Anyone who has been jobhunting any time in the last 10-15 years will know how much it sucks. (I'm not saying it didn't suck before that, just that that is the period across which I have experience of it.) I'm fairly fortunate in that I haven't had to go jobhunting for the best part of the past 10 years, but I remember how bad it was before and little seems to have changed. In fact, some of the adverts out there have gotten even more ridiculous.
Just this morning I spent a couple of hours looking for part-time jobs to fit around the other part-timer job that I currently hold. At the top end of the "are you serious?" scale, we have a post for a "Social Marketing Assistant", 3 days a week for the grand sum of £10,000 a year. (£16,666 full time). So very much an entry level position. Except it isn't - they required at least 1 year experience in both marketing and social media marketing. But it gets better - this is a degree level post. You have to have at least a bachelors. Assuming a regular 9-5 day, we can work out the hourly pay like so: £10,000 / (8 hours a day * 3 days a week * 52 weeks a year) = £8.01 per hour. The current minimum wage for 18-24 year olds is £7.05 and for 25+ it's £7.50, so it's barely above minimum wage for the potential candidate who has been out of university for a year getting their experience in the field, that is required for the post.
That's crazy!
But it's just as bad down at the other end of the scale - in my searches I've seen cleaning jobs with unsocialable hours, on minimum wage that are requiring a minimum of 2 years cleaning experience. TWO YEARS for minimum wage! And it's not like this is uncommon for those sorts of posts. So if after 2 years you decide to move on, a significant portion of the sector is saying "it doesn't matter where you go, there's no more money in it for you". How depressing is that?
"Please have experience for this entry-level/basic job"
This type of advertisment really pisses me off. One posting I saw for a part-time warehouse operative required a minimum of 2 years prior experience working in a warehouse. Okay, I get it, you need to be on the ball in warehouses because there's plenty of opportunities to be injured or injure someone else, but when your job posting can be boiled down to "if you are able to lift and move things, have some common sense and know how to operate a computer, you can do this job", asking for 2 years' experience is ridiculous. Every employer these days wants someone else to do all the training for them so they can just slot the new employee into the near-minimum wage vacancy with minimal effort required on their behalf. How is anyone supposed to get experience if no company wants to give them it?! The kicker about this warehouse post? It pays £8.50 per hour - about 5% more than the graduate job. Now tell me the employment market isn't messed up!
It just seems like people are being trampled by profit margins these days. Everything is about the bottom line, and it's a particularly bad time for things to be like that given the sorry state of the property market. Wages have stagnated for years while the price of "average Joe" houses have skyrocketed, but that's another rant for another day...