Job hunting

Yesterday I dropped by Designline, an Ashburton-based company that manufactures buses. I should be able to put my experience with electro-mechanical stuff to good use there. They have accepted my resume and they would have a look at it. Emma has applied for a job with the IRS (Inland Revenue, the tax department).

Today we went to Christchurch. I have visited two recruiting agencies and Emma just walked through the doors of several companies, offering her CV there. Unlike in Holland that is a pretty common thing to do here :-)

Here, when you apply for a job and a company is actually interested (or should I say: is willing to look at your CV at all), you’ll have to fill out a pretty extensive form, on which you will have to write by hand everything that is already abundantly present on your printed CV. All this, in order to provide someone else with the data which he will probably have to copy into a computer data base again :-) You also have to fill out a medical statement. It seems unusual to me that this should be done beforehand, in Holland they usually only ask for it when you are actually being offered a job. Oh well, we didn’t leave Holland to keep on doing things the same way as we were used to :-)

Emma has dropped off CVs at three different companies. At my visit to the recruiters the first one didn’t like my CV very much. The second one showed a much more positive attitude. He also was already thinking about a particular job I could fit in. Tomorrow I will go to ChCh again to visit a third recruiter. After that we will go cruising through ChCh to look for a nice neighbourhood and for suitable rental houses to live in.

It might not be very wise to go rent a place when we do not have any income yet. On the other hand, it is very important here to have a social network when you are looking for a job, because a lot of them aren’t advertised. If we keep on living a 1.5-hour drive away from ChCh, we will not be building a social network there very soon. A bit of a catch-22, really. Anyway, just looking for houses won’t hurt...