The Green Ink Brigade

“Want a job?”, the woman asked.

“Send an e-mail and we’ll see what we can do.”

This is how it works in journalism- no adverts, no application forms, no anonymity in the application process. It’s the very opposite; you have to know the right people.

For every job that is advertised on sites for job-hunting hacks, there are seemingly 10 more which never make it into the jobs section of the likes of Holdthefrontpage, journalism.co.uk, or even the local rag. These jobs are the much sought after jobs that pay an almost living wage and have you reporting from events with more interest than the village cattle show or yet another golden wedding anniversary. These are jobs you might actually ENJOY.

But instead of advertising them, paying a few hundred quid (which, lets face it, for your average national commercial company is petty cash from the director’s six figure salary), and attracting hundreds of applications, these companies keep them for ‘the boys’.

By ‘boys’ I don’t literally mean juvenile males (though anecdotal evidence does suggest otherwise), or even men, but I mean known quantities. Names they’ve come across though having a big gob, work experience or just daddy being friends with someone else’s daddy. It’s all very odd… and very retro.

In the 1960s my mother’s cousin was forced to emigrate to Canada. Her husband, a former grammar school boy from the Welsh valleys, was a doctor, and found that trying to become a consultant in his chosen field was virtually impossible as he didn’t know the right people, and more importantly, no one knew him as he spent his wages on bringing up a family, not boozing and schmoozing at the golf club with bow-tied Edwardian relics. At that time, it was all about having the right contacts- usually through one’s alma mater- which got you interviews. If you didn’t have that, you were screwed. And so, they left Britain, for the doctor to pursue what became a glittering career in, er, gynaecology.

Fortunately for us when we get ill, medicine has seemed to get wise to the idea that an expensive education and a private income doesn’t necessarily make for a good doctor. Whatever flaws medical training may still have (and I understand that there are many), from my experience at least the balance of talent versus money does seem to have been redressed slightly. In journalism, no one’s that enlightened.

It seems so wrong. Why should we have to know the right people? Why should geography, access to the ‘right’ schools, a name or e-mail slipped to us at a party, free time, money or sheer luck restrict us in our ability to get work? Advertising jobs and interviewing people allows companies to see who’s out there, allows them to find the best. Inviting people vetted through family connections or knowledge of insiders strikes of shitting on one’s own doorstep.

And it’s not as simple as just writing to every company out there- and I know, having written to every newspaper within an hour’s drive of my home.

I’ve found myself in the position where, having done work experience for a certain company, I was asked to send in my CV when I started looking for a job. I did just that, knowing that in the time since my work experience had ended, the group had employed at least five new trainees- two on the very newspaper I had worked for. Not one of the posts were publicly advertised, either in an external source or on the company’s own recruitment site.

I heard nothing about my CV, and after a series of phone calls, chaser e-mails and demands to speak to the organ grinder, I gave up. After two weeks of harassment on my part, not only was I slowly going out of my mind, but the sheer energy needed to bolster myself for yet another telephone ‘disagreement’ was too much for me. I never did speak to the organ grinder, only his strategically shaved monkeys, and judging from their level of literacy and ability to communicate on the phone, I feel I owe an apology to apes around the world.

What lies at the heart of all this is keeping people in their place. It’s the same reason why shitty areas have shitty schools, why one needs £10,000 to train as a lawyer, and why, as more people enter university, the bar on the professions has been raised yet higher through the need for an expensive postgraduate qualification for which there is no government funding. This is all at a time when ordinary folk seem to be finding it harder to get their children a good education- with wealthier types strategically buying homes nearer to good schools and in areas where grammar schools are still in use.

I’m certainly not a Bolshevic revolutionary, but why is the establishment so scared of unknown quantities? What do they fear? The idea that we might suddenly realise that the chaps who are running things aren’t, perhaps, the best chaps for the job?

But this rookie hack, even aided by an ever growing caffeine addiction, cannot beat the system on her own. Especially not when she would be so complicit with that system if tomorrow an editor wanted to have her in for a ‘chat’.

So it’s back to waiting to be asked to apply for some jobs, hoping someone I’ve worked for in the past might respond to my pathetic e-mails and voicemails, begging for work. I still pray for the miracle of an advert, but from experience, I doubt many editors would do that unless they HAD to, even if a beatification could be guaranteed.