Phantasmagoria jobs drown reality

Sir — As Ireland’s unemployment rate continues on a downward trajectory, one could be forgiven for thinking that the jobs market is offering meaningful and fulfilling roles, providing financial and emotional ballast to a person’s well-being. Not so.

Welcome to the Ireland’s jobs phantasmagoria where fantasy drowns reality in a vat of vacuous job titles like ‘Customer Success Guru’, or ‘People Manager’, with a wage unlikely to give your bank account financial indigestion.

If you wish to apply for these positions with their fantastic interfacing duties, employers seek flexibility, doublespeak for ‘You will be employed to do one role but will not always end up doing this role but another equally fantastic role’ or ‘You have to be available when we want you and however long we want, but you still are a valuable full-time member of our team’.

Employers are applying a Tinder process to interview seekers. Offer an interview to those who meet one or all of these criteria — an age profile that laps upon the shores of 20s, born within an Eastern European postal district or can be employed using the Community Employment Scheme, state-sponsored farming of people to positions that offer a short-term future and all the long-term employment prospects of one-handed juggler.

Looking for employment in Ireland is soul-destroying, devoid of fairness. No matter how hard you try, your effort is wasted.

The era of employers offering genuine sustainable jobs with a defined role and a working week, which allow you to commit long-term to your employer’s business, appear to be over.

Ireland may achieve technical full employment by the end of 2018, but behind the number lies a constituency of employment seekers of all ages, skill sets and nationalities that are being rejected by employers motivated by the sheen of a balance sheet rather than the application of human capital. John Tierney, Fews, Kilmacthomas, Co Waterford