Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2012, during Spain’s employment crisis. The job portals it names, such as Infojobs.net and infoempleo.com, reflect that time, and some may no longer exist. Its forecast of no job creation until 2013-2014 has passed; Spanish unemployment peaked in 2013.
Companies are cutting staff and unemployment is rising. As finding a job gets considerably harder, more and more job portals spring up offering the chance to land that elusive job that never seems to come. Perhaps the best known are Infojobs.net, trabajo.com and infoempleo.com. Unemployment has rained down on everyone alike: labourers and executives suffer the consequences in the same way. They all have one thing in common: these days job offers are published online, so actively searching through job portals becomes essential.
Once people start actively looking for work and sign up to every single job portal, they soon come up against reality: their CV will rarely be seen by the company they’ve applied to. For a management position at a company that demands a high level of training and several languages, the company may well receive more than 900 CVs from candidates. The truth is that it will rarely look at more than 150 profiles. Just getting a company to see your profile is like winning a kind of lottery.
Another problem candidates face on job portals is, of course, the quality of the jobs themselves, because there’s no shortage of offers featuring words like “commercial contract” (in Spain, an arrangement where you work as self-employed rather than as an employee) or “freelance“. 7 out of 10 job offers with a commercial contract are jobs that only someone desperate and drowning in their situation would accept. Good job offers do exist, of course; they haven’t disappeared. But just as in the real world, good offers aren’t advertised: you don’t look for them, they find you.
Now there are other job portals, perhaps more focused on and specialized in particular kinds of candidate. Among the most notable are Wiseri, a job portal aimed at tech-minded candidates, and Experteer, a portal for executives looking for jobs paying more than €50,000 a year.
Of course, the question then is: “What about the worker who is neither a tech expert nor an executive?” Off the top of my head, the most honest answer I can give is that they’ve got it really tough, because all they have left are the other job portals, the ones they’ve probably been using for months or years without any result.
These days we talk about the need to have a LinkedIn profile, to turn ourselves into a brand online, and for many people that’s all fabulous, but… for a construction labourer, a waiter, a cleaner, a factory worker, a shop assistant and so on, how far does having an online presence help them catch a recruiter’s eye? The answer is that it doesn’t help at all, and these are precisely the people swelling the unemployment figures.
That’s why you can’t tell these people to carry out a networking strategy; in fact, all you can do is wish them luck in their job search. It’s not a pessimistic message, because the good news is that if you can’t find a job, you can always create one. If we go by the statistics, jobs probably won’t be created until 2013–2014, so if I had to give one honest piece of advice, it would be that it’s easier to start your own business than to find a job.
Over time we’ve shared real examples and stories of people who, faced with a desperate financial situation, had no choice but to start a business of their own. “In this life there comes a moment when you only have two options: either you take the risk and try, or you’re sure to lose.”
We can’t give you the secret to finding a job, but I’m sure we can help you start your own business, whatever sector you work in. Take a look at our business ideas and entrepreneurship articles, where I hope you’ll find something that sparks your interest or makes a light bulb go on.
“A man cannot directly choose his circumstances, but he can choose his thoughts, and so indirectly, yet surely, shape his circumstances.” James Allen
Featured image: Jamain, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
