I’ve been actively looking for work since Chinese New Year – for me, this is a long time.

The recruitment agencies have advised me to be patient as the process is long in HK. Companies tend to average about eight interviews for their HR roles. One of my neighbours had 12 interviews at the one company for her position. The time between interviews can also be quite lengthy. It upsets me ever now and then that I’m still looking for work when I expected to be working by now but HK is not Australia!

I’ve had six job interviews and come second five times (I haven’t been to a company that needs eight interviews to decide as yet). The other candidates have had more HK or investment banking experience than me. This can be frustrating! I’m still waiting to hear about a number of other roles and will follow up with the agencies again tomorrow.

Occasionally it gets me down a bit to have come second so many times. As a fellow job seeker in Australia put it, she likes to be in the position of doing the rejecting not being rejected. Yes, that is certainly easier on the ego!

The way I’m choosing to look at it is that the right job hasn’t come along yet. It’s been difficult sometimes to stay positive. As a person that has done her fair share of hiring, you can tell during an interview when someone is upset / desperate / negative / and I’d rather miss out because I’m not right for the job / company rather than having the wrong attitude.

I’ve just registered to do contract work so that should put to rest the lack of HK experience issue and I am already familiar with HK employment law from my previous role. I’ve read the updated employment ordinance on the internet. Must say it is by far an easier read than WorkChoices and its 560 pages of explanatory notes!

The lack of investment banking experience is a little trickier to counteract unless I manage to get a contract role in that industry. I’ve decided to broaden the industries that I’m looking at as once I start working it should then be easier to find the next job.

I’m at the second interview stage with two other companies and am set to do a psychological profile, verbal reasoning and numerical reasoning test with one of these companies. I’ve been looking at various tests online and practicing because it’s been a while since I’ve needed to know how to calculate the area of a triangle, cube etc. It’s not really something that I’ve tended to need in a HR role before!

After all this interview practice and the length of time it seems to take to hire people in HK, I’ll be in a position to benchmark whichever company I end up joining to make the process a little more efficient for them. Recruitment is a quick and easy way to make money by shortening the process compared to the competition as the person can start before the competitor has even started interviewing so the faster company should be more productive.

Mr Shallot has been his usual supportive self and my neighbours have also been helping me to stay positive. I’m keeping busy with my job search, reading, running, teaching myself to cook Chinese, learn Cantonese and spending time with the pets. Not often that I’d ever get that kind of opportunity!

I’m ready for the celebratory dinner – just need to find the right job!

Thanks to Dire Straits for the title to this post.