'Demoralising' - Job hunters flood the West Country market as businesses feel the pinch of the pandemic
Watch Ben McGrail's report
With shops shut, pubs, restaurants and cafes restricted to takeaways, entertainment and tourism decimated - it’s left the jobs market flooded by candidates with similar backgrounds.
Rachel Walker-House was made redundant just before the pandemic when the Taunton shop she worked at closed down.
She said: "I did actually get a job during lockdown but, unfortunately, the shop actually didn’t reopen so they had to withdraw the offer.
"Which was just so demoralising because it was so hard to get an interview in the first place and then to be told you have a job but then have it taken away it was just incredibly hard, incredibly stressful."
Laura O'Driscoll runs a recruitment business in Somerset. She says the industry is in exceptional times.
"I started just after the last financial crash, really, in recruitment so I’ve seen what it’s like for candidates as business starts to pick up again but I’ve certainly not really experienced an environment with this number of redundancies being made."
Laura is so concerned about the mental health of people job-seeking she’s urging recruiters in the West Country to join her movement to improve the industry.
"It’s a campaign that we are asking employers to sign up to, to say candidates are really important to us and when you apply for a role with us you can expect to be at the heart of our process, your application will be treated with care and respect. That’s all anybody wants, I think - just to know where they stand."
Laura’s campaign is for people like Kim Draper from Taunton, who was made redundant from her job of more than 12 years when she returned from maternity leave last Autumn.
"When you have a child you lose quite a lot of confidence and you end up becoming another person, so returning back to your job is almost a bit of normality," she says.
"So to take that away really knocked my confidence. It made me really worried because I didn’t know how I would provide.
"Particularly with it being a lockdown and a pandemic there’s so many other people out there looking for jobs and you just don’t know whether you’re going to get one."
Thankfully both Kim and Rachel have found new jobs, but there will be many more like them who will hope the Chancellor’s budget promises will lead them into work soon.
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