Job application questions

"It says here you're 'consistently the best at being brilliant'. Welcome to the team!"

You’re trapped. Chained to a desk, moss growing around your feet. “At least I’ve still got a job in these straitened times”, you think, closely followed by “I could be hit by a bus tomorrow and this is the sum of my professional achievements. Shit.” These are the sad moments when you look to escape your current oppressors employers and put your faith in the recruitment process.

You find a job ad. It seems OK: the organisation is one you’ve heard of and the pay’s acceptable. That’s all you can hope for. The only remaining challenge is getting your CV to them and a covering letter.

BUT WAIT…

They don’t want a covering letter. It’s not enough in this technological age. We’ve got 3D films, 6 billion people clamouring for air, food and water and a recession depression concession. There’s a modern digital ‘system’ you must go through.

This being the age of the internet, some companies have one of a series of identical ‘bespoke’ job systems. They give you a username and a login and keep you on file digitally. They also ask you a series of questions about yourself that it’s not decent, reserved or even slightly British to answer in order to put you off working there altogether.

The BBC recruitment process, for example, involves forcing you to watch a series of five minute videos featuring members of the corporation’s famously sandals-wearing, disabled, vegan, multi-faith, tree-hugging staff variously photocopying and chatting before the system poses a multiple-choice question about whether you should go on to congratulate them, insult them or brutally sodomise them. It is not clear how the BBC’s recruitment system relates to real life or what is the right answer, but its a system so far removed from the real world that it makes the British Broadcasting Corporation look like the world’s longest running fly-on-the-wall sitcom about work.

Other systems ask you questions such as “give an example of when you’ve innovated” or “provide an example of how you improve the diversity of the workplace”.

Questions like this turn the recruitment process into another BBC programme, The Apprentice, only this time the recruiters can’t see the devious thoughts behind the hollow eyes of the candidates, much less the beads of sweat forming on their foreheads. The most egregious tosser with the shiniest suit of pre-prepared and embellished falsehoods at their disposal gets an opportunity someone else won’t because they’re not prepared to lie enough. Online lies can be maintained long enough to pass the interview stage and have little bearing on the real world. The questions are annoying, like a child asking about sex. Yes, I could explain it, but now is really not the time. Someone else will then go on to get a pat on the back for saying its when two people “really want a cuddle”.

Diversity answers are harder to nail down; I once gave up cheese for a year, I am excellent at parking, I am from Ancient Greece. While any of them might make some workplace more diverse, it’s unclear until you’re there what you can bring to ‘the mix’. Is this supposed to be a list of every unique and defining feature about me? I’m here for the job, not to volunteer for an all-human Noah’s Ark. Can I lose out on a job simply because I’ve never been to Vietnam?

Questions on innovation are also ridiculous. Anyone who was truly innovating would not be applying for a job. They would have invented the teleporter or started their own business and they would be buying companies like an uber-capitalist, not begging to join a minimum-wage typing pool in order to stave off the bailiffs. Again, people embellish until they create a character so far removed from themselves you might as well be reading a comic about last night’s wacky cheese dream. People are never going to fess up to the real office annoyances: farting a lot, daydreaming (which everyone does, just not on job applications), being a bit racist, misogynist or unpleasant and kranky, having poor hygiene, not being truly awake till 11am, being unable to spell but falling back on an undiagnosed claim of dyslexia, constantly harping on about their child, having one eyebrow or being an annoying prick.

Around 99 per cent of job applications now must say that people are excellent at working in a team or alone, always go the extra mile, have a commitment to blablabla and blablabla. There’s no humility to the answers that do get through – Superman himself would struggle against a properly padded CV, even though he might be the only candidate who can actually fly. Whatever happened to “I think I’m perfectly suited to this job and would love the chance to prove myself”?

Formal qualifications? The near collapse of the British financial system and nationalisation of a banking giant or two

Despite all of these systems, and the stupefying concept of an “HR profession”, companies up and down the land invariably end up topping up their staff with a brigade of useless knackersacks held together by the occasional glimmer of sentient life. People still get the best jobs through nepotism and contacts – remember when the four wealthy bank twats pictured admitted they had no formal banking qualifications? It proved that your CV, along with those annoying questions and online forms simply stock up the bottom ranks of large companies with corporate cannon fodder.

The problem is there are simply too many people looking for jobs. The company is as guilty of complacency as the candidate. When faced with a torrent of needy CVs, instead of studying them on merit and checking references, companies are weeding people out by putting them through a labyrinth of laborious, irrelevant questions designed to dishearten applicants in their thousands.  Pat on the back all round.

Why Facebook is rubbish

I am two weeks away from having my Facebook account deleted. I’ve been on the site for over five years, and in that time have grown to briefly think I might be able to use it to ‘score’, seen countless meaningless party photos, and ultimately, begun to loathe its invasive record of much of my life.

The crux of it is this: Unless a real physical meeting is on the cards, rubbish second and third-tier friends can fuck off and take their bogus ‘connections’ with them. We all have them, we know who they are. I have wasted hours over the years glancing across a sea of data from connections I eagerly added in the hope that they would want to reconnect (an early phase of Facebook usage that’s hard to recall). Instead people try to define themselves through witticisms and poses, largely recycled or devoid of wit or grace. Every now and then someone’s dog dies – Well, boo hoo. Who are you again? From behind the safety of my monitor I come to reject the posturing on display, then recognise that I too am subject to the same posturing and self-defining statements.  I also come to reject the real emotion and events with the same ease of disregard. Then I realise the site, a shop window for the world’s egos, is breeding this behaviour.

I remember university, pre-Facebook, where friends weren’t arranged in any way whatsoever and where new faces were embraced on group outings. You might have developed the new faces as friends over time – asked them questions, slowly come to know them, brought them into the forefront of your social life and maybe even spent more time together. You certainly wouldn’t have stuck their photograph in a book and started recording details about them, and if you asked them to produce their own page in your ‘big book of friends’ I don’t imagine you’d ever see them again. Facebook, of course, is the same repellent concept glossed over by its ‘networking’ pretensions.

The fact is, you can and do have people as Facebook friends who you wouldn’t normally be able to consider a friend at all and you almost certainly ignore them. They, in return, add you, scan your profile and dismiss you. Stevie Wonder just called to say he loved you; Facebook is just standing outside in the dark, staring at you through the window and fumbling in its pants.

There is, in the real world, a great sensory rush when genuinely seeing an old friend again. Your brain updates the smells, sights and changes that you notice in a giddy rush of learning. The attitude, the inflections in a voice, a change of heart, demeanour – things you can’t properly appreciate digitally. Facebook recreates human contact about as faithfully as a Glade plug-in recreates a springtime breeze through an Alpine forest.

The site shows you people as they want you to see them, but we all know that that is never how people are in real life. Now you’re cursed with dozens of these lurker ‘friends’, like a digital mass haunting of also-rans. Also-rans who can only be photographed when drunk, who ‘like’ music (who knew!) and who ‘want Jeremy Clarkson for Prime Minister’. People who think you need to know where they are, night or day, and what happened on the telly just now. People who think their make-up and soft focus webcam photos can make people forget just  how reptilian they look in real life, or that they’ve got a funny nose. People who can’t spell, which would not normally grate as much as it does on a Facebook status update where they are brutally grammatically word-raped by ‘Grammar Nazis’ – people who have picked up a few common corrections but failed to develop any form of restraint for their superiority complex. They too, are a product of the Facebook system; Nobody could spell on MySpace and nobody cared.

Even good friends can use Facebook as a platform to proclaim the inane. Sometimes you can have too much information. Friendship needs mystique. You should make the effort to explore someone else’s record collection rather than giving their Youtube and Spotify links a little blue thumbs-up. Think, too, how Facebook may be turning you into someone else’s rubbish second and third-tier online ghost friend. I dare say I am just such an also-ran to many dozens of people – so why did they add me? The opposite of love, as the saying goes, is indifference. Facebook has a great deal of one and not a lot of the other.

Every interaction on this vast online phone directory for the lonely involves you operating a computer alone, reporting on your own life or reading other people’s reports. When one relationship ended my status showed a broken heart icon, but I would keep visiting my ex’s profile intermittently. The broken heart was apt, but I was unable to digitally let go, and would keep visiting the profile weekly. New photographs would make my heart sink further through the floor until my logical brain gripped the controls and deleted her, freeing me from an entirely optional but compulsive digital love prison. I was Gollum stalking ‘my precious’ on line; Not healthy and not something I’d ever imagined myself doing. Thank you, Facebook.

The model of usage most people adopt is the “idly pissing about seeing what’s new” model, but you shouldn’t suck up the “Top News” on the site any more than you should watch any one TV station 24 hours a day. All Facebook time could be spent doing something productive or genuinely social and literally none of it is.

So with the end in sight, has it made me any richer financially or socially? No. Have I met anyone through Facebook? No.  Facebook is a marketing platform acting as a front for a data farm. It is a place where I offer up my details in return for a sense of ‘connection’, which is something the site genuinely can’t deliver.

For the last few years my Facebook account has held data saying I was born over 100 years ago in Facatativa, Colombia. Now I believe it is no longer enough to just feed the site bogus information. I want out. The weather outside may be crap, but at least it’s real.

Adele – “Button in the teeth”

It’s hard to avoid Adele. That’s not a thinly veiled comment on her size, it’s a comment on the ubiquity of the nation’s new “Heartbroken Commoner Laureate”. Leave a radio on for long enough and Adele honks her way into your affections with a series of 60s-pastiche soul songs that signal music is ready to begin its second 50-year cycle of style repetition.

Few people have been able to say “There’s a fire starting in my heart” less convincingly or with more affectation. A quick trip to Spotify reminds us of that powerful first entrance of the chorus, with its deeply affecting lyrics, as rendered perfectly by said young lady:

“We could have had it aaaa-aaaaalll
Button in the teeth
You had my hard on, sod your hair
And you paid it to the bee-ee-eeee”

Perhaps the surreal lyrics do not surprise you – this is, after all, a woman who previously sang about “Chasing Pavements”; a concept so obscure that nobody dared argue with it as long as she kept hitting the notes on cue.

With a title like Rolling in the Deep, this parasitic radio tune ought to describe an epic underwater brawl between a giant squid and a humpback whale. In fact it’s about Adele – a girl so poor she was born without a surname – breaking up with a man so earth-shakingly important to the grand scheme of the world that together - with her gigantic sorrowful hoot and his almighty power - they could so easily have had that button in the teeth she so desired. As her largely fact-based Wikipedia page confirms, Adele had in fact been dating a giant iron-clad nuclear Stalin.

Adele herself is to blame of course. Gifted songwriter that she is, it was her idea to make a song where it takes literally ages to say “all”. She took the lyrics on the page and emoted her way through four minutes of quality instrumentation and production into our affections

A public softened by wheezing autotuned X-Factor ninnies soon took Adele to heart and, finally beginning to tire of Satan’s house band The Black Eyed Peas, accepted her as ‘real’. She lives with her mum and clearly eats chips. She’s a failure like many of us Brits, but she’s a successful one. We love an underdog, and in the beginning Adele was one, but at any one time half of the soundwaves in the UK are carrying one of her songs from a distant car/office/builder’s radio. Here’s hoping the nation has an enormous cultural change of heart. To treat Adele as anything less than the second coming of music, when there are so many talented nobodies out there, would require chart-radio happy clappers to suddenly tire of endless repetition and mediocrity.

Oh well, there’s always the lottery…