the advertisement into ‘Job Position Closed’?
One of the reason is because the new employees are still in OJT (On-Job Trainee) phase. If the job is terrible, or a sudden shock of what is not expected by the trainee, he/she might choose to call it a quit. I witnessed it with my eyes.
Besides, as long as you are still in your OJT phase with no welfare benefits (you got to take unpaid leave for being sick!), you will not stay in the company when get a call of Better Offer from elsewhere. Right?
Your Resume is stored in the “potential candidates list” when you are not selected for the job which had been filled. You might have chances to be shortlisted as long as the job advertisement is still ‘active’ though the vacancies are filled. By not shutting down the status of recruitment, companies do save cost of advertisement.
Thus, it is also no harm to apply for jobs openings that are not newly advertised however it takes probably Miracles for your resume to be picked up.
2 — The companies operated on delegating multiple hats to the employees shoulders, and there was no time to shortlist candidates.
Now when the hiring managers or the executives and associates are totally occupied throughout the day, sometimes the shortlisting didn’t take place……until a week or later.
In this kind of hectic environment, managers usually work after their official working hours, when the others are already fed-up for the day’s work.
It sounds contradicting when a company is urgently in need of people to fill up the vacancies fast, but well…it is beyond everyone. Beyond anyone can explain. I witnessed it.
That’s one of a good reason for government job portals indicates “ if you are shortlisted we will contact you in 2 months”. However this is not the same for non-government job vacancies portals.
My closing for this post is…
You are not lousy. You are not hopeless. There will be your opportunity. First, learn to be Optimistic. If the people around you will not even encourage you or have positive thoughts about you trying your best, Enough it is for you to Believe in Yourself. At least you understand better now what happens behind some scenes.
So Be Kind to Yourself. Love yourself. Forgive yourself if you had thought it was you being useless, or whatsoever negative feelings when you wondered why was there no response to your job application. FIRST THING FIRST, have confidence that you will get a job.
Don’t be surprised that when you get a job, there will be people who end up getting unemployed. They might be asking you all these you had experienced. Then that is your call, to either help or ignore.
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