I’m in the US, no degree, and absolutely sick to death of working in retail.
I’ve tried all the jobs website. They haven’t even gotten me an interview. The only job search method that’s ever given me results is to think of businesses near me and apply to them directly. But that only leaves me working more retail, since public facing businesses are all I’m interacting with.
I just want a job that pays my bills, and lets me work on a consistent schedule. I’m so sick of having my hours constantly whipped back and forth. I just want to go to bed at the same time every day.
I worked retail and retail adjacent for almost 20 years. I just started a corporate job for a very big electronics company. The answer?
Know people.
I know it sucks to hear, but it really truly is who you know. I got lucky once but it’s seriously all about the connections you make. Your best bets are from informal friends. People who know you well enough to say you’d be good for a job, but they’re not invested in you either being there or not.
The only reason I am where I am now is because I made connections. Read the book “How to Win Friends and Influence People” if you’re an introvert. It helped me understand how people view each other’s interactions better.
There’s a lot of remote jobs too that you can start looking into. Use your retail planning and selling experience for remote sales roles or remote account management.
My first job was pizza delivery for a local shop. My mom knew someone who worked there, and I got the job through her. They weren’t exactly hiring for the position yet, but they knew they were going to need someone seen because their current delivery guy was going back to college in a couple months. She knew I was looking for a job, floated my name to the owner, and he called me.
Second job was a warehouse shipping/receiving position. Again, got it through a family friend who was their accountant or something. He mentioned they were looking for someone, I said I might be interested, and he basically set everything up for me to come in and interview and I was basically hired on the spot.
Now I work in 911 dispatch. This is basically the only job I actually found and applied for myself, I saw they were doing some sort of hiring event and I thought it was something I could do. Still though, I worked my connections, my brother in law is a firefighter, and knows a lot of people in local public safety/first responder circles, so I got him to ask someone he knows who works here to put in a good word for me. It could be that I just really impressed them, but I only had one interview and a lot of people who got hired at the same time as me, some arguably with more impressive resumes, had to go through an additional round or two of interviews.
So as the old saying goes, it’s not so much what you know as who you know.
When I was applying for jobs on my own back at 16-18 years old, even shitty retail gigs, I never seemed to get anywhere, online, paper applications, etc. never seemed to go anywhere, occasionally I got an interview but they never panned out. But when I know someone, or know someone who knows someone, I have a 100% success rate of getting hired and I’ve gotten to skip some of the bureaucracy to boot, and they’ve turned out to be pretty stable, reasonably well-paying jobs given my level of experience and such.
This aspect cannot be overstated. I landed my biggest* jobs because of my professional network. Moreover, I landed those roles during some serious labor market carnage: Dotcom Bust, Great Recession, and the current knowledge career uncertainty.
*Highest salary, longest running, best environment, most career growth, or some combination thereof.
This sucks sooo fucking much, but it’s true. I don’t network, and the only way I’ve had decent jobs is by the people in the company getting to know me and moving up. My current job is at the place I did security for, for 3 years while getting my degree.