WHAT WENT WRONG?!
Is it no "luck", no "wasta" or something else?

Once you read this article, tell us what you think

Numerous young Egyptian graduates who have been chasing, in vain, job opportunities, seem to attribute their fruitless job hunt to a very short list of reasons. Whether in the "Career Advisory" workshops skill-link.com regularly conducts, in messages to "Your Career Advisor" or during personal visits to skill-link.com; those young men and women tend to unanimously agree on this short list, that seem to comfort them and take the blame away from them. So what is in this list of reasons for not finding a job? Well, here it is:

1. In order to find a job, you must have a "wasta". And we do not have one.
2. No one wants to employ fresh university graduates, only experienced professionals get hired.
3. Unemployment is every where, companies are not hiring.

We hear the above so often, that we can repeat them by heart, before a young graduate starts reciting them. But are these true reasons for not finding a job? We will try and address this issue from our (skill-link.com) own observations dealing with tens of thousands of job seekers and having witnessed hundreds of employment situations every year.

First of all, no one can deny that Egypt suffers from unemployment. With a current work force of around 19 million individuals, it is estimated that unemployment in the country is at 9% to 10%. Every year, 700,000 or so new Egyptians enter the job market for the first time, out of these maybe 500,000 get employed, the rest will increase the number of those out of jobs. Needless to say, these new entrants range from the illiterate and school drop-outs, to the high school and university graduate. About 200,000 graduate from university every year, and this is the segment we are addressing here.

The law of supply and demand, prevails in everything in life, including employment. It is obvious that more people graduate than the job market can absorb, hence the difficulty in finding a job and unemployment. Having said that, one must remember that all people are not identical, so who get the jobs? And how valid is the "short list" of excuses we started this article with?

Hum, let us see, the first statement was "In order to find a job, you must have a "wasta". And we do not have one."
This may be true in government or public sector but not the private sector (which includes joint ventures, multinationals, foreign companies etc…). Any organization that has an owner or a manager accountable for results, will seek those it can find and afford, who could best fit and perform. Maybe when all qualifications, experience and skills are equal, a manager could hire someone he/she knows, or is recommended by a trusted party. But this is not "wasta", this is more of a reference check. "Wasta" only applies when a less competent person is selected over a more suitable candidate for the same salary. And we are not telling theories here, skill-link.com and its management deal with a large number of organizations in almost all sectors. They are all eager to find the most suitable candidates, sometimes 10 or more are interviewed for a single position until the "right" individual is found. So where is the "wasta"?

The second "famous" statement or excuse was "No one wants to employ fresh university graduates, only experienced professionals get hired"
Again, this is an insult to intelligence, and the statement defies logic. While it is obviously harder for one to get that first job, companies and other organizations hire fresh graduates right left and center. If they only recruited professionals with at least three years of experience, how did these same individuals gain such work experience? Were they born with it?

skill-link.com just recently received recruitment requests from a number of entities (a bank, and advertising company and a Call Center), all seeking to hire fresh graduates. Do you think it was easy to fill the vacancies? No it was not, the skill-link.com staff worked very hard to identify suitable individuals. We will elaborate on that later on.

It should also be noted that the employment market is not only for fresh graduates, it is completely normal that vacant jobs should be for all age groups and levels of experience. Assuming the working life of a person spans over 40 years on average, should all vacancies be for the twenty something year olds for them to be happy and satisfied? Things do not work this way, every organization has a pyramid shape, most seniors on top and it grows wider as we go lower, hence the need to recruit at every level.

And the last on the trio of excuses was "Unemployment is every where, companies are not hiring"
While it is true the economy is in bad shape and entities are recruiting at a slower than usual pace, there are jobs. Companies are recruiting every day, just take a look at Al Ahram, an LE 1 million worth of recruitment advertisements are published every month in that newspaper. Aren't these ads and the money paid for them to fill jobs? Closer to home, skill-link.com corporate clients call everyday with new vacancies or to schedule interviews with candidates. Are these people just bored and happy to waste their time and the money they pay to skill-link.com, or do they have vacant jobs to fill?

So what went wrong? Why despite the large number of graduates looking for work, numerous employers do not find it easy to recruit quickly? And why is it that some of us get hired on the spot, while others go from one interview to the other. Let alone those sending out dozens of applications and not even reaching the interview step?

To elaborate on the above, one needs to write a book, however the simple answer is professionalism and resourcefulness. This is what most employers are looking for, and a lot of young Egyptians seeking jobs lack.

Let us define those two terms:
Professionalism: addresses being reliable, presentable, having courtesy (civilized), trustworthy and quality oriented.
Resourcefulness: has to do with getting things done, knowing how to solve problems and where to look for information.

As you can see, these are not difficult character traits, they have nothing to do with being born to a rich family, graduating from the AUC, or earning expensive Masters degrees or certifications. They are aspects most people can easily develop (or acquire) if lacking. The truth of the matter is that they are in such short supply among young Egyptian graduates that employers often have a tough time recruiting.

Let us present a few examples from real life (each witnessed hundreds of times by skill-link.com staff) to support our above argument:

• About 15% to 18% of candidates sent by skill-link.com for job interviews with a company, do not show up at the interview and do not apologize, before or after. These are individuals who have been told of the opportunity and accepted to go. How would you describe such a behavior? Professional?

• 6 out of every 10 CVs we receive or get to see (and we reviewed over 50,000 in the last few years) have unacceptable spelling mistakes or errors that are not excusable. Why would anyone write "jop" or "Egyption" - very common mistakes in CVs? While people are not expected to be all fluent in English, there is no excuse not to use the spell checker, all these CVs were written on a PC word processor. Why would applicants when listing their previous employers misspell their names? How can one work in a company for months or even years and not be able to spell its name right? This reflects carelessness, total distraction or most likely lack of interest in reviewing ones work (the CV in our case). How would you describe such a person? Professional? Resourceful.

• We see thousands of CVs where the applicant states he/she is fluent in English, yet the structuring of the document, words used and spelling clearly demonstrate the owner is far from fluent in English. This leaves the potential employer reading the CV between two thoughts, the job applicant is either a liar or he/she does not know what fluency in English mean… both are negative thoughts and would usually not have the application progress to an interview... what is wrong with saying one is average in English, or has basic English?

• We witness a large number of cases where young graduates go for a job interview without doing any homework on the company (or bank or organization etc…) they are being considered for. Imagine not checking their web site or trying to get a brochure before hand just to know what they do and the products / services they deal in. skill-link.com once identified an interesting job opportunity for one of its registered job seekers with Maktoob.com (the well known Arab protal); we were shocked when he was interviewed by the General Manager of Maktoob.com, that the candidate did not bother even checking the web site of that online company. Another example, is a young lady applying to skill-link.com itself, she also admitted to have never seen our web site. She had 4 full days between being told of the interview and sitting for it ! Plenty of similar examples could be told. How would you describe such individuals? Professional? Resourceful?.

• In the various seminars, meetings or even interviews skill-link.com conducts, we discovered that for those below the age of 30, only about a third or less regularly read a daily newspaper (Ahram, Akhbar or other). Why? Do the others have all the general knowledge in the world to impress an interviewer? Do they know what is happening in various sectors, which new companies are expanding or being established, so as not to stay up to date through the newspapers? How can they even find out about advertised job vacancies if they are not regular readers? Definitely resourcefulness went out of the window…

• A fact we are proud of, is that no media channel (web site, newspaper, TV, radio station...) provide more career related information than skill-link.com through its weekly online magazine "Interest Zone". Hence, visitors can find, free of charge, job hunting tips, advice about job interviews, cover letter & CV preparation, salary survey, career advice, scholarship announcements, interviews with successful professionals etc… One would have thought, that visitors would really make use of this and try and develop their job hunting skills, since the information is conveniently available and it is free. Our site monitoring reveals otherwise. Less than 1 in 5 of the skill-link.com visitors bother to read any of the 100+ articles available at any given day on skill-link.com's Interest Zone. The rest would just get in, add their CVs, maybe periodically check the job vacancies and get out. Why? do they know it all? or is the information of such a poor quality and is so useless that they should not waste their time with it? Figures speak for themselves in another way to. skill-link.com currently has 55,000 registered CVs, yet the number of visits received by the skill-link.com web site ranges around this figure. We know for a fact that many site visitors do not have a registered CV on skill-link.com, therefore it is safe to assume that the average owner of a registered CV visits skill-link.com less than once a month. So they are too lazy or uninterested to read all the job news, employment market trends and career information updated weekly, let alone checking the job vacancies and scholarships. Maybe if skill-link.com published Nancy Aagram news and football articles, they would have all been visiting it daily, but for their careers… nah… they are too busy with more important things ! How would you describe such an attitude? Being pro active and resourceful?

• Courtesy (in Arabic, zo'k or tahzeeb) is part of being "professional" as we described earlier. How many individuals remember to say thank you at the end of a job interview, or think of sending the interviewer a thank you letter or email? Very few… despite it not costing any significant expenses or requiring substantial efforts, just a minute or two of attention. Similarly, skill-link.com's popular section "Your Career Advisor" that thrives to reply to questions from the site visitors regarding salaries, education, training, job advancement, employment problems and other career related topics. Answering such questions requires research, time and effort, and of course it is free, 90% of those who get their questions addressed do not bother with a short thank you email after it was answered for them… Why?

In conclusion, the message we really care to deliver is that, despite a small percentage of professional and resourceful individuals being really unlucky in their job search, a significant number of young (and old) professionals are missing opportunities for no valid reason, other than not trying to improve / develop themselves. Unemployment is severe, but among the hundreds of thousands of graduates competing for the same jobs, it is easy for one to differentiate him/herself and get noticed… to rise above the masses of unprofessional, uninformed and passive graduates and get ahead with his / her career. TRUST US.

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