Candidates

We have a number of vacancies in my section at the moment – and in fact I am going to another person’s leaving drink tonight. Yesterday afternoon I went through a number of application forms to select people for interview for a couple of posts. I did a pretty thorough job making notes on each applicant on if/ how they had demonstrated each competency. I always feel a bit bad about turning down people’s applications, as the forms are horrible and I always want to give them marks for just having gone to the effort of filling it out.

However, some of the forms were really poor and the likelihood of them being invited to interview is not very high. Their managers will have read the form as they had to endorse it. If I was their manager, I might have given a bit of advice to the applicant on how to fill out the form because you at least want to give the person a fighting chance.

- Giving some contrived example which seemed to be for the purpose of telling me what big posh university you went to is not going to impress me.

- Saying that you demonstrate the competency but not explaining how or what you actually did is not going to impress me.

- Using lots of acronyms that mean absolutely nothing to me is not going to impress me.

- Demonstrating that you have not even read what the competency involves is not going to impress me.

There was a lot of not being impressed. When I still worked at a university I do recall interviewing someone and she wasn’t the best candidate. Half way through the interview the woman said “This is going really badly, I should just leave now really shouldn’t I?” I have to admit it was quite tempting to agree and ask her to leave, but instead we convinced her that it really was worth carrying on the agony so that we could formally write to her afterwards and turn her down. I am hoping that we may have more success with these candidates.