I met an old boss a few weeks ago for coffee, I am feeling battered and bruised because I have been out of work since last October and have had 8 unsuccessful interviews in the past 9 weeks. He said what I had to do was to re find my sparkle because that's what made him hire me.
So why have I lost it? this blog post will attempt to explore the process and show why I have lost my sparkle
Job application forms and person specs have become more unrealistic.
This has been a trend since the economic crisis of 2008 organisations are trying to keep up the same level of service with less money. In reality this means combining jobs and paying people the same to do more work. What this means for person specs is that the Essential and Desirable Criteria are becoming more lengthy. The Desirable matter because if the candidates show they have 3 of 4 and another application has 2 of the 4 then the candidate with 3 of 4 is more likely to get the interview if both have met the essentials. Organisations need to think if they really need a person with all the points on the person spec as they rarely exist
This means for application forms the additional information section is now critical but organisations have changed the way they recruit accordingly. The additional information is now dealt with by character length and not just word length so candidates have to work out how to say they fit the lengthy criteria. in roughly 15 full length tweets or 2000 characters sometimes more. For word length its about 500 so imagine a 12 point person spec and working out a way to cover all the important points in as much detail but as briefly as possible.
This has turned me into a robot who can recite pretty much from memory my examples for applications and doesn't leave much room for the extra stardust which may get the interview.
Interviews are now literally box ticking exercises.
I am disabled but the ticking of "interviewing the disabled person box" is not what I am talking about here. I am talking about the fact interviews are now competency based so they follow the STAR model. Situation Task Action Result. So Tell me an example of when you worked in a team? What they are really interested in is the Action or What you did in that situation This again has turned me into a robot because what the interviewers will do at the end of the day is add up who said what into a score and the person with the biggest score wins. For me this is hard because i give solid interviews and use my personality at the interview to try and show I would fit in at this organisation, but that counts for nothing as I haven't the highest score so again my sparkle is lost. It has become so prescriptive, that very rarely now the panel decides Person X did not score the highest in the interview but they have have something we can work with or improve so lets go with them.
Feedback
At the end of the interview process it is vital to gain feedback even if you are successful because each interview is a learning opportunity but employers can be reluctant to provide useful feedback. With this I can than improve the other 2 parts of the blog. The pressures on organisations time means they tend to be robots as unless the recruiting manager has the time or you push them for it. The feedback is "There was a high standard of candidates all of whom were excellent and you did well to get to this stage." This is not helpful at all as I can't tweak my answer or take something out of my application. So recruiting companies should be made to constructive feedback. I mentioned previously my personality. It has often been brought up in my feedback how engaged I am with the panel and how great I would be to work with
I lost my sparkle because the job application process is now so robotic that I am worn out by it
So for me to regain my Sparkle I need to find a way to be the best robot that there is via the job application and hopefully the interview process, then get the one thing that has not changed in recruitment have a big slice of luck.
No comments:
Post a Comment