Help Wanted

NEED A CAREER BOOST FOR THE NEW YEAR? THE PEOPLE WHO CAN TRANSFORM YOUR WORK LIFE MIGHT BE IN THE LAST PLACE YOU LOOK…

- Meg Mason

The best part of job hunting is wish-listing blazers on Net-A-Porter in the interest of interview-readiness...

…The worst part is everything else.

Trawling job sites, cold-calling recruiters, working and reworking your CV until you are screen-blind at midnight, discovering that your application has not been successful “on this occasion” via an email that’s guaranteed to arrive when you’re at your lowest emotional ebb or nailing the interview only to be ghosted instead of got-back-to-very-soon. And somehow, between each differently painful kind of no-thank-you, you’re meant to be getting out there, networking and knowing exactly what you want. No wonder 60 percent of respondents to a recent Australian labor study admitted that job hunting can be onerous, less than 40 percent felt confident about finding the right role and nearly half of participants claimed to feel more despondent the longer they looked.

The process of getting a job usually takes up to six months, the same study found. And if we’re switching jobs every 3.3 years, according to the national mean – or closer to two-and-a-half years if we’re aged between 25 and 35, 18 months if we’re under 25 – a significant portion of our professional lives will be spent uploading résumés and bleeding over cover letters.