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.
