job hunting

So my job hunting has continued, obviously without success.

It's been odd, actually.  I've had a reasonable number of interviews with a mixture of face-to-face and telephone-based, but I've been struck that most of these haven't felt "fully formed".

When I was looking before and going to interviews, it felt much clearer that the organisations I was talking to had a clear idea what they wanted.  Obviously I'm not saying that they pre-decided who they wanted, but I mean they had a clear idea that they wanted a bid manager and were either keen to explore if someone from a different sector could fit or already appreciated that they could.

This is one of the key things that's causing my search to be longer - I am very keen to move into a different sector.  The problem this time is that I seem to be encountering lots of people/organisations that don't really have a clear feeling about quite what they want, but then having been through some interviews, they then decided "no, we want someone with experience in our sector."

Now I've no problem with them wanting that experience, it's just that it's quite a big waste of my time, money and holiday (all of which are in short supply) if they're bimbling around not really knowing what they want.

And it's quite clear that they don't have any real clue.  Two of the interviews I went to in person (one in Essex, and one in Knutsford, so pretty excessive travel) I've seen the jobs being re-advertised several times since.

Or at least, they seem to have come to the decision that they want someone with experience in their sector.  But the problem there is we're talking sometimes talking about such a specific sector that there basically isn't anyone in the country.

It boils down to a combination of a lack of bravery ("as in let's take a chance" - these organisations are all coming across as quite risk averse) but also, mainly, I think, a lack of understanding of the generalist nature of a Bid Manager's skill set.  It's like Project Management - it's a fully-transferrable skill-set: if you can manage one thing, you can manage anything.  But they don't appreciate that, and I think a big part of that is because they don't really understand bid management themselves, and certainly don't appear to have properly defined and established processes.

Which is the flip-side: in all honesty, I'm kind of glad none of these have gone any further, as I've had red flags being hoisted at each interview.  One of the big advantages of where I currently work is we do a lot of things badly, and I find a lot of frustrating, so I know what I'm looking for in terms of things I don't want.

Of course the other aspect of going back to job hunting is that I'm having to deal with employment agencies again.  Quite why companies don't just place the job adverts themselves, I don't know, but the thing nowadays seems to be to use job agents.  They're basically on a par with estate agents and used car salesmen, in my opinion.  I mean, you get the odd one that's okay, but generally you're talking about a bunch of people who are only interested in getting their commission, and they don't really give a shit about things like never telling you you've been unsuccessful following a job interview.