Case Study

Insider tips spell success for Samuel

31 Aug 2022

Samuel Hayble thought he had the world at his feet. He’d taken a law undergraduate degree and then spent a year working for the alumni engagement team at his university. As he began to search for a new job, he had every reason to think he'd succeed. “I thought it would be easy, I’d just got my degree and was on top of the world, but it was a lot more difficult than I had anticipated,” says Samuel, aged 26.

He spent over three years searching in vain – and during that time the pandemic hit, making matters even worse. He had also begun studying for a master’s degree and wondered how he was going to pay his academic fees. But things turned around for Samuel when he joined an employability programme delivered by Ingeus. Central London Works, Work and Health Programme Job Entry Targeted Support (CLW WHP JETS) gives targeted employment support to people affected by the pandemic. Central London Works is delivered by Ingeus and commissioned by Central London Forward.

Samuel signed up to JETS after it was mentioned to him by Finsbury Park Jobcentre Plus work coach Farid, who believed he would be a strong candidate. As well as his job at the university, Samuel has previous experience in retail and has also worked at a law firm. Ingeus employment coach, Stuart Braybrooke, began liaising with Samuel to help boost his chances of finding work. Stuart set weekly tasks for Samuel, such as signing up to agencies and making use of Ingeus employability platform iWorks to improve his CV.

“Stuart was great,” says Samuel, who lives in Islington. “He was very flexible and made himself available even outside of office hours. We touched up my CV as it was a bit convoluted, I tend to overexplain things.” After helping Samuel to whittle his CV down to the essentials, Stuart passed on some insider knowledge. He advised Samuel to mention his business-to-business and business-to-customer experience and said there was no harm in changing the order of previous roles so that the most relevant ones appeared first.

Samuel needed a home-based role as he was experiencing sciatica. Using his new improved CV, he set about applying for as many jobs as he could. “I applied for 30 jobs in one day and by the next week I had four phone calls from four different companies,” he says. After attending three formal interviews, Samuel received three job offers. He took a job as a customer adviser with an insurance technology firm and has now passed the initial probationary period.

“I got the job within two weeks of fine-tuning my CV based on information Stuart had given me, so I owe Stuart and the JETS programme,” says Samuel. “The job is going great, there’s only about 10 of us in the team and I get on with everyone. It’s going well. This is the first time since 2018 that I’ve had a job, which is amazing, after only being on the programme for a few weeks. I am doing a master’s degree in global public health and would like to do a PhD in anthropology but that’s probably a decade away. I’m happy in my job, I don’t plan on going anywhere, I want to stay here and climb the ladder."

He adds: "I would 100 per cent recommend JETS. Just look at the numbers – from 2018 to 2021 I was unemployed, then I got on the programme and within five to six weeks I had a job. That’s not a coincidence. The programme definitely worked, I was given insights you wouldn’t get anywhere else and an employment coach who made himself available out of hours. They really do go above and beyond.”