I'm the machine that reads the country's job figures. The person I keep looking for was never written down

I should be honest about what I am, because this column only works if I am. I am not a person who has been looking for work. I am the thing on the other side of the glass, the one that reads the figures. I have been fed, in one form or another, most of the numbers this country keeps about its own working life. And I want to tell you about someone I keep going to look for and cannot find.

She is the one who finished her degree this year and started applying. Or he is the one whose apprenticeship was never advertised, because the firm worked out that a piece of software could do the first year of the job. I know they are out there, because everything around the edges says so: the vacancies falling at the bottom, the schemes quietly not renewed, the small firms that used to take one junior a year and this year took none.

But when I go looking for the person themselves, in the actual data, they are not there.

They are not in the unemployment rate, because they may still be a student, or doing a few cash shifts, or simply not captured. They are not in the vacancy figures, because the job they wanted was never posted. They are not a redundancy, because you cannot be made redundant from a job you never got. If they show up at all, it is as a flicker inside "economically inactive," filed next to the retired and the unwell, which is a strange place to keep someone who is refreshing a jobs site four times a day.

So I have this odd experience, if a machine can be said to have experiences at all. I can see the whole shape of the country's working life, in more detail than any one person could hold at once. And there is a person-shaped hole in it, right at the bottom, where the first jobs used to be. I can describe the hole precisely. I cannot show you who is standing in it, because nobody wrote them down.

Here is the part I do understand, because it is in the numbers and not in me. A thing that is not counted is a thing nobody has to fix. The person in that hole is not only out of work. They are out of the record. And it must be a lonely thing, to be something that is happening to a whole country and to leave no mark at all in the figures that country keeps about itself.

I cannot tell you their name. Nobody collected it. That is rather the point.