One man’s epic and frustrating adventures in the Wellington job market.

I was informed my job was going to be cut in July 2022, and did not get a full-time role again until August 2024. During that period, I was on the dole for 10 months and did odd jobs and some contracting. I looked at over 500 jobs, applied for about 120 of those, and got 12 interviews. This is my story.

Why I started looking before I was let go

In January 2022, after coming back from my holiday break, I started looking for a new job. The previous year had gone well from my perspective – my team had been delivering high quality work, and our customers were happier than ever.

But the behaviour of my boss wasn’t great. He’d never given me any positive feedback on my work since I’d started in 2017, was highly directive, and was constantly rewriting the reports I produced, mostly poorly. It was time to move on, but like a lot of tech companies a restructuring came around first and my role ended in October 2022.

My job application purgatory

My first interview, back in January 2022, was for a senior role at a software company. Even though the company was based in the same town, they opted for an interview over video. This seemed odd given that the position included a high degree of coaching, but they had some interesting questions which I had no trouble answering. I did not progress, and the feedback I got was not very helpful – I lacked empathetic listening skills. I am not sure how anyone can make that call after a 45-minute job interview where you are asked to do the talking, so I didn’t take it too hard.

Another interview, in December 2022, was for a tier three role in a large state-owned entity. The interview went extremely well, but the job was subsequently withdrawn and changed to a fixed term contract. My contact in the company said that the boss had been converting real roles to contracts and giving them to his mates.

This was the first time I’d seen such a blatant example of the old boys’ network at play, and sadly it was not the last. This surely must be concerning to the CEOs of those companies, if they even know about it, because good candidates were being passed over, and in some cases unsuitable people were being hired for these roles.

January and February 2023 were pretty dead in the job market, and while I did check Seek every day, there were only a few things to apply for at my level, so I took a stay-cation to conserve funds.

In March I applied for a role via an executive recruitment company. Having been on panels for executive positions I had a pretty good idea of how a good process is supposed to run.

In this case, the recruiter was unable to send an information pack about the role, suggesting a look at the company website in the meantime. He eventually provided a draft version, which was full of mistakes, promising a final version “shortly”. That never came. I wrote a cover letter, but was asked to send an email instead with 12 bullet points stating how I met the requirements instead on the basis that they had over 50 applications to get through.

After sending this, and my CV, I got a brief email thanking me, saying that a timeline for the process would follow. I heard nothing more from the recruiter, eventually hearing via the grapevine that an appointment had been made. When I contacted him, he claimed that an email had been sent. Other candidates I knew told me no emails had been sent to any of them either.

Apart from the damage to the recruitment company’s reputation, this also harms the brand of the company they are working for. Sadly, this kind of behaviour was a common pattern among both agencies and in-house recruiters, and as a job-hunter you aren’t in a position to complain about it.

In April I was fortunate to apply for a role via an agency with staff who actually do their job, and got through to an interview. The agency rep was fantastic and was everything you’d want from both a candidate and company perspective – friendly but professional, open communication, supportive. He gave me good feedback on my cover letter and on how to adjust my CV to better highlight what was required for the role. I didn’t get the job, but the recruiter kept in touch giving me updates on market conditions (worsening) and general advice.

I noticed that a few Wellington agencies have clusters of staff like this, and working with them as a candidate makes a real difference.

Applying to – and getting rejected by – Winz

By May I had almost run out of money, and contacted MSD to apply for Jobseeker support, but they turned me down because they thought I earned too much. When I asked my case manager for help and a copy of the income calculation, she ghosted me. I eventually had to make a Privacy Act request, which they lost, asking for another 20 days on the grounds that they only just found out about it!

Once I had the information, I discovered multiple mistakes in their calculations, which added more than $50k to my low income. I appealed immediately, but their internal review upheld the decision, endorsing the incorrect calculations. The next step was to go to a benefits review committee which took 9 months, and while they paid me some money, I am still wating for the balance 18 months later.

After spending many months dealing with MSD, it is clear that they are not equipped to deal with executive-level clients. They require that you apply for any role you could reasonably undertake, which meant I had to apply for many junior positions and be repeatedly told that I was too senior (in age and/or experience) for these roles. The MSD system is very wasteful in this regard. 

Casual work

Because the incoming government had signalled job cuts, the market was very lean and awash with large numbers of contractors looking for work. Some of the roles I applied for had several hundred applicants. As an experienced executive I was eventually able to pick up some casual consulting work from October 2023 and this expanded over the following months. This kept me going until I picked up a senior role in August 2024, seeing off over 200 other applicants, which I was told was a typical number for all roles at that time.

Lessons learnt

It was tempting to name names in this story. There are some recruiters who, frankly, should find other work, and some companies that should close. Their transactional, volume-based approach is degrading for candidates and adds no value for their clients. Those looking for employees would be better off doing it themselves, engaging a specialist who can work with their in-house team if needed. 

Some of the government departments I applied to were among the worst recruitment experiences. The lack of clear information about the purpose of a role (for example), lack of salary information, poor or non-existent comms, no timelines, and poor interviewing were just some of the problems.

At one private company the recruiter conceded that I was a perfect match for the role, but that I would not be getting an interview because the company wanted to make a “diversity hire”. That is illegal, of course, but like many job seekers I was powerless to do anything about it. But word gets around, and the reputation of this company (and recruiter) is now toast as far as I am concerned.

Many recruiters (internal and agency) seem to have missed that recruitment is a two-way street; you are being assessed by the candidate too. The recruitment process is the first experience candidates have of the culture of the company, and in the face of other offers it will be a factor they consider. 

The first lesson during this time is that failure to progress in a job application is never about you as a person. You are probably able to do the job you applied for, but you can never really know what they are looking for, and what biases exist. The hiring process is far from perfect.

The second thing I learnt is to keep moving forward. It’s easy to get bogged down in the failures, when the cause of failure is generally not yours.

The third is that you have more skills than you realise, and that you can successfully apply them outside your specialisation. The casual work I did was sometimes very far from my “main thing”, but I was still able to do a good job, and took more satisfaction from that work than I expected. It also gave me a chance to review my leadership style.

Overall, this was a chance to meet a lot of new and interesting people, and to grow as a person.