Tuesday 28 August 2012

The Not - So - Hidden - Job - Market

A few minutes ago I typed "hidden job market" into the Google search engine. It threw up 4,200,000, (yes that is four million two hundred thousand) entries in 0.41 seconds!

If I were to pursue all those web pages, I can assure you I would be so advanced in years that finding a job would be the least of my concerns!

New immigrants, people who have been laid off, folk who are unemployed, are all apprised of the Hidden Job Market via all the communication channels available in this post modern society that we live in. They talk about it in all the workshops on Looking for Work. Human Resource professionals, market savvy authors, writers and journalists have churned out millions of pages of fluff on the subject. The number of websites devoted to helping the hapless job seeker are as numerous as the stars in the known galaxies. In simple terms, the Hidden Job Market translates to "Networking".  To put it bluntly, it means Do you Know Anyone in the Company You Are Applying to For a Job? Almost every single desirable job in Canada seems to to go to people who fulfil the criteria above. It does not matter if you are the best in your field, if you are competing against the boss's niece, guess who will get the job? At a recent interview, the smart young lady who was calling the shots, went to great lengths to reiterate that there was no "mafia" in her workplace, meaning that it was not biased in favour of any ethnic group. I thought to myself : why take such pains to deny a condition which is supposedly non-existent? Needless to add, I did not get the job. On my way home, I stopped at a gas station to fill up. A cheerful attendant chatted with me and spoke in French to my dog who was sitting at the rear of the vehicle. I asked him where he was from. He said Togo and went on to explain precisely where it was on the African continent. Togo is in West Africa, sandwiched between Ghana to the west and Benin to the east, with Burkina Faso forming the northern border and the Gulf of Guinea washing the southern shores. As he handed me my credit card back I happened to glance inside the convenience store attached to the gas station. There was a large man at the cashier's desk with the same skin pigmentation as my new friend from Togo! I made an educated guess as to his country of origin...


Networking Not Required for this Job

This means that if you are not the outgoing, Hail Fellow Well Met kind of person, the odds are stacked up against you. It means that it does not pay to be modest about your abilities, it means that if you cannot muster up the gumption to knock on doors which clearly state No Vacancy and No Soliciting, you might as well pursue a career as a Trappist monk or a cloistered nun. North America has no place for the reclusive soul, the socially challenged, the shy-by-nature creature. Yeah, I hate it as much as you!


Networking and contacts required in this industry

On my many encounters with people who had immigrated into Canada say thirty or forty years ago, I heard wondrous tales of men and women who mailed their resumes randomly like throwing darts in a pub to big corporations and government departments and were instantly rewarded with an invitation for an interview. In many cases a solid job offer followed. Alas, those happy times are mere stories to regale today's harried job hunter in between tweaking the old curriculum vitae!


Certification, networking, and luck required for this job

However, if you are not looking for a steady, full time job with a great pension plan, dental and medical benefits, three weeks or more of paid vacation, and a salary which will allow you to own a home and occasionally eat out at a restaurant slightly more expensive than MacDonald's Happy Hour, there are plenty of options. And fate would decree that this is the world I would explore when I began to live in Canada at the tender age of 46!


This job calls for latent talent, outgoing personality, self confidence, entrepreneurship and sheer perseverance!

In my next few posts I shall regale you with the agony and the ecstasy of working at jobs you can find without taking the boss's niece out to dinner...


Use of CSA certified workgloves reccomended for this job!

City permit and possibly Mafia connections required!



Many vacancies...Few candidates...APPLY NOW!

Friday 10 August 2012

What Will You Do in Canada?

Mohan and I were waiting for a train on the platform at Shepherd's Bush station in London. It was a crisp November morning in 1999 and we stood in the sun soaking up the warmth.

"What will you do in Canada?" Mohan asked me suddenly. The unexpectedness of the question took me by surprise and I gazed into the middle distance along the empty tracks pretending to spot the oncoming train. Mohan was my flight attendant friend and colleague in Air India and we were in London on a scheduled layover. We were headed for The Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew. Though November might not be the best month to see the flowers, I had never been there in spite of passing through London hundreds of times in my 22 years in the airline, and had decided that this deficiency must be rectified before I migrated to Canada.

"I know what I will not do...", I replied blithely as I searched my mind and heart for the right answer. A couple of years earlier the same question had been posed to me by Laxman, a friend who lived in the same building as me in Mumbai. Back then too I had had no answer for Laxman.

The immigration agent (or "consultant" as they prefer to be called) who was in charge of processing our application with the Canadian High Commission in New Delhi once told us an apocryphal tale about a client of his, a young educated lady from Mumbai, who, when she was asked the same question by the official at the High Commission, answered confidently,"Sir, I will do anything, even clean toilets, just let me into your country!" The consultant thought this brilliant answer had increased her chances exponentially for immigration.

I had looked aghast at the agent. Was that the level of desperation required to emigrate? Okay, even Mahatma Gandhi made it mandatory in his ashram in Wardha that all the inmates should share the task of cleaning the bucket toilets, but this was done to highlight and address a social problem which condemned members belonging to the lowest of the low castes to spend their entire lives cleaning the shit of the rest of society. I reccomend reading "Endless Filth : The Saga of the Bhangis", a book by Mari Marcel Thekaekara on the subject. The performing of menial, boring chores was also very much a part of the great Eastern traditions of teaching humility to the neophyte in search of spiritual liberation. On the other hand, as General George S.Patton  put it so eloquently, you don't want to be remembered by your grandchild for having "shovelled shit in Louisiana"! I had unclogged umpteen toilets at 30,000 feet and it did not appeal to me as a full time occupation. If dealing with human waste had been my forte, India, with its over one billion people, would be the ideal location for such a pursuit...

The question, "What will you do in Canada" lies at the heart of the dilemma faced by all immigrants into Canada. At the core of it all lies the mismatch between what Canada needs to keep the economy humming along, and the rather high standards it sets for potential immigrants : as per the "points system" the more educated you are, the better are your chances of  being admitted. On arrival however, newcomers are rejected for jobs that they apply for on the flimsy (there is no other word for it) grounds that they lack "Canadian" experience or that their credentials are not recognised in this country. This is rather ironic, because the credentials were damn well recognised when they filed their applications!

Obviously I had fallen horribly short in exercising due diligence when researching the kind of work I might be able to find in Canada. If nothing else, it would have prepared me mentally for the opportunities (or lack thereof) I would find. Every immigrant's story should serve as a cautionary tale for the next in line!

Once the driver of a taxi I was taking to the airport happened to be a civil engineer from India! I  bought a cordless telephone in a large retail chain from a salesman who sported a Ph.D in chemistry along with his name tag. This kind of "square peg in a round hole" syndrome seems to be fairly common. The dignity of labour and all that wonderful stuff is fine, but when human talent and skill is wasted it is a great loss for the host country. Perhaps the immigration guidelines and filters need to be changed so that all may benefit.

Happily, the policies never applied in my particular case! I tagged along as excess baggage with my wife ...she was the one who had qualified to immigrate. My profession as a flight attendant obviously had no value to the Canadian economy...and rightly so. A few months after I returned to Canada in July 2001, Air Canada laid off approximately 5000 workers! There was another fledgling carrier called Canada 3000 (who were planning to begin direct Vancouver - New Delhi flights!) which went bankrupt overnight : some of their crew were stranded in places like Hawaii and had to buy their own tickets to get home!!

Aviation was not the only sector affected in 2001. The softwood lumber industry (one of the mainstays of the economy in BC) suffered a devastating blow when the biggest importer - the good old US of A - slapped on an extra customs duty on the product. I remember reading in a newspaper that around 85,000 workers lost their jobs.

These localised events were then overshadowed by 9/11 and the paranoia that followed. The Iraq war followed soon after. The world seemed to be coming to an end.

Given the above scenario, did it really matter what I did for a living? As they love to say here in North America, you still have to put food on the table, you still have to pay your bills. My next post on this blog will cover the myriad things that I tried my hand at to keep the wolf from the door.

In tough times and in times of tribulation, some people turn to prayer and religion. Some turn to alcohol and drugs. I find succour and solace in the natural world, and locating these eternal fountains of inspiration and hope is never a problem in Vancouver and its surrounding areas.

"Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in its head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything."

(Act II, Scene 1, "As You Like It", by William Shakespeare)