By my own admission, I'm a bit of a lazy swine.
Despite this, I have never claimed the dole, because I have always been prepared to do almost any job. The way I viewed it, I needed money, and even minimum wage was more money than the dole.
The easiest thing for me to do was sign up with an employment agency. I did this and generally earned between £3.50 and £4.00 an hour (back in 1995/6), and back then, agency staff had no right to sick leave or paid holiday. I was also still doing my Saturday (and occasional Sundays!) job on the checkout at B&Q (a legacy from my sixth form days). So I was often doing 7 day weeks, where the Mon-Fri stuff could be anything, and indeed was!: working in a sawmill and furniture factory (drilling holes all day), making sandwiches, helping remove industrial air conditioning systems from the tops of office buildings, kitchen duties, portering, newspaper order picking, greetings card order picking, and so on... I eventually got a temporary office job in transport, which I did for nearly two years - and then another temporary office job - in insolvency! (wtf was that, I thought...) And kind of stayed there.
My point is, that despite being a lazy sod, I didn't want to be receiving handouts when there was something I could do about it, i.e. get a job, even a crap one.
There are now 1.57m (or thereabouts) unemployed and signing on in the UK. I bet that the number of unfilled jobs as about the same - but they don't want to do the menial stuff.