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why won't anyone employ me???
Former Member
Posts: 1,876,323 The Mix Honorary Guru
in Work & Study
I can't get a job i've tried everywere from fast food restaurants to banks. Im either to experienced or not experienced enough! any advice welcome. thanx
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Comments
how do you go about applying for these jobs? you maybe need a new CV.
The best advice to give is to sort out your CV, and to sort out your form-filling expertise. Take a day to think of your experiences as to why you would be an employable person, and write out roughly what each experience does for you. Most application forms are experience-based now, so you need to be able to choose good examples, and sell them well.
Your CV should be short and to the point. Don't use flowery language. Don't write essays. Write short and to the point: what qualifications you have, what you have done in the past, what work experience you have, what extra-curricular experience you have, and what your hobbies are. A CV is a marketing tool, and if you balls it up then your advert will go straight in the bin.
Lie on your CV. I don't mean you should give yourself a degree in medicine or anything daft like that but invent some companies and say you worked for them for x amount of years doing all kinds of responsible jobs. Then say you left because they went into liquidation, hense no references are available.
Worked for me!
no.
bad advise.
not a good idea to lie so blatantly. a better idea could be to..expand the truth a bit!
Especially the bit about the responsible jobs and all these companies going into liquidation.
What ridiculous advice.
Firstly, the staff from the companies would still be about somewhere.
Secondly, if you are important in several companies that go bust, that says something about you. It ain't good.
Lying on CVs is never a very good idea. Not unless you can remember your lies very well, because an experience interviewer will- more often than not- see straight through all but the best liars.
Hi there,
I'm sorry to hear about your difficulty finding a job, lets be honest lying on a CV probably isn't the best option - we've got this article on the site which may help you to improve your CV.
Have you tried looking for a job through an agency? There's plenty out there and they can often recommend jobs for you to apply for based on what experience you already have.
Good luck
Helen
It's worked for me once or twice.
I started out being honest on my CV with the usual slight exaggerations. I had no luck finding a job so I embellished a little more...and this progressed in to full-on lies. I then started getting job offers.
Employers shouldn't raise standards unrealistically high, simple as that.
*If* you get caught.
but honestly , expanding the truth a little is ok like hobbies etc ... i'd rather employ a person who goes to the gym , plays football, coaches a junior team football as it shows this person cares about themselves , has teamwork abilities etc
someone whos hobbies include, watching paint dry and banging one out to a porno would be no no's,
get my jist , that sounds so wrong
Now THAT'S an idea...
I want to make it clear that I'd never lie for a job which meant people's lives were dependant on me or anything like that - but in this day and age, getting a fairly secure job is a dog-eat-dog world, IMO you've got to do whatever you've got to do to survive.
My strategy was well-thought out. I created a ficticous company name and bought a domain name for it and set up a holding page saying something like "XXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXX has now gone out of business, for all enquiries email xxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxx.com".
On my CV I put down that I worked for them for X number of years in whatever position I felt would be relevant to the job I was after. I'd write my CV to relate to this and adding a few lines about how they went out of business but their 'webpage' is still up.
If references were needed, the potential employer would then use the contact email address which of course would come back to me - enabling me to write my own reference.
This has worked perfectly for me.
I can understand people getting frustrated but as i said, it's a dog-eat-dog world.
I can't remember any unrealistically high standards when I was job hunting
if you don't meet those standards, however high they are, you don't deserve to get the job.
there will be other people applying who will have actually done everything you've claimed to do, and worked their asses off, only to have their chances of success snatched away by someone who'd rather lie than graft.
They're not actually. I spent time doing my CV, in which I have no previous employment, irrelevent employment (lab technician, lol) but yet I've got a job and I only had to hand one in. The trick is, like other people have said, is to sell yourself. I wrote a list of qualities that I had, and threw in experiences I had had, that most people probably have, to back these up. For example, under team-skills, I put that I went to an army training week, which really impressed employers, even though I went with my school in year 9
I've seen some of my friends CVs and some were trukly dire. One of my friends who loves english actually just wrote an essay with her name at the top!! I touched up my girlfriends CV (all I did was to line up the text on her address and things so it looked neater) and she got 3 interviews straight away! Not a word of a lie in there either. But english essay friend
My Sacrifice, it is a dog eat dog world, and obviously if you cant get a job without lying, it shows you aren't up to the standard of the other 'dogs', and will eventually get eaten. Lol, what a peculiar metaphor.
I'm now doing a job which I'm not fully qualified to do. It's not a managerial role or something which directly requires a certain level of experience/qualifications or anything like that.
I've been doing it for 18 months and I'm as good at it as any of my colleagues. My monthly appraisals prove that.
In my opinion my employers are making a mistake by requiring their staff to have X qualifications and X experience.
The world of employment is a cut-throat one and we need to do what we can in order to survive IMO.
I've lost jobs because of lies. I wish I'd known then that it was a lie. Basically I went for a paralegal job and they asked about if I'd done advocacy, and obviously another candidate had said they had. Such a shame paralegals don't have rights of audience in any court, eh.
I think people who lie in CVs are twats, who normally get found out in the end. I have a sneaking feeling My Sacrifice has recently been banned from these boards too, tbh.
Thanks, I feel better now that I have your permission.
To exaggerate is a lie if you want to be pedantic. I'd say the majority of people exaggerate on their CV.
Sorry about the sneaking feeling but no, I've never been banned from here simply because I've only just registered after being a guest for a few months.
I'm sure the mods can check my IP for clarification.
No it isn't.
If you make duties up then its lying. If you make duties sound more important than they are it is good marketing.
CVs are adverts. And just as you don't trust companies that lie in adverts, so people don't trust people who lie on CVs. Some people can blag it, but most can be spotted a mile off.
I had a right laugh at some of the CVs when I was working for Budget insurance.
Harsh
I am a recent graduate and I can't find work. I'm now starting to try for bar staff jobs agan as I can't even get a simple office job.
I have the CV, its all set out and filled out to expert speicifcation, no lies, good degree, decent a-levels results, stuff on my past work but I never ven get to the interview stage.
I had 2 interviews since I left uni. One went great I thought but still didnt get it and the other was a week or 2 back for a temp job. Despite the woman at th eagency recommending me, depsite me doing a test on my skills in Access and Excel and dong well and despite the woman that interviewed me thinking I was great I still didn't get the job. Turns out they went for someone with mor experience.
And thats the thing its experience. I mean way back in my teens I could never get a saturdy job but over the years I have scraped togethre so varied work experience but its still not enough. Most job advertisements want years solid of experience and I just don't have thta, nor does any1 form uni that I know.
Then you read all this stuff the employers want and they say they want peoplel that have been captains of the university football team. Like that has anything to do with the job at hand.
I am finding it very frustrating myself and am not sure when I will get a job.
EXACTLY!!
In my job, my employers require us to have 2 A levels or equivalent and 12 months experience in a similar field.
I don't meet either criteria but I still do the job perfectly well and am adament that nobody needs that background for this job.
I have exactly the same problem. And the funny thing is that you go for an interview and know that some other idiot will get the job despite not having an ounce of common sense. And why do they get it? Because they have X on their CV.
I've given up applying for jobs and am now temping. My plan is to keep doing this until someone offers me something permanent. There simply isn't any other way in at the moment unless you have all A grade A-levels, phd in dictionary use and play golf with Tiger Woods at the weekends. :banghead:
I have managed to get a temp job for 4 DAYS next week. I am praying I can impress enough to get them to offer me a proper job.
Interviewing is a costly process, employers can't interview everyone out there that might want a job.
Frankly what's wrong with a lot of people is that they have an expectation that they deserve to be handed a job on a plate, which they don't. If you're not getting interviews, then you need to lower your sights, or word your CV better.
What you don't need to do is lie. Obviously if you're a selfish bastard who doesn't mind taking a job that someone else has actually worked hard for, then that's going to be between you and whatever interviewer that you manage to fool. Personally I'd set the questions to weed out people who just think that they can blag it.
And yeah, I would have someone sacked for lying.
Well, that surely is taken as read tbh.
However, I don't think potential employers look at fonts and go "oh, he bought his". If you want a font that may stand out then there are loads that you can get on t'internet that are free (and legal!)
Back to the original thread, you should not need to lie on your CV or to an interviewer. If you find yourself in a position that this is the only way you are able to get a job you are setting your sights too high.
Fair point. But then again, using Comic Sans anywhere warrants being shot.