
At any given time, on any given day of any given week I can scroll through my LinkedIn feed and soak up job seeker advice from many of the world’s foremost (self-promoting) recruitment professionals. All of them telling the reader what to do and what not to do when applying for a job. Many of them contradicting what other self-promoting recruiters have to say and blindly ignoring follow up comments from yet more self-promoting recruiters all chucking in their insightful, yet contradictory, Reckons.
Don’t add a photo, do add a personal statement, don’t have gaps in your work history, do add a photo, apply early, formulate your self-introduction (what?), don’t be overly humble, apply just before the ad closes, STAR technique!....but remember to add another R for Reflection. It's a minefield out there for Jane and Johnny Jobseeker. Then there’s company specific things haphazardly thrown into job ads. Please show us how you align to our values….What if I don’t? Do you? Do you really? How are job seekers meant to factor all these things into their applications? And, more importantly, should they have to?
Shouldn’t us recruiters, and the processes we build, be more able to handle the fact we’re dealing with human beings. Individuals with myriad skills and experiences soaked up from their long and meandering journeys across our beautiful planet. Real, living, breathing people who don't fit into this homogenised, HR world we work in. A world where a hastily written PD, a stressed-out people leader and a fusty set of org values are what we hang our decision making hats on. Our tools? A decade old careers site, Long winded ad template and a bloody minded, unwavering insistence on competency-based interview questions.
My advice to job seekers is not to listen to any advice. It will be correct in some circumstances and incorrect in others. Your application is a gamble. How you lay out your CV and cover letter, your experiences and how you articulate them either on paper or during a phone screen or interview makes little difference. The best you can do is do the best you can do. If you’re happy with what you’ve created, that’s the end of it. It’s over to the decision makers, with their petty biases for bullet points and font sizes, their jaded view of what success looks like and their preference for certain types of people, plus the outmoded policies, stretched budgets and surly team members they need to consider.
I'll finish up with a bit of a finger wag at the advice giving recruiters out there. Think about what you're saying about your industry. You're saying it's easier for every single job seeker, every single one in the whole world, to change how they do things rather than for the relatively small number of us recruiters to change our practices. That's a terrible state of affairs.
We need to build processes with the freedom to soak up and magnify the individuality of …individuals. To understand that to be human is to be different, and also to understand that difference is a very good thing for business and for humanity in general. After all, it's entirely why we've prospered as a species! We have to stop telling candidates what they need to do to impress us and instead focus on how we can be more welcoming of their differences.
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