‘A more human LinkedIn’: Spain media project helping Covid jobless

Level: Intermediate

1
  Warmer

a. Collect short answers to these three questions on a board or shared screen.

These days, …

… where can you see jobs ads?

… what software, hardware, etc. do you need to apply for a job nowadays?

… how do employers tell applicants that they have got the job?

2
  Key words

a. Find words in the article that match the definitions below. The paragraph numbers are given to
help you.

1. describing someone whose husband or wife has died

(para 1)

2. money that you have put in a bank so that you can use it later
(para 1)

3. say something that is not true (para 3)

4. asking people for money or food, usually because you are very poor
(para 4)

5. personal details and other information that someone posts about themselves on social media
(para 5)

6. understand how someone feels because you can imagine what it is like to be them
(para 11)

7. jobs or types of work that someone is trained to do

(para 11)

8. the fact that people want something or a service (para 13)

9. the ways in which a company encourages people to buy its products or use its services
(para 14)

10. very happy, especially because something good has happened

(para 15)
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 ‘A more human LinkedIn’: Spain media project helping Covid jobless
Level: Intermediate

b. Use some of the key words above to complete these sentences.

1. He had to about his age to get into the army.

2. The for organic food is increasing every year.

3. I was to see my old friends again.

4. The money for the flight came out of my .

5. She is able to with Kim because she is also a mother

of twins.

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 ‘A more human LinkedIn’: Spain media project helping Covid jobless
Level: Intermediate
Sam Jones
15 September, 2021
1 The Covid crisis quickly changed Alejandro’s*
life. Almost overnight, Alejandro, a widowed
craftsman, lost his business that supplied
leather pieces to shops, markets and the
military. He quickly used his savings, his father
died from coronavirus, the electricity was
disconnected, and he had to go to food banks
to feed himself and his teenage daughter.
2 “Things were hard before the pandemic,”
he says. “But if you’d told me that these
things would happen to me, I’d never have
believed you.
3 “I started missing meals so that I could feed
my daughter properly. I lost 12 kilos through
nerves, not eating and not sleeping. I used
to lie and tell her I wasn’t hungry because I’d
been eating all day.”
4 By spring 2020, Alejandro was begging outside
a Madrid supermarket just to survive.
5 A family he talked to at the supermarket told
him about Un Mismo Equipo (One Team), an
Instagram account and website that allows
unemployed and often homeless people to
advertise their skills. A company that makes
luxury motorbike seats saw Alejandro’s
profile and offered him a job at their factory in
northern Spain.
6 Un Mismo Equipo began in June when a friend
of the film-maker Gonzalo Perales sent him a
photo of a man on a street in central Madrid.
The man, an electrician, had made a cardboard
sign to ask for work.
7 Perales posted the picture on his Instagram
account. Within an hour, the man got a job
offer. The following day, Perales met another
man on the streets of Madrid who was looking
for work as a waiter. He uploaded his story and,
within 48 hours, the man received 15 job offers.
8 Perales realized that many of the people who
lost their jobs because of the pandemic were
in their 40s and 50s who had worked for many
years as waiters, tradespeople or craftworkers.
They couldn’t find work because they did not
know how to look for jobs online.
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9 “Today, you need a computer and computer
skills to get a job because that’s where 95%
of jobs are advertised,” says Perales. “In the
beginning, I used to go out in Madrid and look
for people who had not been on the streets
for too long. I talked to them and asked if they
were looking for work. I then tried to write a
nice short text to put online.”
10 The idea of Un Mismo Equipo is simple: people
make contact via Instagram or the website and
Perales sends them a questionnaire to fill in.
After that, he chats to them and uploads their
profiles for potential employers to read.
11 “It’s like a more human kind of LinkedIn,” he
says. “We tell people’s stories in a nice way so
that others can empathize with them. A lot of
the people we work with are in their 50s. They
have been working in their trades for 30 years
so they have a lot of experience. That can
really help companies.”
12 Thanks to their mobile phones and free wifi in
cafés and other public places, many people
who are looking for work contact Un Mismo
Equipo every day. Their Instagram page has
more than 30,000 followers.
13 Unemployment is high in Spain, and as the
demand for Un Mismo Equipo grows, Perales
and his colleagues hope to develop the project.
14 “If we can get enough people involved and
enough partnerships and marketing, we could
help 1,000 people a year instead of 100,” he
says. In the last months, the project has helped
get 13 people jobs across Spain.
15 Alejandro has just finished his first week of
work in 18 months. He is delighted to be
working again and has even started to make
plans. He is saving money so that his daughter
can stop living with relatives in Madrid and join
him in the north.
*Alejandro is not his real name.
© Guardian News and Media 2021
First published in The Guardian, 15/09/2021
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 ‘A more human LinkedIn’: Spain media project helping Covid jobless
Level: Intermediate

3
  Find the information

a. Answer the questions with information from the article.

Alejandro

1. What do you know about Alejandro and his family?

2. What is his trade and why did he lose his job?

3. What happened in his life when he lost his work?

4. Who told Alejandro about Un Mismo Equipo?

5. Where did he live before the pandemic, and where does he live now?

Gonzalo Perales

6. What happened to make Perales set up Un Mismo Equipo?

7. What does Perales do after he has interviewed a person on the streets who is looking for work?

8. Why is it harder for older people to find a job than it is for younger people?

9. Why does Perales think older tradespeople can really help companies?

10. What are Perales’s hopes and plans for the future of Un Mismo Equipo?

4
  Key language

a. Find and highlight the word ‘job’ or ‘jobs’

nine times in the article.
get a job
b. Write the words and parts of words that go
with ‘job’ to make collocations and phrases
onto the word field.

c. Add any other collocations or phrases that job

include the word ‘job’ that you know.

d. Use some of these examples in sentences of

your own.
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 ‘A more human LinkedIn’: Spain media project helping Covid jobless
Level: Intermediate

5
  Discussion

a. Discuss these questions and statements.

• What positive social changes have you noticed that started because of the coronavirus pandemic?

• Talk about other stories of human kindness (large or small) that have happened recently.

• Talk about other ways that social media can be, or already has been, used to help people.

6
  In your own words

a. According to the article, one big difference between Un Mismo Equipo and other social-media
profiles that help people find new jobs is that it tells people’s stories in a human way that
people can empathize with. Interview a partner and write up their story so that others who
read it can empathize with them. Write around 200 words.

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