Ripped jeans and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt
A lot gets told to young people about how to get jobs: the clothes you should wear, what your CV should look like, what you should say, the connections you should make, the websites you should scour, but the truth is that there is no single sure-fire way to find steady employment when you get out of full-time education. It would help if there was a formula that you could stick to and come out of it with a job at the end, and sure you can follow the conventions, try, fail, and analyse your mistakes and figure out where you went wrong, but it is still a lottery.
I recognise that my story of how I got a job after university is very unique to me and that I was about as lucky as its possible to get. Maybe you’ll find it helpful, comforting, reassuring, maybe you’ll think I’m being smug. I don’t know. But this is how I did it.
Just out of university, I was depressed, living with my parents, working my supermarket job, had barely any friends or contacts and was trying to find some sort of direction.
After email blitzing for a few weeks, the first interview I had was for a placement making coffee around some graphic design agency in a trendy part of London. I showed up dressed as smart as I could afford, with my hair tied back (I still refused to cut it, even if it skewed my chances). I didn’t get it. I don’t know why. As far as I was aware I said all the right things. I probably just happened to be the second, third or fourth best person he saw that day. Travel expenses were probably the big issue. I wasn’t too cut up about it. There was no promise of a full-time position or money on offer anyway. As a graduate you’re supposed to subsist on exposure and oxygen. Apparently food is paid for with wishes and dreams when you’re 21.
My lack of experience in any kind of creative industry was probably the main issue, so I went searching for volunteer opportunities. I got so desperate for something that I could just show up to and they’d accept me without thinking too hard about whether they really wanted to take on this morose scruffy twentysomething that I ended up on Gumtree. I don’t want to slander Gumtree, but just a year before, my girlfriend had tried to buy a used iPhone on it and the seller never sent it and she never got her money back. Now whenever I see an advert for Gumtree, I roll my eyes.
I found an advert looking for volunteers for a newly established community radio station in Central London called ‘ZoneOneRadio’ — as in the radio station for zone one on the tube map. I’d only need to get off-peak return tickets to the London terminals and then walk about 40 minutes to Marelybone high street. I could just-about afford to go in every other week.
On my way in on that first Saturday induction session, I psyched myself up. I said to myself, “Okay, so you have no social skills, but you’re not going to be scared away like you were in every situation at university. This is what you want. What you’re going to do is show an interest, ask questions about them, try and connect with them on a human level. You can do this!”
Only three people showed up. I never saw the other two again.
The man leading the session was the station founder. His name was (and still is) Matthew Layton. He started talking about social media branding. He’d rented this office several months ago, around the time his two daughters were born, and had started plastering his brand all over the internet. He’d actually gotten some funding from the Mayor of London’s office.
The Mayor of London at the time was Boris Johnson. Unfortunately I have to include him a fair bit in this story, so I’ll try and make as few references to him as possible.
Anyway, I went home after the session, reassuring myself that “I did it! I went somewhere! I seemed to make a sort-of good first impression!”
The second time I showed up was the next weekend when I didn’t have a supermarket shift. Matthew was the only one in the office. He set me to work on some SEO. I went through all the shows he had on the station website and labelled them up with appropriate tags. He also introduced me to this website that made it so if you post on one social media site, it would automatically replicate the post on another one. I seemed to be doing well.
I hung around for as long as possible and started asking Matthew more questions about his setup. I liked Matthew. His voice was oddly similar to mine. He was like me, but a bit more outgoing.
I was really really pushing myself to be as sociable as possible, which is hard for introverts. Its not that we don’t care about making friends with people, its just we spend the entire experience of social interaction fighting the urge to curl up into a ball and die.
He then asked me if I wanted to go to the pub with him, which I didn’t normally do. I’m not a big fan of alcohol. I used to be into alcohol at the start of university, but it made me throw up very easily back then, so I started drinking less and less until I stopped altogether. I said yes though because some part of me said “I need to be friends with Matthew.”
We sat and talked. He asked me about what I’d been doing up until now. I told him about university. I didn’t tell him about the weird experimental student radio show that I’d done on my own and that no one listened to. I told him I basically lived on forums and that some job involving the internet would suit me. We really hit it off, and for the next few months, Matthew started tutoring me on job applications. I remember him sitting down with me for about five hours walking me through rebuilding the rather rubbish CV I’d been using up until that point. I got a few more interviews out of it. Nothing came of any of them, but I was feeling much more positive about the future. He also started teaching me how to edit audio files. He gave me the edit job on the arts show, which made sense for me because I was an arty type, but he decided that since I had what he deemed a ‘radio voice’ that it would make sense for me to host something, which I was unsure about.
Given my student radio show had been an alienating failure, my YouTube channel was trundling along at about twelve subscribers and I was well aware of its commercial faults, I was close to calling time on myself as the ‘face’ of any piece of media I put out. I thought I was too weird to ever truly get people to listen to me.
After a little bit of pushback from me, Matthew convinced me to start producing the weekly compilation show of the best moments on the station called ‘ZoneOneDigest’. I’d pick highlights and do linking narration. Nothing too full-on. Its all still available somewhere on the internet if you fancy tracking it down. Of course, whenever we sent someone to some event with the Mayor of London, I had to include a clip of Boris Johnson at the top of the show, which unfortunately renders some of these shows basically unlistenable in a modern context. I do recognise that in hindsight I did play a small part in the media’s normalisation of someone so unsuited to public office. In my defence, I didn’t have anywhere near the reach of Have I got News for You. I remember editing a clip of an interview with him at some event where he told our presenter an anecdote about the Today programme and thinking “this is bullshit. I do not believe that at all.”
Not long after this, Matthew told me he was putting me forward for a placement that had opened up in the Mayor of London’s office. Apparently they were interested in me because I ‘had long hair and a beard’. They weren’t interested in me for any of the work I was doing, it was just the appearance. Which makes sense given Boris Johnson’s qualification for political office has always been ‘he’s got silly hair’. I didn’t hear anything back from them. It was probably for the best that I didn’t get it, given, y’know.
In around October, not long after my birthday, I heard rumblings that one of our presenters was being offered a job by one of Matthew’s old university friends who ran a pharmaceutical wholesaler. The presenter was a reformed offender and had just been interviewed on the Today Programme. Unfortunately, that old university friend wasn’t sure how the UK’s pharmaceutical regulator would react to him hiring someone with a previous conviction for drug offences. As a result: when Matthew met up with his friend at some event hosted by, yes, him again, Boris Johnson, Matthew suggested the next best candidate.
I showed up at Matthew’s office on a random Wednesday. I hadn’t showered or done laundry in days. My beard was a messy overgrowth. I was wearing ripped jeans and a Led Zeppelin T-shirt that had been in use for two straight days. The second I got into the office, Matthew said “Stuart, you’ve got a job interview in two hours”. I thought it was a joke because I looked even more like a mess than usual. Then he gave me the phone number and the tube station I needed to go to and an elastic band to tie my hair back.
“You’ll be fine, trust me.”
In the midst of having about nine different breakdowns all at once, I somehow managed to get myself to the tube station I needed to get to, and found the building. I phoned the number and said “Hi, I’m Stuart, Matthew’s friend,” and the man came down to meet me. He was dressed smartly, and I apologised for my appearance and explained what had just happened. He told me it was alright and that he didn’t usually wear button-up shirts to the office anyway and was only wearing it because they had someone coming for a meeting.
He took me to the café nearby and started asking me about my working relationship with Matthew. He ended up telling me that the position wasn’t open yet, but the guy they had at the time wasn’t very good and they were probably going to have to let him go. Obviously, being someone with such huge confidence issues, I was very intimidated by this, but I didn’t let it get to me. I retained that level of confidence and enthusiasm that I’d pushed myself into when I’d first met Matthew.
The man then took me up to the office and showed me around and explained what I’d be doing. A simple office, emails, phone, spreadsheet setup. Salaried position as well, and a decent one at that, not the minimum wage hourly rate that I was used to. I was still disassociating and barely taking in what was actually happening. Another guy who ended up being my colleague for 8 years told me that he remembered I seemed distant and he wasn’t too sure about me. I told him that that was because I was trying to stop myself from having a panic attack.
Anyway, Michael, the man that has now been my boss for over ten years, told me he’d call me when the position was open. When, not if.
I left, still bewildered and not quite believing that it would actually happen.
A week later, Michael phoned me and told me the job was mine. I thanked him and jumped up and down, hung up, and immediately phoned Matthew and thanked him.
Thing is though: because I still didn’t trust myself and the unusual nature of my interview, I kept my supermarket job for two weeks and worked full time at the office AND on the checkouts back home. I handed in my notice at the supermarket after the first week and then worked my last week when I gained more confidence that I could do the office job. These were the two busiest and most stressful weeks of my life, but I wanted to be secure in the knowledge that I could actually do this because the last thing I wanted was to be back on the job hunt.
Turned out I could do it, and I’ve been there ever since.
