Job hunting for a year and I need help!

[coachinghelp]

I've never found it hard to find a job before but I've been looking for a year and I'm getting really down about it.

I'm mid-40s. I have an Oxbridge degree and MA. Between 2002 and 2019 I have an unbroken work history in the charity sector — from 2011-19 this was at senior management level, my last role in this period was as Marketing & Fundraising Director at a small-to-medium well-regarded charity.

I relocated in 2019 from London to another large city. Since then, I’ve been self-employed as a Marketing & Fundraising consultant, working for charities - I’ve had 15-20 decent clients and I’m pretty pleased with how it’s all going. I joined a really well respected organisation’s board and spent a 5 year term on there.

I’ve interspersed this with some part time contract roles - 2 fixed term maternity covers and 1 which I left voluntarily 18 months ago on amicable terms. Generally the contract roles have been a level below my last long-term position - manager not director - but I’m not too bothered by that. I’ve also diversified, so moved into adjacent fields like copywriting.

While self employed, I also started freelance writing and reviewing based around my field, and this is where it gets a bit weird. I’ve also edited a non fiction book which ended up doing really well, as these things go (good reviews in broadsheets, earned out its advance immediately, got invited to speak at literary festivals etc, deal for a second book). So with consultancy, writing and contract work, it gets a bit muddled. As recently as 2022 I was picking up contract work relatively easily, but nothing has bitten all year. Agents tell me my CV is “really impressive” but I don’t know if this is code for “a bit much” or something! I’ve been getting interviews, and down to the last 2 on several occasions, but nothing has worked. It’s clear that some combination of all this has made me less employable, but I’m not exactly sure what.

I know people say "just take anything" but I'm not even sure that the "anything" jobs are there for me either. I am self-employed with consultancy clients at a decent day rate, so I do have work on. I just want stability and I’m ready to go back in-house.

I'm finding it really hard to stay positive.

Is this something a career coach could help with? And how do I find one?

I would let the editing and related activities from your Cv or drop it into the hobbies section.

I think if you are contractor people expect to see that you “love” the work and perhaps the editing and speaking is creating an impression that you do the day job to pay the bills but are really focused elsewhere.

Keep it really clean and focused on your CV, you can always throw in the other skills once you are talking to someone if they become relevant.

Also not in the same sector but the contract market has been awful for the last 12-18 months. I know lots of people who have never struggled to find work who are suddenly finding it tough.

No real words of wisdom but I have been job hunting for the last 6 months and finally successful so starting new position next week. One thing I’ve gleaned is that it is a really difficult time to be job hunting- less jobs available overall compared to this time last year and also more competition for remote/hydbrid roles as not as limited to location anymore.

keep going- what’s for you won’t go by you became my mantra… something will turn up when you least expect it…

oh and apparently no boxes on your CV as the bots can’t read them…?!

Weirdly OP, I’m in a similar position to you…combination of working in the publishing industry where I was quite senior, plus experience in the third sector. I also work as a writer and have been looking for a part-time role to balance with this. Have had a few interviews, including being down to the final two - and haven’t yet got anything!

No real advice but solidarity. I do know the market is very tough out there right now, and I don’t know if companies are just making do and waiting for candidates who tick every box before hiring.

The advice to tailor your CV according to the role is good, and always do a shining letter where you say what a brilliant fit you’d be. I’m a bit confused about the editorial experience I’ve got to say (unusual for editors to speak at festivals and when you say agents, do you mean recruitment agents?) but there’s a lot of transferable skills here so not sure I’d leave it off entirely. Just make it clear that you’re not simply going to jump ship as soon as you get your own book deal or whatever :)

I would think it is the market rather than your CV. It is really tough out there.

The market is tough, so employers can pick and choose.The good news is that copilot - with a bit of judicious editing- can tailor your CV and cover letter for any job in a matter of minutes.
Like others have said, either remove the non relevant stuff or try and weave some story in about how you’re pivoting otherwise it looks like you don’t really want to do Marketing but it pays the bills.

The market is hard for 40+ and incredibly hard for 50+

Im looking desperately at the moment and feel your pain.
Keep plugging away.

Your post is confusing. What you want isn't actually very clear. So I think clarifying that and making your cv matches what you want, not what you have done, is important.

I would drop the copyrighting mentions on the CV. If I read that I'd assume you've been AI-d out of work and therefore won't be a useful addition.

You say that you are getting interviews and down to the last 2 on some occasions so your CV/applications are hooking their attention and something isn’t hitting right at interview.

Based on pmt experience recruiting roles, people get cut after interview if their verbal examples and responses don’t match up well to the CV or if they don’t present themselves as being a good fit for the team.

If I’ve read your CV and want to speak to you then it’s because it looks like you have most of the skills and experience I’m looking for. I then use the interview to validate that, so I’ll ask questions to draw out additional depth and understand what role you specifically played in the experience you listed. Often this shows up people who have ‘embellished’ their CVs, they don’t know who the audit body was that they were ISO27001 certified by, they don’t have a clear explanation of how they would draft a policy and confirm its compliance to the framework etc

Or they demonstrate personality traits or ways of working that I feel would not work well in the team or the culture of the company I work for.

Have you critically reflected on your performance at interview to see if there are any areas where you could have done better?

Thanks so much all of you, it's awful out there but good to hear I'm not alone!

@Huskyeye Yes I meant recruitment agents. I left off some details for brevity/outing reasons - I wasn't an editor in the publishing house sense, but on my book I had a front cover "edited by" credit. Am also quite an established writer (magazines etc) and wrote one of the essays in the book myself. The looking like I'm going to jump ship when I get a book deal is a fair point except that even a £30k advance only gets you about £6500 upfront.

@Stripeysockspots Well, I didn't say what I wanted, just wanted to say that I was finding it hard. Copywriting is only one of several skills, and I think the problem is probably that I do too many things.

@InfoSecInTheCity Thanks, I think this is hitting the nail on the head. As you say, I'm getting the interviews so although my CV could be more focused, it's essentially doing the job.I 've never struggled at interview before, and had previously always found that getting the interview was the difficult part - so this is a bitter pill! A lot of the feedback I've had is like "we were really impressed by your skills and experience, but someone else was a closer fit for what the team needs right now".

In general, I think I'm struggling to present myself in a nutshell, in that elevator pitch way, and answer the "why me, why now" question. It feels like people don't want to consider transferable skills right now when someone else could be a perfect fit.

I think one thing I'm conscious of at interview is that my senior team leadership experience is 5+ years old now. I'm wary of drawing on too-old examples. I think in my interview answers I've been trying to give them the whole picture of who I am, where I just need to be more stepford wife "what do they want me to say", perhaps.

I did find my career coach really helped with my elevator pitch as well as just refining what I was going after and why.

A good career coach is amazing. There are lots of poor ones out there though.

In an interview the interviewees only have a short period of time to pick between the candidates, so your focus absolutely has to be why you are the best person for the job.

For my last successful interview, I bought the book “Why You” and came up with focused answers for all the questions, weaving in a bit about the company I was applying for where possible.

It’s hardly Stepford wives to position yourself as the absolute best fit for the role that you can be. Interviews are a process, just like writing a CV or covering letter.

My sense is from your last post that you are maybe giving off a slight ambivalence for the roles. Most employers would rather have someone who is an 80% fit but 100% wanting to work at their organisation in that role. Therefore for future interviews even if you don’t absolutely see yourself there in the long term, you need to act as if you do and this is a perfect fit for you.

I wonder if it has anything to do with charities and purpose driven orgs in particular looking to ‘balance the books’ on diversity and recruitment. Your success / oxbridge degree might actually be holding you back. Nothing you can do about that, so I’d focus on ‘fit’ - understand the business, culture - down to the dress code and like you said, give them what they want to hear.

On a side note, I’ve noticed since Covid there is a an undercurrent of job insecurity and we (not me, but our business) seem to recruit down - I think there’s a definite negative bias to recruiting someone better qualified/more successful than the hirer - and at your level, this might be the case. Maybe only put on your CV/ talk about the experience specific to the job role.

Sorry, not much help, but best of luck.

@Fitzcarraldo353 Ah, I'd love to hear more about this! How did you find yours, and what brief did you give them? I feel like I need help to make me make sense.

@rookiemere I'm not sure where you get the impression I'm ambivalent, because I'm not, but if other people are getting that impression too then it must be coming from somewhere! I do feel like it's almost like people are suspicious of me or something? I've always been quite a jolly colleague who gets on well with people and I haven't had this before, so it feels weird.

In terms of subject matter, I do try and get my passion across. I've worked across a number of briefs (education, climate, arts, children's) which intersect with each other, but I always try to bring the most relevant one to the forefront.

@sunnysiders Yes possibly, bless you for saying that, I certainly don't feel very successful! I never mention where I went to university because it's cringe although obviously it's on there unless they do blind recruitment, so doubt it's that particularly...but I think there's maybe something about seniority/age/life stage making me hard to read or hard to picture in the role? It's maddening though because I've gone for some 6-month interim posts recently so why that would be an issue for those ones is beyond me.

@coachinghelpit comes across in your opening post where you mention wanting a permanent post for stability and calling answering interview questions with a format being “stepford wives”.

It feels like unconsciously you might be giving the impression that you currently have all these exciting options in play, but you need a permanent job to pay the bills. I don’t know, only you know how the interviews went. Competition is so fierce these days that you have to absolutely nail it in that hour and any mixed emotions on your part may well be leaking through in your answers.

@rookiemere OK cool. Obviously I know about format answers, STAR etc. I meant that answering an interview question with "what they want to hear" is a bit Stepford Wives - as in, giving them only what they want to hear, rather than an honest answer about who I am. For example, I have combined six years of senior leadership in fundraising. But I also have 15 years experience in marketing. If I go for a fundraising job that requires 3+ years experience in fundraising, then OK, great, I have that. But I've been trying to paint a picture where I can say "and my added marketing experience is also useful because..." - where, perhaps, telling them what they want to hear would be to only talk about the fundraising aspect of my career. Just as an example.

I agree with rookiemere

You need to play the game a bit more - this job in this company is the most rewarding and brilliant job in the world and you would be lucky to have it.

@CatsMagic Hahaha, I mean I do say those words! Maybe they're not convincing enough. I have been (truthfully) saying that after a few years of self-employment I've valued the range of experience it's given me but I am really looking for an opportunity to contribute to XYZ FIELD as part of a team (++ say some stuff about their work specifically). I kind of felt like that was fair enough, especially for an interim contract?

It is tricky to pitch yourself correctly, especially if you have a wide range of experience from different fields, which it sounds like you do.

The other challenge is going from self employed to being an employee-it could help you to address this in the interview even if you are not asked directly , so talk about why being an employee is now important to you, you can tie that in quite smoothly with why the company’s values and standards/mission statement aligns with your own values /appeals to you.

I can only speak to what I’m looking for but I don’t care about all the ‘gosh I’m sooooo excited to work for this company’ stuff. I am looking for people who meet the values and competencies. So right now I’m recruiting for a GRC lead analyst. I need someone who can turn Information Security into relatable information, who can engage with stakeholders across the business most of whom think Security is (a) someone else’s job, (b) boring (C) too technical for them to understand (D) Unimportant. I need someone who knows the various frameworks inside out, who is self motivated, capable of keeping on top of a busy and ever-changing workload with lots of high priority items, who can deal with small details without getting lost in them, who can not take life too seriously because honestly with the amount of URGENT! THREATS! Type of stuff we deal with if you get too affected by it you burn out.

Thats how I use the interview, to identify if they can be a person who can handle the job without causing me a load of extra work and if they can integrate well into the team and wider business. You need to understand what your interviewer is looking for from the Person Spec and company info and do your best to put that side of yourself across.

Also if you have over-emphasised your role in any of the stuff on your CV at least do your interviewer the courtesy of researching it enough before the interview to sound knowledgeable. It’s incredibly frustrating to read on a CV that someone has done everything you need them to have done and then realise within 2 mins of speaking to them that it was all a bunch of of lies.

@InfoSecInTheCity Thanks, it's really helpful to hear from a senior level recruiter albeit one in a different field. I'll keep all that in mind. I don't think over-emphasising my role in anything is a problem here, if anything I go too far the other way because I want to look like I'm still a team player. I bet it's a real problem in tech roles but in my field it's more like either you led a rebrand or you didn't, you led a team of 6 bringing in £1.5m a year, or you didn't.

@CatsMagic Good point, I've been answering the question of being self employed when asked but maybe I should be more pro-active and head this off!

(My reasons for wanting an employed job are, in no particular order: sick of being self-employed (unstable, lonely, hustle), the jobs i'm applying for are genuinely interesting, would like more money, would like more career progression, no longer require extreme flexibility now dc older primary age.)

I’ve interviewed a few people in what I’d guess is an equivalent situation to you in a different field.

One thing that might need to keep in mind is that more and more recruitment goes through fairly tick box scoring criteria.

In each case, their application & CV ticked enough of the boxes to get to interview.
Then in their interviews, they didn’t actually do a particularly great job at answering the question asked. We’ve generally been hiring for senior technical roles, but they’re very much doing the activity / review roles rather than managing the activity or the review roles. In interview, the very experienced contracting / self employed / consultancy individuals often describe how they managed a team that……, or how they’d ensure that …….. got done. Whereas the scoring criteria we’re using are looking for ‘doing’ it. The candidate basically answered the question in the way the mark scheme would be looking for a candidate for my job or my bosses job to answer it rather than the role they’re applying for.

On brutal scoring criteria, it means they don’t necessarily come out very well. Even though it’s fairly obvious they would be capable.

Sometimes they come across as dripping with ‘stop gap or fall back plan’, which we can’t score against but on tight scores doesn’t help. Sometimes they come across as not going to work well in the team because they’re used to being in charge and managing rather than doing, or that they see it as a stepping stone. Again, cant mark against that but it doesn’t help the undertone stuff. Some managers would love to recruit someone into their team who could do the managers job in their sleep. Others really won’t want that fit.

I don’t think there’s a magic solution, but maybe helps with reading the room a bit and tailoring responses to the role description. Some places will probably love the multi talented, getting more than paying for angle. Others will see it as disruptive or flighty.

Good luck!

(Also, for places where you think it might not help, you can drop where the degree is from when you’re over 40. When I worked on sites, I went to uni in ‘England’, or when pushed east of England, where it’s remarkably dry).

@ScaryM0nster Uh-oh! We're onto something! This really rings true...

"We’ve generally been hiring for senior technical roles, but they’re very much doing the activity / review roles rather than managing the activity or the review roles. In interview, the very experienced contracting / self employed / consultancy individuals often describe how they managed a team that……, or how they’d ensure that …….. got done. Whereas the scoring criteria we’re using are looking for ‘doing’ it. The candidate basically answered the question in the way the mark scheme would be looking for a candidate for my job or my bosses job to answer it rather than the role they’re applying for."

So, one thing I find awkward, is in several consultancy roles I get hired at a certain rate to, say, write a direct marketing strategy for X fundraising scheme. Then what often happens is the in-house team don't quite have the capacity to deliver it so they say "would you come back and write the leaflet/design the instagram posts/brief the videographers" etc. And I say, of course, that's fine - more than happy to help, I don't mind getting my hands dirty, and they're paying me the same day rate as they are for strategy. But I find it awkward to explain that at interview - am I a senior strategy person or am I someone who's still doing regular delivery? I don't want to look more junior than I am, and sometimes I'm going for senior roles. But also I AM still fine doing delivery stuff. So I never know how to present myself and, if anything, I play down the delivery. Maybe I shouldn't!

I guess the writing/published work success story is great, but probably not necessarily transferrable to a corporate or non writing role.

I would say just try and focus on things in the theme of the job at hand. Anything impressive but in a totally different field needn't be included, at least not in detail.

If you go for anything publishing, writing, journalism related then big up that side and minimise the other less relevant things.