The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Unemployed at 45 Ash Nallawalla ash@melbpc.org.au

Aged 45, I was unemployed for the better part of 15 months. There were small projects here and there, but that permanent job proved to be elusive. Many people who know me were baffled by my inability to find a job; the answer to that mystery will never be found. While it is fresh in my mind, I will endeavour to share my experience in the hope of helping others.

Redundancy

Being made redundant, retrenched, laid off, downsized -all euphemisms for losing one's job involuntarily and all equally painful. Sadly, there is every indication that we will see more of this in the future.

This was my second experience of redundancy. Early one June morning, I was surprised to see my Sydney-based boss in my office, unannounced. Before I had time to think, I was given the bad news. "Please clear out your desk within 30 minutes." My e-mail access had gone, but I stretched those 30 minutes into a couple of hours. I knew I had several unfinished tasks, and I took the time to jot down notes to my successors, which also helped to calm me down.

Early warning radar

Get to know how well your company is doing. Ask yourself how long could you survive financially if you lost your job without warning. What type of package can you expect from your employer? Only you can answer those questions and make allowances for a financial buffer.

I had misread the warning signs because our Australian subsidiary had been doing well, compared to others. It did not occur to me that we would be downsized to save the distant parent company. Some weeks after I left, four others were retrenched, without the benefit of the "package" that I received. Over the past months, I have noticed this happening to some other multinational IT companies too.

If your employer's future looks bleak, would you be better off lending your shoulder to the wheel, perhaps helping to save your own job, or look for a new employer?

I recommend finding a new job. For inexplicable reasons, you have more credibility when you apply while you are employed than when you are not. Once you are unemployed, the matter of redundancy is irrelevant to your prospective employer, but the state of unemployment reflects on your ability to be employed.

Outplacement

I was fortunate to be referred to an out-placement service - Morgan & Banks (M&B) - by my former employer. This is a once-off paid service for the employer but completely free and limitless for the former employee. M&B offers you a handful of relevant short courses, a personal counsellor, PCs, printers, desks, Internet access, copier, postage for your applications, and more. The courses helped me to polish my resume, recognise my strengths and weaknesses, learn job-seeking techniques, and provided me with an "office" in the city. I could reserve a cubicle, which contains a telephone and PC with word processing and Internet software, or I could have the M&B receptionist take messages for me. City parking is very expensive, so taking public transport is advisable.

Centrelink

I registered with the former Commonwealth Employment Service (CES) and Centrelink within hours of being laid off, because payments start on the day you apply. Be sure to have a list of your assets in a handy location, for you will be filling out a few forms. Keep a copy of the completed forms, in case you need to re-apply. This happens if you leave the country for any duration. Even if you warn Centrelink in advance, the Immigration Department's computer will detect your departure and you'll receive a rather triumphant-sounding, "Gotcha!" letter some weeks later, asking you to explain your absence. You have to ring Centrelink and ask them to look at your computer record where you point out that you did tell them before you left, right? "Oh, yes, you are right, Sir, please disregard the notice."

It does not matter if you have to leave the country for a funeral or a job interview--the government has deemed that you cease your relationship with Centrelink when you depart. When you return, you re-apply almost from scratch. I am sure the procedure was designed to catch rorters and to create full employment for the departments, but it does not help the genuine cases. I heard about an unemployed pilot who got the occasional one-trip contract as a reliever and he had to re-apply every time he returned.

My advice is to not leave the country even if someone else is paying for the trip. The grief is not worth it and Centrelink staff have better things to do. One would think that they could merely dock your dole for the duration of your trip but that would be too easy, wouldn't it?

When you are on a Job Search Allowance, you have to keep a diary for the first six weeks and you list your search efforts. You also fill out a form once a fortnight with the same information and other information about your situation. I missed out on the Telstra share offer because I thought I wasn't supposed to be able to afford shares. I learnt later that I could have bought the shares without affecting my entitlement.

Even after completing the diary, you are strongly advised to keep details of your searches. There are two reasons for this. The first is the relatively trivial reason of being able to repeat the list of jobs you applied for in the past six weeks--occasionally you get a special form. The more important reason is that you need to keep a list of your efforts so that you can make notes about each application--did you get an interview, a second interview, any response at all, and so on.

IT jobs

I don't have a "solid" history in one industry and that is perhaps my handicap. My first seven years as an accountant are best described as a bad choice of first degree. My eight years as a RAAF officer included a significant element of computing, so I left them to get a Graduate Diploma of Computing from Deakin University and join the IT industry. Without going into my detailed career history, suffice it to say that I wanted to be a Product Manager, which is at the marketing end of the IT business. That was my last role and I was very happy there.

Many "ideal" vacancies came and went, beyond my grasp because the client had mandated a Marketing degree. This is true of many Melbourne-based IT manufacturers and their loss was my loss. Sometimes, these are elimination criteria more so than selection criteria. If I did further studies, it would be a Master of Business Administration in Marketing.

Melbourne does not have as many IT vendors as does Sydney, so we begin with a smaller selection of vacancies. There are more IT vacancies advertised in The Australian than The Age, and most of the jobs are in Sydney. Most of the (few) product manager jobs were in Sydney, so I was also applying for other roles that I had performed in my career, such as project manager and technical writer-editor.

Applying for an interstate or overseas job is a greater challenge than a local one. Not only do they have to fly you to an interview (or fly someone to interview you) but you are more expensive to re-locate than a local candidate. You would need to be really good to get such a job. Jobs in the Middle-East are relatively easy to get, but be sure to ask for a list of conditions imposed on foreign workers before wasting time applying for a position.

The elimination game

This has been the first time I have had to look for a job "seriously"; namely, the earlier ones had been very easy to get. The current theory about writing a good resume is that it should be tailored for the job; it should be four pages at the most; and it should only cover the past ten years of your career. I will mention later why this can work against you.

Too much detail in your resume gives the recruiter more opportunities to eliminate you. Hence, you should only mention your experiences that directly relate to the vacancy, even if you spent more time doing other things.

Many IT vacancies attract dozens, sometimes hundreds, of applicants, so your objective is to get into the short list. A tailored resume is a good start, but it is not enough, for you have to attract the attention of the recruiter, typically an external agency.

Understanding recruiters

Recruiters seem to come in two flavours. There is the younger type, who was probably hired as a graduate and then there is the seasoned veteran who has worked in some segment of the IT industry. I preferred the latter type, as I felt they knew the subject matter, whereas the former were likely to skim your resume for keywords and possibly fail to recognise your potential.

Recruiters work for the client, not you. Hence they will not take a risk based on your potential capacity when it is easier to pick someone else who has done the same type of work before. As an example, although I worked as a senior technical editor, supervised technical writers, and am up-to-date with the tools used in that profession, I had a near-zero interview rate when applying for technical writer positions. I topped the technical writer's course at RMIT, but as I didn't have such a job description in my resume, it simply did not matter. As I wasn't seriously trying to get back into that tax bracket, I didn't try to "tailor" my resume accordingly.

Applying technology

My initial applications were often sent by fax, until I noticed at one interview how ghastly the faxed version looked. The majority of recruiters can handle e-mailed attachments, so most of my applications were sent from the comfort of home at no cost. It was rare to send one by post.

Unfortunately, a minority of these recruiters is not computer literate enough or their e-mail gateways are antiquated. Some are still using "Word 6" (predates Office 95, which is "Word 7", while Office 97 was "Word 8"). One of them stumped me when he said I was sending a Word 8 file, not Word 6. I was using the former, but I would take the file to a "Word 7" PC and re-save it in that format. Finally, a patient recruiter at that firm agreed to humour me when I sent several messages, each configured differently.

The solution for that agency was for me to set the e-mail attachment encoding method to "uuencode" mode, not the default "MIME" mode. The mail gateway there pre-dated MIME.

The confusion arises because the formats for Word 6 and Word 7 were mutually compatible and are shown as "Word 6.0/95" in the Save As dialog box of the current version.

At the same agency, another recruiter once rang me to say that he didn't know how to open a .TXT file, so I had to send it to him in Word 6 format. I shudder when I think that these people are high-profile IT recruiters.

Most recruiters have a Web site, ranging from the atrocious to the bleeding edge; very few can be described as impressive. As has been alleged about print advertisements for some time, some of the online advertisements have been long filled. Visit some of them two months apart and see how many earlier vacancies are still displayed. When I questioned one of these agencies, they said that this is done because some clients have an ongoing need for certain positions. Yeah, right.

There are a few job-search sites in Australia and abroad that will scan new vacancies for your keywords and e-mail you the URLs of those vacancies. I haven't found one that I can recommend, unless you don't mind wading through mostly irrelevant notifications.

Most agencies use a single e-mail address for all incoming mail. This is sometimes set to send an automated response, which can be confusing to you if you are not applying for a position but are writing a follow-up message. One agency uses a single address because they have a part-timer who checks each attachment for viruses. (I hope she doesn't have to process each file manually.)

Should you have a Web site that includes your resume? That is up to you, but my experience is that you may get some curious visitors but not potential employers. Should you upload your resume to some Web site or post it to a job newsgroup? I did not try the latter but leaving it at a few resume sites resulted in not one enquiry.

The application

There is no substitute for paper applications sent in a flat, well-protected envelope. Often the journey of your envelope is beyond your control, but for some positions I hand-delivered my application to the front desk of the company. I heard that some applicants are sending resumes on a CD-ROM but every interviewer I spoke to about it was annoyed by these resumes. A CD-ROM is suitable as an optional extra tool if you are applying for a multimedia position, else it could be a liability. Few of the recruiters appear to have PCs capable of running a multimedia application.

Your resume must have a one-page covering letter and it is worth asking someone else to check every application before you send it. I made at least two such errors. In one case I sent a badly cut-and-pasted resume that had several conflicting "objectives". That was a case of not deleting conflicting comments from my master resume. In the other example, I used a previous letter as my starting point but I forgot to edit out the name of the first company and position.

Getting shortlisted

I must have applied for hundreds of positions, which included many slightly beyond my skill set. I did not attend the M&B courses for a full year because I thought they'd be a bit of a joke and I believed I had a "good" nine-page resume. My RAAF experience included personnel staffing and interviewing, so I thought I knew it all. In hindsight, this was a serious error of judgment on my part.

My resume had simply grown over the years and it had not occurred to me that an employer isn't much interested in what I had done more than five years ago. The problem here is that only recent experience seems to count (unless you are a former COBOL programmer whose skills are needed for the Y2K crisis), so it seemed to make me a less attractive candidate for, say, an editorial role.

The tailored resume will increase your chances of being shortlisted but there is one hazard. Many agencies genuinely keep your resume for future vacancies and I suspect that some merely say that they do. If you have had a varied career like me, you are more likely to have more than one tailored master resume. So, if you sent your "project manager" resume, you may miss out on that "product manager" job that comes up at the same agency. You need to send an "updated" resume when you see the vacancy.

Cold calls

"Cold calling" did not work for me. When I was laid off, I wrote to all the major IT vendors I could think of. Most did not respond. I can relate to this, as one of my previous employers used to get job enquiries almost on a daily basis, so they rarely got past the receptionist. I knew some of the local vendor staff and I tried the direct approach. The response ranged from a complete lack of acknowledgment to a polite evasion. I even offered to work two days a week without payment (that is the limit set by Centrelink), but they did not take me up. This might work for you if you are a student.

Interviews

My interview-to-application ratio was about 1 in 10, clearly not as good as I would have liked. The advice given to interviewees by various sources is fairly identical--dress appropriately, be honest, project confidence, be well prepared, and so on.

Being prepared is getting easier, thanks to the power of the Web. A company's annual reports, product portfolio, its competitors, share price, news reports and so on are all easy to find. Do this research before sending that application and do some more before each interview.

In hindsight, I can say that the interview that lands you the job will be significantly different from the ones you failed. I had only three "second interviews", namely a follow-up interview of two or three of the short list candidates.

An interesting theory I read recently was that removing one's jacket before the interview has helped many people to win the job. Apparently, this tactic shows that you are willing to roll up your sleeves and get on with the job. I did this at my successful interview, so it certainly worked for me.

Interviews that aren't

I read in another article that some employers invite you to an interview merely to meet a person with your background. This happens to more experienced candidates and probably not with recruitment agencies, who are too busy to play games.

I had two interviews (both being for junior positions in the State government) where the panel members "knew" me through this magazine or by other means. One panel had several copies of PC Update on the interview table and seemed to dwell on the time I spent on Melb PC work. I assured them that I did it in my own time. To this date I have not heard back from those interviews, in spite of written reminders, which puts their professionalism under question.

At a second interview, I was kept waiting three hours with no explanation. The receptionist told me that the interviewer was interviewing someone and could not be disturbed. I walked out of that one and I learnt later that the company hired internally after all that.

Tests

Some agencies will subject you to a battery of written tests that are designed to place you in a category. You are also interviewed but the test results are used to determine if you deserve a client interview. At an agency interview for a job at the ANZ Bank, I was scored low in verbal reasoning. This means I may not be able to understand instructions. At an earlier, day-long series of tests (conducted for a previous employer for career guidance purposes) I had ranked near the absolute top of the population norm, which is corroborated by my long association with writing and editing. I think I was a bit slow off the mark in starting the recent test and did not answer all questions. Who knows how reliable these tests are, but I suggest that an employer should not place too much reliance on their results.

If the culture fits

A phrase one often hears these days is "a culture fit". Interviewers will use this phrase to visualise you in the client's workplace. What does it mean? In my experience it means that your age must be less than that of your potential boss and of most of the team. In a US survey of IT positions, only about five percent of managers hire candidates older than themselves.

The "culture" also refers to the work practices in place. If you come from an environment that is perceived to be clock-watching, then you may not be a good fit in a workplace that needs you to work 60-hour weeks. If you come from a military background then they are likely to assume that you will bark orders and, therefore, be unlikely to "fit".

Sometimes, the client has made it clear to the recruiter that the successful candidate will be in a certain age range or sex. Just look at the faces of recent appointees in various IT magazines and judge for yourself.

As such factors are beyond your control, don't dwell on them and look at other ways to get short listed.

Networking or not working

One sometimes hears that "the majority of jobs are not advertised". While I can neither prove nor disprove this assertion, I suspect that it is a qualified statement. Some jobs are not advertised externally, such as government jobs; some are filled internally through promotion. I don't think those vacancies count if you are an outsider. Nevertheless, some jobs go to people who made it known that they were available. This is done by human networking.

If you are looking for work, you need to tell everyone who will listen. While this carries the hazard of being offered interviews for entirely inappropriate (non-IT) or junior positions, you may need to take such a job one day. Most people will assume that you have found a new position after some weeks have elapsed, so you need to remind them of your status.

Where can you network? Your workmates at previous employers are often a good starting point. Some of them would have moved on to new employers and could put in a word for you. Our user group is another great place to establish and nourish new networks--go to some SIG meetings.

When do you begin to network? I have now learnt that I should have kept alive my old networks to a better degree, as many of my former colleagues have disappeared without a trace. The lesson learnt is that networking is a constant process and it must be nurtured even when you are not consciously looking for work. Look up that former colleague before it is too late!

Mind over matter

Most members may not know that I distanced myself entirely from all Melb PC and APCUG roles when I passed the 12-month unemployment mark. I was spending too much time on those voluntary duties, but ironically, I believe I was less productive in those tasks than in my employed days. You may have noticed fewer articles written by me in that time frame. I had to be sure that I was giving job-hunting my full attention. So must you, if you are in this predicament.

About the author
Ash Nallawalla is an Honorary Life Member of this group and has held many senior positions on its Committee and this magazine. He is a product manager with a CTI and ISDN design company.

Reprinted from the November 1998 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia

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