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…
The word ‘robust’
Business words come and business words go, but ‘robust’ looks like it’s intent on staying. As one of the most pernicious signs of pale, pasty, nondescript English that you’re likely to see, robust can be found in public statements and marketing bumph everywhere from food to finance.
Bogus buzzwords and phrases like ‘think outside the box’ and ‘step change’ ring alarm bells the instant they’re heard. ‘Robust’ has been sneaking past people’s better sensibilities for years, and can now be found almost everywhere – and used to describe almost anything – and it is spreading. It’s a viral killer of meaning, much like it’s distant cousin, ‘solutions’.
Tesco now stocks ‘Indian Meal Solutions’ – not curries, but solutions for anyone experiencing a shortage of Indian meals. Unfortunately for Tesco, very few people have a problematic deficiency of Indian Meals, and are assuming they’re referring to microwave chicken balti – which is handy, because they are. The people who decide such things, labels for shelves, have picked a side, the side of bollocks-talk.
Grammar Nazis have been napping on the job when it comes to defending the English language. It’s simple to be a literal fascist of words when it comes to commas, semicolons, colons, capital letters, possessive apostrophes and spelling. They simply treat English like it was mathematics, making sure that all the squiggles and letters line up in a perfectly logical framework, creating a perfectly uniform word-frame only to fill it with literary catshit like ‘step change’, ‘thought leaders’ and ‘holistic governance’.
Robust packaging, robust policies, a robust policy framework, a robust flavour, a robust vehicle, robust action on poverty, a robust response to the ‘downturn’. In use, the word might once have served to reassure, but now, thanks to its overuse it’s a signpost for the farting classes that the speaker wants to get across a positive, reassuring message without actually stooping to explain themselves.
When used in political terms it’s a way of particularly nondescript. If a politician had ‘robust’ discussions with a foreign counterpart, it’s just a guarantee that some talking went on. Your politician is probably more concerned that he got his mileage allowance for that particular junket. Where once a meeting could have been described as deadlocked or unproductive, now robust discussions can have taken place. “Yes, we discussed it. No, we didn’t achieve anything.”
Of course you can’t, and shouldn’t, outlaw words. And this article is not in any way an assassination attempt on what is a perfectly acceptable term. The problem with ‘robust’ is it’s ubiquity, and it’s over-adoption by lazy press officers and politicians the universe over.
As a correspondent in the American Journal of Hematology correctly points out, it is possible to make a robust point without using the word ‘robust:
“Literary standards such as the complete works of Shakespeare (37 plays and 154 sonnets), the King James Bible, and Bulfinch’s mythology do not use the word ‘robust’ even once. Despite plenty of robust structures in the human body, there is only a single ‘robust’ descriptor buried in the 1396 pages of Henry Gray’s anatomical classic. Bartlett’s Quotations does not contain one aphorism with the word ‘robust,’ proving that witty and clever sayings can exist in a robust-less world.”
According to George Orwell’s Principles of Newspeak, “Newspeak was designed not to extend, but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum.” Robust business words like ‘robust’ are not Newspeak yet, but give them time to bed in fully and replace the plethora of actual adjectives that could have been used and they will be. The people who use them will realise they never have to truly describe things ever again, never have to tell you what’s what. Then you’re fucked.
Ref: http://bloodjournal.hematologylibrary.org/cgi/content/full/103/2/746
British Army recruitment adverts
Right up there with the ‘six second abs’ and Bill Clinton’s definition of ‘sexual relations with that woman’, the British Army’s recruitment advertisements are a fine addition to the canon of conveniently incomplete statements. In six seconds time you will still be a fat failure who somehow thought there was an easy route to changing your stomach from gloopy gas-factory into a ripped, washboard paradise machine.
In one of the British Army’s videos, we see home video footage of a youth with his mum and life in Britain is exposed as high tedium next to the fun and games of those crazy army boys and their barrack-room shits and giggles. In another, a young chap is seen prominently wielding an Xbox 360 pad while he controls an airborne surveillance camera, keeping an eye on his pals. In a third, a woman is seen tending sick villagers in some backward desert death-hole, when a jeep appears with some ‘bad news’.
In all of these adverts, the video crackles out before the dramatic arc of the stories they seek to tell is fully realised. Perhaps the Xbox-playing lunk didn’t just see his friends receive bullet wounds to the face in a shabby bush-assault by Kalashnikov-wielding jihadists. Perhaps he did. Maybe the surprise for the bleeding-heart humanitarian medic in the African village is, in fact, a delicious cake and a birthday sing-song. Maybe it’s her imminent death, or that of a friend.
All films here need a coda. They need the ending to be completely undramatic. The British Army is selling war to young people as an exciting prospect, and one in which an individual has huge responsibilities. Join the army and the film of YOUR life might crackle – it could be cake, it could be death. It WILL be unpredictable.
If they were more honest, they would flesh out the subtext of these adverts. “You COULD get killed in somebody else’s futile oil-war, possibly even by friendly forces. If you don’t you will almost certainly get to hold a gun a few times and it beats living with your mum for the rest of your life.”
Where do I sign?
Katie Melua
Insipid, pasty, watery ear-piddle. Katie Melua has a voice like a lazy 12-year-old pretending to be sick at school so she doesn’t have to do PE that afternoon. Her pathetic tissue-thin voice resonated perfectly in the dense, log-like skull of Radio 2 Yorkshire-thickie Michael Parkinson and such was his love of weak, weak shit, he played her records a lot.
Songs like “I’ve got cramps in my belly miss” and “it’s dead sore at the back of me throat” soon died down for her big hitters like “Closest thing to crazy” and “Ten million bicycles”, which were both unapologetic dewy-eyed horse-cockery.
Harry Potter and the Facebook group
Rubbishlisters, Harry Potter is more than rubbish, he’s a big pile of shit.
Unfortunately due to my suspicion that suggesting JK Rowling to be an unimaginative cash-whoring dipshit might well be libellous, I’ve limited the Harry Potter post to this site’s sister Faceboook group.
The fact is that’s my honestly held opinion and is not malicious, unless wishing horrid bum-diseases on an overstuffed poobrain is malice, I’m sure it’s not. Anyway, suing me would only make me richer, perversely, as bankruptcy would kill my student loan repayments off.
Anyway, if you wish to read the Harry Potter post you can go to the Facebook group ”The following things are rubbish“.
Facebook is also rubbish, for trying to pretend that it’s not just another advertising channel or for having so many optional “applications” as to make veteran pages mind bogglingly confusing to look at.
I’ll see you there.
Red Bull Extreme Sports
Red Bull ‘extreme’ sports such as “Flugtag” are among the more annoying aspects of the potentially sick-inducing fizzy red caffeine-pop.
The drink itself is an overpriced miniature can of what could loosely be described as “Tizer Espresso”. It is bought in pubs by people falling asleep under the weight of their friends conversations as a method to prevent their eyelids from closing . In order to reinforce its “Might just keep you awake” energy-boosting power, Red Bull has associated itself with some of society’s crappiest, most unwanted and unwatched sports.
So Flugtag, which sounds almost nouveau-German chic like Fussball (Table football, directly translates as ‘pinball for wankers‘) is a Red Bull ‘extreme’ sport, and people are invited to create their own flying machines and be launched off a pier into the sea.
It all looks innocent enough but the Red Bull version of Flugtag betrays the sport’s roots. Flugtag is German for their annual “Idiot push”. Idiots would be rounded up and herded off a high pier, tricked into agreement by being told they were about to fly away in a bizarre shed-like contraption for shits and giggles. In fact, they were being erased from existence by a society intent on destroying the subhumans who were still voting on television talent-shows and lacking in German efficiency.
So when this societal medicine sport reached the UK, far from thinking how delightfully jolly the participants looked in their Heath Robinson contraptions, I initially wept with joy that the government had finally begun to tackle our nations growing ‘idiot problems’.
It was not to be, the vastly pointless event is in fact REAL, and plays up to the “Red Bull gives you wiiings!” slogan. I immediately ceased weeping for joy and began weeping in despair.
The event had gone from the joyous – “let’s push these retards into the sea once and for all!” to the hellish realisation that none of the event marshalls were shooting the survivors as they bobbed grinning next to the wreckage of their shed-planes. Oh, shit and fried eggs.
There they were, clambering out of the sea. Like normal cretins, only slightly damper – and still alive.
Red Bull had reinforced itself as the pumped-up can-crushing goon’s beverage of choice and our nation’s idiocy pandemic continued for another day.
The same happened with the damn “Air Race”. Middle-class, middle-aged people in their miniature flying machines poncing around above the Thames doing “death-defying” turns and such between giant coloured flags. Well whoop-de-shit! The sort of people who go to the pub for a ‘real ale’ after a race and talk engines were now being celebrated by a company desperate for wing-related sports to fit their brand. Well they can cock right off, all their sports are rubbish.
The iPhone
Apple’s obsession with world domination continues, but their phone is just a flashy piece of shit for shallow losers. Here’s a link for real people to a page that, in a simplistic American way, makes all the necessary arguments against said piece of Apple crapple.
Sunday Afternoons
Sunday afternoons are intensely boring and usually result in the kind of relentless brain-rotting tedium that drives people to commit violent hate-crimes or start reading the Daily Mail, or both.
Saturdays are OK, Saturday is a “get things done” day in the minds of most people. Saturday is a trip to the shops or a DIY day. Saturday you might go and look at expensive electrical items in an out-of-town retail park or even attend a barbecue at a friend’s house if it wasn’t raining enough to drown birds in flight.
Sunday of course is an unusual beast. In an old storybook the main character “God” decided to partition Sunday’s off as a day of rest. Historically, with the majority of the nation using it as a day to recover from Saturday’s excesses and the emotionless wheels of industry using the day as a statutory rest-period for their worker drones, Sundays tend to be quiet.
Depressingly so. The afternoon is the time most of the country has reserved for pointless activites – like paintballing, mowing the lawn or washing the car. All of the activities that people associate with performing on a Sunday afternoon are those which are at the bottom of the all-time “things to do list”. Hence toenails get clipped, cakes baked, microwave-clocks set and houses cleaned.
Sunday afternoon is merely a gaping expanse of time demanding to be filled; anutterly utterly poor part of the week.
The following things are rubbish... 