FURNITURE RETAILER DESCRIBES SENIOR ROLE – BUT CALLS IT JUNIOR
The furniture retailer MADE.COM has come under fire for posting a lengthy advert for an ‘entry level’ job requiring extensive knowledge and experience that no new entrant to the job market could possibly have.
Here is the 760 word (!) advert. The salary is not stated, but decide for yourself if you think it describes an ‘entry level’ position:
Graduate Emily McKenzie, who challenged MADE.COM, told Graduate Fog that adverts like this make her really angry:
“I wanted to know how MADE.COM justify making this an ‘entry level’ role when they also require so much experience.
“I was lucky enough to get a Content Editing role basically identical to this fresh out of uni eight years ago – back when entry level actually meant entry level.
“How is it that we’re asking graduates to pay three times what I paid to study, but making it so that once they graduate they can’t even get an entry level job without them already having had a similar job before?”
Following Emily’s public challenge on Twitter, MADE.COM claimed that labelling the role as ‘entry level’ had been “genuinely a mistake”:
Emily told Graduate Fog she is happy that the seniority has now been changed (to ‘Mid-senior level’) – but still has her suspicions about whether it really was a mistake:
“The advert has been up for four weeks, so the sceptical side of me thinks that it only got changed because I made a fuss. But that’s still a good result.”
And Graduate Fog suspects many of our readers will share Emily’s concerns, as we are hearing numerous reports of supposedly ‘entry level’ jobs requiring more and more prior experience, leaving recent graduates baffled about how they are supposed to have gained this. Are employers simply trying to get experienced graduates on the cheap? Or do they expect you to have done unpaid internships first?
* DO TOO MANY ‘ENTRY LEVEL’ JOBS DEMAND STUPID AMOUNTS OF EXPERIENCE?
If so, what industries are worst for doing this? Why do you think they do this? And how do you think employers expect you to gain the skills, knowledge and experience they want when you’ve only just finished your degree?
I’m currently sat in a computer room at the university of Manchester. I haven’t been here since I first went to (and dropped out of) university when I was 19. That was 10 years ago. Very little has changed in my life and the computer room is exactly how I remember it from 10 years ago. That was when I was a young student, wet behind the ears but full of enthusiasm. Fresh out of A-levels. I sit here now, trapped, doing a masters degree I don’t enjoy and the only reason I started it was because I have been rejected from jobs over and over again. My adult life has never got started. I’ve been rejected from so many “entry-level” positions because I didn’t have enough experience. I spoke with someone on the course and he was amazed I haven’t been able to get a job after my bachelors, but he is in his 40s (doing it part time) and from a different generation. I’ve tried to start socialising more and going to meetup events so I can try to escape crushing depression but I feel like I have wasted the past 10 years. My sisters partner even hooked me up with an interview for a graduate position as an acoustical engineer. I did the telephone interview and guess what… rejection. The other candidates had more experience, apparently, even though it was advertised as entry level. I am in a strange place now where I am bordering on 30 and still no further ahead in life. I feel lost and depressed and like no one has given me a chance.