How to Find a Job in Sydney and not have it SUCK!

Now that we had a phone number and address to slap on our resumes, we set out to find work. Job hunting probably sucks even more than apartment hunting. Be ready to hear “No” a lot. While Gumtree is helpful, it’s best to just hit the streets, show up in person, and don’t give up. One roadblock we hit was backpacker discrimination. Many employers assumed all backpackers looking for a job would end up moving on in a couple weeks, and leave them high and dry with the same position to fill yet again. It’s important to set yourself apart from this stereotype by telling potential employers that your plan is to stay in Sydney a long time, duh. Also, chain stores like Cotton On or Gloria Jean’s, are less likely to hire backpackers, so look for privately-owned restaurants or stores. Another great thing with family owned business is they’re more willing to pay “under the table”, which eliminates high tax rates. Matt interviewed at a Cotton On clothing store for a managerial position but after a group-interview was notified that they weren’t interested, which is for the best, because it would suck to work there!! Not that he’s still bitter about it or anything.

Matt found a job at a nightclub in Darling Harbour as a “glassier” or “bus boy”. IT SUCKED! It sucked so hard. Working till 3am, getting home at 4am is not a normal life, unless you’re a vampire. Then it’s very normal. Thank god Cassie found a good waitress job at a respectable restaurant, and they just happened to be looking for another person, so they gave Matt a shot and it all worked out! A common practice for employers is to give potential employees a test run. Which means they call you in and you work for 1 day, sometimes at your own expense (i.e. no pay). As long as you don’t set the place on fire, it’ll work out and they’ll hire you. So that’s what happened, and Cassie and I were fortunate enough to work together at the world-famous, 1^st class, gourmet restaurant: The Hyde Park Barracks Café! Another great part of working at a restaurant is, if your boss is as awesome as ours was at Hyde Park Barracks Café, they’ll feed you after your shift, and our restaurant was a great place to eat.

If you plan to work in the food service industry, like as a waiter, bar tender, etc. You must have a RSA (Responsible Service of Alcohol). It’s a one day class where you sit in a classroom and listen to an old retired bar tender lecture you on all the crazy drinking laws in New South Wales that everyone seems to ignore anyways. It’s more like a punishment, like Traffic School. But it’s easy, and afterwards you can legally work in a food or drink service establishment. We took our RSA in Bondi; it was the cheapest, like $60 or so. Also, to work in Australia you obviously need a Working Holiday Visa and a Tax File Number (TFN). The Visa you can and should apply way before you even get to OZ, but the TFN you can only get when you’re here and have a permanent address.

It’s important to dress the part. The standard uniform for working in most restaurants and bars is a black t-shirt or button up, so if you plan on being a waiter, it’s a wise investment to buy a black shirt. Cheap options are available at K-Mart or Paddy’s Market. If you can, choose the latter of the two. Paddy’s is a cheap, dirty underworld in China Town; it’s awesome! It’s literally underneath a real mall and it’s packed to the rafters with knock-offs, discounted tourist crap, and food that I wouldn’t really trust. Hopefully you’re familiar with the Sylvester Stallone and Wesley Snipes 1993 summer blockbuster, Demolition Man. In the movie there exists a dirty, noisy underworld buried away from the daylight where filthy under-dwellers eat rat burgers. That’s what Paddy’s is like. It’s a must see and there are some great bargains to be had, at Paddy’s that is. Demolition Man is good too.

Working visas differ for different countries. As Americans we can only work at one place for 6 months and 1 year total in Australia. European residents have the option of picking fruit for 3 months to re-new their working visas allowing them to stay much longer. Also, don’t come here and assume a University degree will automatically land you a job. We both have B.A.s from San Francisco State, but we’re waiters, obviously college was a giant waste of time!

So when it’s your turn to start looking for work in a wild hurry in Sydney, remember our tips:

o      Have a personal phone number for prospective employers to reach you at.

o      Grab a black shirt, and wear it when dropping off resumes and at your interview, too.

o      Get your RSA certificate and TFN number early.

o      Don’t rely on only the Internet to get a lead on a job. It can help, but it’s not the end all be all.

It’s best to show up in person, shake hands, and hopefully find a job that doesn’t totally suck.

How to find an Apartment in Sydney and not have it SUCK!

So here’s our story on how we found our apartment in Sydney along with our awesome tips on how to find an apartment and hopefully not have it suck.

Sydney was our home for the past 6 months. It is a beautiful city with tons to do and probably the best place to be for New Year’s Eve. But just like any big city, in order to do awesome things, it requires money. After all the pricey CanyonSwinging, ZORBing, swimming with seals, hiring a car, and Matt’s insatiable food habit in New Zealand, we were just about dead broke. However, by hustling hard, using charm and good looks, a job was soon found...then Matt found one too.

When we first arrived in Sydney, we thought we could simply walk into one of its countless hostels and find work there in return for free accommodation. We couldn’t have been more wrong! Seems that every other smelly backpacker has the same idea, and when we inquired at hostels the common response was “Well, if you stay here for a month or more, maybe there’s a chance we can hire you”. On hearing this, all we could think was “A MONTH?? ARE YOU CRAZY?! WHO HAS THAT KIND OF TIME?! WE NEED JOBS NOW!! I JUST SHIT MY PANTS!” As our brains exploded with the fearful realization that our whole plan of working in a hostel was a failure, we knew we needed to change our game plan, FAST.

While job-hunting, we stationed ourselves at a hostel in Kings Cross, the red light district of Sydney. Kings Cross lives up to it’s reputation; it’s chock full of strip clubs, sex shops, seedy bars, and crack heads roam the streets freely. It’s a quaint place really, full of life and bad decisions. Our best tip for finding a hostel is to have a look at the rooms before you pay. We walked into several places that we would never want to lay our heads for fear of finding bed bugs, stinky beds, or a transvestite hooker. We saved ourselves a lot of grief by checking a few places before we settled down. One block off the main drag of King’s Cross is a street filled with hostels, so there are loads of places to stay there, but they fill up fast in the warm season, so plan ahead.

Once we had a place to leave our massive backpacks, we set out to find more permanent (and affordable) housing. Even the cheapest hostel is more expensive than renting a room in an apartment, so the faster we could find a room, the better it was on our pockets. The best place to find cheap apartments or house shares is either on Gumtree Sydney or Domain Sydney. Unfortunately Craigslist hasn’t caught on here like in the States. These sites often offer better housing options for backpackers, because you are usually subletting from someone who either owns or is renting the apartment, and therefore you are not required to sign a lease or undergo a credit check, and many rooms come fully furnished. Before we could start contacting potential roommates, we needed to go out and get a prepaid mobile (cell phone). This is so that we could leave messages, and have a number for people to call us back at, this is also very important to have when passing out resumes for a job. We went with the cheapest plan at the Vodafone stand at the mall, $30 a month. Vodafone is the cheapest, but Telstra has the best coverage.

When budget apartment hunting, be prepared to hate your life and see a lot of horrible living facilities people call their home. We found one room on Gumtree that sounded promising. It was on the 20^th floor of a downtown high-rise apartment, with reasonable rent, and loads of natural light. We could only imagine the awesome view from the 20^th floor! We thought we found a gem. That was until we walked in and found 14 other people living there! That’s 12 people all using the same bathroom! And yes, the room was sunny; that’s because it was a sunroom on the balcony with no real walls! The only reason it was up for rent was because the girl living there got pregnant and had to move back to Thailand. We obviously passed on that room and ran back to a 2-bedroom apartment room we saw earlier with only 4 people living there. But the 20^th floor sunroom did have a nice view.

After 3 stressful days of apartment hunting we found a fully furnished master bedroom in Pyrmont, which is just past Darling Harbour, pressed up against the Sydney Fish Market, and about a 20 minute walk from Sydney’s City Business District. It was a great location; close enough to the city, but not as expensive as a room in the CBD, and only 4 other people living there. We had one bedroom, the room across from us had a couple living in there, and two more girls lived in a fake-makeshift room in the living room. It had been built with cloth and plywood walls, which we dubbed “the enclosure”. Everyone was Korean except us. We paid $310 a week, which seemed to be a pretty average payment in Sydney. Of course this varies. Some people were shocked to find out we pay $310 per week to live with 4 other people, but you have to keep in mind it came fully furnished with Internet and included all the rice we could eat, no joke, there was always a giant bag of rice in the kitchen. We never asked where it came from, we just ate it. Seeing as we had only come to Sydney with basically just the clothing in our backpacks, this was perfect for us. We didn’t need to go out and buy kitchen wear, a bed or other basic things one needs to live, but can end up costing a fortune once it all adds up.

We ended up really loving the apartment, but hating our roommates. Anyone who has shared a home with others, knows how hard it is to find normal people to live with.

Read our next blog for our stories and tips for finding a job in Syndey without having it suck!