When A Persevering Job Applicant Gets Refused 1,000 Times…

Finding a job nowadays is not such a complicated process as it was a couple of years before. The easiest way to do it is to register your Curriculum Vitae on a Job Recruitment On-line service and the change from an un employee to an employee will be just a matter of time. But what happens when this time seems to become endless?

Andrew Allerton is a guy of 56 years old who is having constant problems in finding himself a job. Being a qualified mechanical engineer, with a degree in math and engineering from the Open University and HND in computer aided engineering and a City and Guilds teaching certificate, he still finds the road to employment a difficult way.

Normally, you would say that it is absolutely impossible that from 1,000 shots to be employed, Andrew Allerton finds himself at the present without a job. Not even a single company that he applied at contact him in order to set an interview or to show some interest in his services. Now, the reasons for this may be either that he didn’t know how “to sell” himself as an employee, either he is being discriminated on the basis of his age. Taking into consideration though, the large number of times that he did tried to get a job, it is very difficult to sustain our first hypothesis and therefore, the only lead that is still available to us is the one related to the age. At least that’s what he realized after those unsuccessful shots to get a paid job: "It really is unbelievable. I am desperate to work and my age should not be a barrier."

In his experience, Andrew Allerton finds that employers didn’t even bother to call people to say even as little as this: “You have been unsuccessful…” He thus says: "What annoys me most is I've written for 300 jobs with councils and they don't even have the courtesy to send a letter saying I've been unsuccessful. It's really disheartening not to get a reply and it makes you wonder if my age is a factor. I just want a permanent job with a steady wage. I don't know what more I can do."

From North Tyneside council, where he applied for not fewer than 150 jobs, an official explained: "It is our policy not to respond to unsuccessful applicants. We can receive hundreds of applications so it is far more cost effective to operate in this way.”

Even if we can try to imagine that we do understand the companies policies with respect to that, is it Andrew Allerton a single case of an un employee or is it just that the discrimination has become something common in our era?