The Great Job Hunt

Life is now getting into a routine of job-hunting in the morning and sightseeing in the afternoon with a liberal amount of meeting up with Steph's friends from when she was last here.

I've found a few good job boards, www.reed.co.uk and www.cv-library.co.uk which are proving quite a few leads. CV Library is particularly good, I get a call every day or two out of the blue from some agent with some opportunity.

This morning it was regarding a job with a company that had uplifted their entire development team from somewhere in New Zealand and relocated them to Amersham, which is at the western end of the Metropolitan Line. From what I understand they are developing technology to deploy banking services to the developing world - bank branch in a shipping container sort of thing.

Yesterday, just after 2pm, we had just finished lunch on the Southbank with Flair, a friend of Steph's, and got a callback about a job. They were keen to interview me so we set up an interview at 4pm. I rushed to an internet cafe to have a last minute look over the companies website (www.lshift.net). The interview went fairly well. It's a small company run by developers, so not much management overhead, and lots of opportunity to take responsibility for projects. Will find out in a few days if I get thought to the next stage.

Agents can be a bit funny over here. One told me he had a telephone interview set up for last Monday. He hadn't sent any information about the company through on Friday, so I asked for their name and website so I could at least have a look at that, it turns out their website was down and I didn't get a company name. I didn't get any calls on Monday and haven't heard back from him. I called up another agent who wanted me to get together quite a bit of information so he could decide whether to put me forward. It sounded a bit like a job another agent was putting me forward for so I asked whether it was for this company, he would "neither confirm or deny", because he gets a lot of calls from other agents pretending to be candidates to find jobs to advertise. I guess it's a dog eat dog world in the high stakes game of IT recruitment.

This afternoon we are off to the National History Museum to meet up with some of Steph's family. They have dinosaurs and other cool things there.