It's hard not to become disheartened...

As most of you will know I have been looking for work for some weeks (and YES, I realise that compared to many many others this is nothing) and in that time have made several hundred applications for jobs as far away from home as Surrey, Milton Keynes, and Oxford as well as everything & anything I could find close to home.

My outbox is full of the emails I have sent in application for posts but (maybe not surprisingly to those of you who have been through this situation) my inbox is fairly sparsely populated with responses - either of acknowledgement or with a resulting interview appointment/rejection etc.

Now I also realise that in most cases there is one person responding to these job applications & that they will almost definitely be overwhelmed by the number of interested candidates, but with email systems nowadays it is no great deal to set up a responder to such applications, so that people sending in their CV's etc know that they HAVE actually arrived at their destination, and not disappeared into the www somewhere. It would also allow those needing to keep a record of their application history (whilst claiming unemployment benefits say) to prove to the relevant people that they were indeed making the effort & not just saying that they had sent off their details for a job and not had a reply.

I have now been for interview twice in the last month for completely different roles - neither of which have resulted in any positive outcome. Obviously I haven't been lucky enough (and yes I do believe that luck plays a big part in this process - how else could you explain some of the things I've seen?) to be given the role I was interviewed for, but neither was I able to gain any insight into why I was felt unsuitable for the role. In the first case the employer I went to see are now ignoring my emails & calls after initially stating that they would "put some thoughts together" The second interview for which I only got the rejection this morning, have said that "they found a candidate with a better profile" ... but would be no more specific than that.

I have spent a lot of time applying for, pretty much, anything I felt I was capable of, which realistically is quite a lot considering my skills are widely transferable (and no I'm not blowing my own horn, this is what other people have said about me!) but I am now really concerned that considering the amount of competition for jobs, if I narrow my search down to jobs which people genuinely felt fit my skillset then maybe I wouldn't be wasting my own time, that of the people to whom I'm applying & reducing the competition a little, helping someone else maybe?

On the other hand, if I was to restrict the number of jobs applications I sent out would I be cutting off my nose to spite my face?

I'm now more than just a little bit confused... and more than a little disheartened by the whole thing.