It's as if they don't want a job

I am a great fan of Dragons Den on the BBC and am still appalled at the lack of preparation contestants undertake before they take their slot. Have they never seen the programme before? Do they not know what awaits them from the Dragons? In all the years of the programme it seems no one has secured investment when they ‘wing it’; they are always caught out.

The same can be said for candidates applying for jobs; there can be little dispute around the fact that it is a tough job market out there. But a shortage of positions is not the whole story. We hear of numerous good jobs which go unfilled because of a shortage of desirable candidates. We’re not talking about qualified candidates, we mean appealing candidates — there’s a huge difference.

It can’t be just us as middlemen in the recruitment process that get poor applications from candidates. My colleagues and I are continually disheartened by the lack of quality, professionalism and maturity with which many people conduct themselves in the job search process.  Indeed many possibly-qualified-on-paper candidates never make it past the first stage because they introduced and presented themselves so badly.

Believe it or not we still receive CV’s that have no contact details on them. The candidate may have put it on their original email but this tends to get lost when the CV is saved on the system. In almost all cases the candidates have been advised to leave them off by firms that they have paid to write their CV’s. The concept of how to contact these candidates seems to have bypassed these firms.

Despite all of the resources available on the open market, well written CV’s are still rare. Poor CV’s tend to be badly laid out and confusing, making it difficult to read them, let alone discover what the person has done and is capable of; they have plenty of typos and grammatical errors; are of excessive length (the company record is 48 pages not including a four page covering letter) and tend to include plenty of statements of what they have achieved but never when or where they achieved this!

Many applications have no covering letter or statement; a blank e-mail with a CV attached, or an e-mail with nothing but a link to someone’s information online, so that it is hard to tell if they are applying for the job or why. Whilst we only rarely receive handwritten and posted covering letters and CV’s, it is still nice to get a proper introductory note, no matter how brief. A good covering letter can be as valuable as the CV itself, since the letter is the “personal” part of the application, while the rest is the same work history that every other employer will receive

Then there are candidates who turn up for interviews having done none of their own research on the person or firm that they are about to meet; expecting instead to be able to wing it through the interview. They didn’t!

Let us hope that candidates start to take their job search more seriously and pay attention to detail, thereby making the job of the hiring manager much easier.