Yahoo Finance Woman who lost three jobs due to COVID pandemic hired after calling radio show
A woman who has lost three jobs due to the coronavirus pandemic has been hired after calling into a radio show for advice.
Business owner Catherine Shuttleworth gave Annabelle Smith a job when she phoned a BBC Radio 5 Live show asking her for tips on how to get hired.
Last March, Smith, 29, was let go as a marketing manager; she then lost a role working for a property company in May and finally had to leave a job as an assistant gym manager in December at the start of the third lockdown.
Shuttleworth's marketing firm Get Savvy, based in Leeds, hired Smith as an account manager after being impressed by her “tenacity and positivity” over the last year.
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Shuttleworth told Yahoo News UK: “Afterwards, I contacted her to offer her further help in her job search as it felt like the right thing to do.
“On talking to her, I realised that she actually might have the kind of skills we were looking for for a current vacancy, so I organised for her to be put into the recruitment process for the role, and she got it.
“In terms of why we hired her - she has shown great tenacity and positivity over the last 12 months, and she has shown that she wants to learn and develop new skills.”
Smith, from Leeds, said she was “relieved and excited” when she was offered the job.
She added: “It was almost the sense of everything happens for a reason, and a huge weight had been lifted from me - from redundancies to instant application rejections, to stumbling across a perfect role in the middle of a pandemic off the back of appearing on the radio.
“I feel incredibly lucky.”
“I also felt incredibly grateful to be given this opportunity to work for such a fantastic marketing agency, where my role enables me to combine my two passions which are marketing and fitness.”
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Shuttleworth said people who are currently looking for jobs should remain really focused.
She said: “Learn about the business that you want to join, use internet research and linked in as a way of finding people you can connect with in organisations to find out more, and when you write a letter or an email, make sure that you stand out in the right way by spell checking your correspondence, being honest and telling the person you are writing to something interesting about you so that you stand out from the other applications.”
When asked what advice she’d give to jobseekers, Smith added: “Firstly I would say don’t be too hard on yourself, it is an incredibly competitive market currently, keep pushing on - as one day soon you will get that phone call you’ve been waiting for and everything will fall into place! If I have managed it now three times, you can too!
“On the more helpful side, I recommend looking at what it is you really want to do as a career, narrow it down and pinpoint companies you would like to work for.
“Do your research and contact them directly with your CV and covering letter, highlighting why you want to work for them and how your skills would be an asset to them.”
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