I’m getting used to turning up at parties or work meetings naked. Everyone seems intrigued to start with, but then they shrug and carry on. When I first started having these dreams, they really upset me, but now I figure I’m asleep and get on with whatever is the main event.

Apparently, these dreams can reveal a fear of being exposed, vulnerability, a need for acceptance, or anxiety about preparedness. I suppose that’s classic imposter syndrome. If the cap fits…

The nightmares I find more difficult to endure are the ones where I turn up for an exam or a course I never attended. Sometimes it’s GCSE physics. (I hated those classes. My teacher wrote in my report that ‘physics rolls over Jeff’s head like waves on a beach’, which I thought was poetry, given the subject matter.) Sometimes I’m on stage on the X-Factor, wondering how I got there and not knowing the words to the song. One time I was on stage with Steps, not knowing the moves. Another time, I was in a play with Patrick Stewart…

For jobseekers who have been rejected a thousand times, it’s all but impossible to shake off imposter syndrome. The number of times I’ve heard ‘Who would employ me?’, ‘I have nothing to offer’, or ‘I can’t work, look at me…’ I’m sure Jobcentre work coaches can relate to this experience. And I’m sure employers can sense it in countless application forms, CVs and cover letters they’ve seen over the years. It runs through people like Blackpool in a stick of rock.

One time, Clean Slate ran an initiative to help homeless people with previous experience of working in the trades. We tried to set up a social enterprise around it but, for those who had the skills, it only took one session of paid work to realise they were totally employable. And off they would go, into painting and decorating, plastering, bricklaying, plumbing, or whatever.

Paid work experience is something we now build into our Ele-ments programme. Although its founding premise is about recruiting ‘Experts through Lived Experience’ and mentoring them, (E-L-E-MENTs, see?), and filling gaps in the care and health sectors, it’s an alternative to formal recruitment.

Unemployed people join us for one of our 7 Signs events, which is all about confidence-building through gentle, discursive, peer skills reviews and exploring the world of recruitment through employers’ eyes. Almost always, we erase the word ‘unemployable’ and replace it with a personal statement about job goals that match their skills and interests. I wouldn’t even say most are jobseekers when they arrive, but they are by the time they leave.

We invite those who buy into the 7 Signs process join our Ele-ments programme and reveal qualities and aspirations suited to a role in the health, care or advice sectors. They are offered twelve weeks of paid work experience. The pay is fundamental to the programme. If you work and are financially rewarded for it, especially when you’ve spent years feeling nobody would, it can be a watershed moment. What we find happens is people start asking for more hours because we only offer half a day a week to start. Others get impatient to find other work or training.

Along the way, we provide in-house training on professional standards. This includes modules on boundaries, GDPR and confidentiality, and conducting difficult conversations, for example. The things some employers might take for granted and others might include in a short induction or policy documents, (that maybe no-one reads). We’re recruiting people for their lived, not professional, experience, so we have to compensate for that through training and on-site supervision. Then we add accredited training for a further sense of validation, as well as for the practical, vocational skills they develop.

By the end of the placement, we aim to have job-ready candidates for support roles. We fill many of our own vacancies this way — half of our Team Leads come from our Elements Programme —  and our vision is to continue all our staff’s progression until lived experience informs our work at every level up to the Board. That’s great for us but there’s an emerging opportunity to work closer with the health and care sectors to fill vacancies through a new form of recruitment vehicle.

Living with imposter syndrome occasionally undermines my confidence but in many ways it helps me relate to the sense of unworthiness that many jobseekers feel. Wearing that mantle proudly, or happily parading round naked (to be clear, in my dreams), is a frame of mind I’m slowly getting used to.

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