This is a bit of a list of things that have occurred to me over the past month or so as I indulged in job hunting. As a full-time worker who then became a part-time worker elsewhere instead last month (nice job and lovely people, but not long-term sustainable) I’m still job hunting for a full-time job.
No major order to any of this below, but it’s mostly about process logistics. Next week I’ll do one on other aspects.
If you don’t have regular internet access you’re pretty sunk
Just about everything process-wise from advertisement to submission to hearing back is online. Anything involving the sending or receiving of paper is rare, though it happens occasionally. Be prepared to spend an awful lot of quality time with your computer.
Anyone who has to do everything elsewhere in libraries etc, or hasn’t the right level of computer skills, has my complete sympathy simply because they don’t have the same flexibility. At least the old tradition of awaiting The Arrival Of The Post twice daily, the use of pen, stamps, and posting things is 90% removed these days. That part is good.
There is Exact Date Tyranny – The System Rules
A lot of the big online portals used by lots of similar organizations are so set as to require DD/MM/YYYY format for just about everything in life. Without it you cannot move forward or progress to the next part of the application.
You can be asked for this precision level for anything from the precise dates you started and ended every job you’ve ever had to the exact date you joined every professional body you are a member of.
At the end you will get to declare that everything you’ve entered is accurate to the best of your knowledge. Certain things you will know and have to hand, others can be found out by diligently asking the right people, but some things will inevitably end up at a best guess if you’ve had a long career and the records aren’t there and the organizations no longer exist…
You will have Usernames and Passwords running out both ears
Lots of online application systems means the registration process for each of them and a bulging system set up to remember them all and which ones goes with which website. Personally I like KeePass to keep track of usernames and passwords but there’s lots of options. Job Alerts do run rampage in your InBox though, an in-coming tide of which a few things will actually be useful (see below).
Job Alerts Cannot Easily Be Framed for Specificity
Many (not all by any means) recruitment websites and ones carrying job adverts enable you to set up email alerts. I have 8 zillion that ping into my InBox of an early morning.
If you are searching for things like information and library jobs beware, all of reality just about is going to be caught because all it requires is the word to appear anywhere in the advert (‘for more information contact’, ‘may be required to work in heritage, libraries, parks and other council properties’). If you don’t use very generic words however you simply don’t see lots of jobs that are actually information roles but just don’t have that in the job title so wouldn't appear if you restricted the alert to job title. Jobs in the information profession are called such completely variable things these days.
So whether you set up 8 zillion job alerts or just search manually is probably a matter of preference. Some things you have to search manually as you can’t set up alerts for the sites anyway.
Job Alerts Can However Give Entertainment
The sheer amount of totally unsuited jobs that can come up can be magnificent. I particularly liked Sous Chef.
Jurisdiction Matters
One of my favourite things about job alerts is the fact that lots of them are continentally challenged. Lots of them won’t allow you to enter a more specific geographical location than ‘Scotland’ (erm – big country in feasible commuting and expense terms, trust me), some will allow more specific locations (e.g. West of Scotland). However with many of them what you can get pinging into your InBox is a job in a city or town that is certainly in Scotland, only the continent it is in is America or Australia where there happens to be somewhere called the same thing. So not all alerts manage to match up country and place.
Guidance Information
Normal is job advert, Job Specification, Person Specification, Application form / process. Sometimes it’s all very clear, succinct, and lovely. A lot of the time it isn’t. I recall wading through a 17 page job description (no, that is not a typo and I am not joking) to finally get to the bit near the end which said driving licence was essential.
My plea here would go put the essential and desirable things really near the top under an obvious heading, and don’t expect folk to be able to match a job description that is far longer than the application form. Make the guidance documentation and form something that encourages applications, not discourages.
Applications that involve ten separate attachments, some of which require you to sign them physically, and some are PDF and some are Word, or are electronic but don’t give you an email address to return it all to, are destined to confuse potential candidates. It happens fairly regularly.
You have to prove your Eligibility to Work in the UK
There will be a bit of the application form that will enquire precisely what you your status is re eligibility to work in the UK. These days there are long delightful lists of documents you can be required to produce at interview, everything from passports onwards.
There is a Mini Industry in Providing Academic Transcripts and Replacement Certificates
Most job applications require complete breakdowns of what you studied, where, at what level, when awarded, what grade. Some are more stringent than others in the amount of information they ask for. But you can be asked to list all the main components you studied. This can cause problems when some of it is a very long time ago and you can’t quite remember all the required information or find the relevant bits of paper.
If you start trying to replace them from the various places you will quickly discover it is now an industry and a way the institution now makes money. It can also take time. So my advice would be keep all your certificates in one place and keep them together.
The most baffling thing I have been asked so far is to list all the school qualifications I failed, not just the ones I passed, and at what grade. But it’s wise to have all your Certificates because you can be asked to produce them for interview etc.
It Can be Difficult to Tailor Applications
For some of the major portals most common fixed parts of an application (personal details, qualifications, job history, professional memberships, references, equal opportunities monitoring) are held in your account so each time you apply for a job a lot of information is already entered and the major creative part of it is doing the ‘why you should be considered for this specific job’ section. But each time you change one of the fixed areas for a specific job it can cascade the change into everything else.
So if you decide you want to apply for things in different areas highlighting different parts of your experience, and that some qualifications are relevant for one area, but you’d rather drop them out of the other… you can’t always. Nice as it really is not to have to endlessly enter the same information into the same system, I suspect that makes it difficult for anyone with portfolio lives where they’ve done different things.
Keeping Everything In One Place
I tend to keep everything related to each application in a Word folder by date due and post then change the title after submission to put it into the date submitted section so what’s due in next is always at the top, and I add it all in as I see the jobs appear. It also has all the other things I’m going to need like upteen versions of c.v.’s and lists of components of everything I’ve done re various qualifications. I also keep a masterlist of what I’ve applied for when.
It’s all very basic as systems go, but it suffices. I just prefer to do it this way so it’s all on the laptop and I'm not spending much time on it.
Interpreting Closing Dates
Not all job adverts have a closing date on them. The majority do. Within that some of them also specify a time – usually noon, 5pm, or 11.59pm. In that most submissions are electronic to electronic systems I tend to assume that if it just stipulates a date then anytime on that date will suffice. But it is an assumption.
Some Things Don’t Change - Submission Acknowledgments
Now I last job-hunted in the mid 90s. An awful lot of things were posted away and nothing would ever be heard back. In the online application world you get asked for email, phone, mobile, address etc. Lots of contact mechanisms. But the rule hasn’t changed. If you’re submitting through a jobs portal it’ll usually be configured to automatically send you a receipt so at least you know it got there. If you’re submitting to a small and / or traditional organization it’s a lot more likely you email it in and get no acknowledgment of receipt.
How Long It Takes To Hear Back Is Like Soothsaying A Piece Of String
This applies to those organizations that do respond and tell you the result of the consideration of your application. Not all do by any means. How long it takes with the super speedy ones can be a few days, but this is highly unusual, what is a lot more likely is edging towards two months if at all. This means you can still hear back from places that you’d mentally consigned to the application graveyard ages ago. There is no logical way of thinking ‘well I submitted around x date, therefore…’. Each organization is different.
A Reject Has Its Up Sides
Compared to having no idea what happened or if it’s dead or alive as an application at least with a reject you get certainty. Reject = at least you know, move on.
Format issues can be a terror
Instinct might seem to say you should spend more time on the content than the formatting of the application. However it is certainly true that sometimes the application form will be so badly formatted that the insertion of any word in many sections is going to cause absolute chaos to the legibility (and thus possibly reception) of the overall application.
I have been known to spend longer trying to sort the formatting than writing the information. What this proved to me overall is that I am not a professional secretary (not that I thought I was!!). Sometimes you end up submitting a dog’s breakfast in look simply because you’re out of time deadline-wise and you can’t get it to do it properly.
