Rewind about 20 years (if you’re old enough!). Do you remember the old days when you’d be sitting at your desk looking through the post at the CVs you’d received that day having a little laugh about that chap who applied for EVERY single one you’d advertised in the local paper? ‘God, how annoying’ you’d moan as you wrote ‘no’ or ‘reject’ on his (many) covering letters.
Now move forward a little to the early days of job boards. Do you remember getting utterly swamped in applications from candidates all over the world who had no relevant skills and certainly no visa to work in the UK? That really was annoying. Having to, ineptly at first, trawl through hundreds of emails to find the relevant ones. Luckily after a while we worked out how to cut down the number of totally irrelevant applications.
However, in these mobile times are we back where we started? Not with desperate souls as in the 90s or with strange overseas applicants in the early 2000s but instead with thumb-happy mobile applications? You can’t help but notice that jobseekers want to search for jobs via their mobile devices, they also want to be able to apply. Not all job boards and corporate/agency sites are there yet but they will be. Is this leading to a sizeable number of candidates who make job applications on the hoof via their handheld devices when they are really not that serious about the roles they apply for? Are they filling time whilst commuting, waiting in the queue for lunch, even on the toilet?!
I’ve spoken with one recruiter, who would like to remain anonymous, who wonders if we “need to bring back the fountain pen, quality writing paper and the need to think out a carefully written cover letter which has to be folded, inserted into a stamped addressed envelope and walked down to the post box – preferably through rain and a force 5 gale – to really test out the seriousness of the person’s job application.”
Jobseekers sure as hell want our full attention when we screen their applications; don’t we deserve theirs when they apply!
I think a good middle ground would be to re-enforce the concept of the cover letter, which seems to me to have become an option rather than the norm. I don’t think going back to the postal approach is a smart move, because of the cost and time-lag involved, but I do certainly think that there is something to be said for a candidate who actually takes the time to write a personal communication with the agent or hiring manager – the input (or lack thereof) will show just how keen the jobseeker is to land an interview.
One of the things I try to implement in my training is for the recruiter to test the candidate and find out just how serious he or she is about jobseeking – as you observe, there is SO much time wasted by people ‘job fishing’ rather than job hunting – and I don’t think many/any of them realise how selfish this is because it’s causing recruiters to become cynical about candidates, taking time away from people who have precious little of it in the first place (and, might I add, are NOT being paid by the supposed ‘jobseeker’ for the time they might be wasting), not to mention taking the attention of the recruiters away from those candidates who *are* genuinely motivated to look for and accept a new position.
[…] jobseekers thumb happy (I wrote this blog previously – but Matt Alder says I’m wrong and that mobile applications are a higher quality): […]