Like many other soon-to-be graduates, Victoria began looking for work in her final few months of university, planning ahead for her next chapter. With three years of further education and employability training under her belt, she started the process feeling good about her prospects – but her confidence soon took a hit.

Victoria, Age 21, ‘It’s just really tough out there... It’s quite brutal. You just keep getting knocked back and knocked back, and you get on your feet, and then then you get slapped down again.’ ‘You start out thinking that it’ll be fine, that you’re a university student so you’ll be able to get a job. Then you get rejected for the first time, and it’s sad… but it’s fine, you have backups!

Then it goes on, and on, and on… and the hope just slowly starts seeping away. I must have applied for around 100 jobs, and I think I only got five interviews. It was quite depressing to say the least, and it definitely knocked my confidence. You think to yourself, ‘What might be wrong?’

I started doing courses to improve my employability skills, and they would all say ‘Don’t worry, they’re just trying to make sure that you’re the right fit and your personality is right for the job’. But it gets to the point where you worry – ‘Do I just have a bad personality? Am I completely unlikeable, and that’s why no one is hiring me?’

Lack of experience was also a big thing for me. You can’t really get a proper job until you’re 18, so I don’t know what I was expected to do. A few jobs would even say ‘we don’t care about experience, it’s a trainee role’, and then you’d get rejected, because someone with 5 years’ experience would apply, and they’d get the job.

I did some volunteering and at one point that was probably the most valuable thing on my CV. I applied for a job at a charity, and they sent feedback to everyone afterwards saying, ‘Lots of applicants put volunteering experience down for this job, however we don’t think experience is necessary, so this wasn’t something we looked at for this role.’

That’s probably the worst I felt after getting rejected – the one time I had experience for something, it was overlooked. It was very depressing. I had to take a little break from job searching after that, because I’d just been doing it constantly day in and day out.’

To get support on her employment journey, Victoria got in touch with Jobs & Business Glasgow, who provided her with an advisor to help with the job search. Once she had secured an interview, she was referred to Smart Works to use the Interview Dressing and Preparation service. It was at her appointment that she found her confidence slowly start to be restored.

‘It was absolutely amazing. I felt like people weren’t just interacting with me because it’s their job – they actually wanted me to succeed. Over the past year, I’d felt like I couldn’t, but the volunteers were telling me ‘No, you can succeed, we know you can, and we will support you.’

Afterwards, I felt so confident. I felt unstoppable. I got the job, and since then, my confidence has gone way up. It’s kind 21 but this is the best my confidence and my mental health has ever been. And it’s from getting this job, but I think it began at Smart Works, because that was such a good day. Since then, I’ve just been going up and up and up.

Being unemployed was probably one of the lowest times of my life, because I just kept getting knocked back. You sort of don’t feel anything, any emotions. The way that you speak, the voice you think in completely changes…. I’m quite expressive normally, but I just became sort of blank.

You feel like a failure, that you’re not going down the correct path. And I know now that others were in the same boat, but I would have loved to have someone to connect to and relate to, because you do feel alone. Finding Smart Works made me think, ‘This organisation is helping people like me, which means that there are other people like me. It’s not just me, alone in my house, really upset because I can’t get a job. There are other people like me, and people who want to help us, and show us that we’re not failures.’’