A Rant: On Job Applications

Earlier in the year, to earn some money whilst I wrote my thesis, I was looking for a part-time job. Having recently graduated, I’m lucky to be in the same business once again, though obviously slightly more invested this time around. Consequently, I’m having less success.

This isn’t a post about the process of job applications per se; finding jobs, writing them out, and so forth. No, this is a post about the applications themselves. More specifically: the kind of crappy application forms and processes certain employers think are appropriate and somehow haven’t had the decency to change.

Give that we’re still in a dire economic situation, with mass unemployment, especially mass youth unemployment, employers can be forgiven for trying to make it easier to sift through hundreds of applications. No problem there.

But what is the problem then? Well, my guess is the average job seeker is looking for a job. It’s a hunch I have. But most job seekers aren’t idiots, so they’ll be applying for more than one job. Two jobs. Perhaps three. Maybe even many jobs. Job applications take time (unless of course you just want a CV and cover letter – in which case we love you). Making the process convoluted, confusing, frustrating, unnecessarily time-consuming and so forth – there’s no justification. I’ve seen some pretty crummy things in the last 8 months in the 75+ applications I’ve made. Most you won’t think are that bad, and they aren’t. But it all adds up, and it needn’t be this way.

I’m not going to name names, mind you. I’m a job seeker, not an idiot.

There are a number of types of annoying job application, so I’ll start with the one most people will have had experience with.

CV Breakers

You have a CV. You think it’s a good CV. It has all the relevant information; jobs, skills, education, maybe some other exciting things such as hobbies to get employers to go “wow”. But no, CVs aren’t good enough here – application forms only.

Well, that’s fine. Application forms can be a good thing. They make you think a bit more and you may gain some insight into what the organisation is like by the kind of things they ask.

But why do so many of them essentially just ask you for a CV and cover letter in their own pro-forma? Yes, I know it helps them with their bureaucracy, but it makes applications a massive pain.

Some forms, despite this, are still easy. One just required details from my most recent job, then just the job title, organisation and dates from my others. And only information from my degrees.

But others ask you to list every job. And every duty. And achievement. And the address. And dates. And salaries. And more. Some may ask for bits and pieces of this. And more. The same goes for education.

For many applications, people will just copy and paste from their CV. But this is still a needlessly time-consuming task. But other applications require far more effort to say, essentially, the same thing.

Crap online applications

The worst experience I’ve had of this was an HTML only form on a single page. No ability to save any entry, yet asking for as many details as the average application form. Of course, as I pressed submit, it crashed. I gave up on that job.

A recent application gave no details about how to apply after clicking the “Apply” button. It gave space to upload a CV and a “further information” box, then “Save” or “Cancel” buttons. I assumed this was, as with many applications, the first page to register some details, assuming I’d have room for a supporting statement later on. After clicking “Save” and finding I’d applied for the job, I realised that was what the “Further information” box was probably for.

Another application had a “Back” button on every page. So, after spending over 40 minutes on the application, I skipped forward a bit to see how long the rest of the application was likely to take me. Incidentally, this is another bugbear – applications that don’t tell you how long they are until you, well, get to the end. But anyway. I got to the last page (it would have taken at least another hour). The “Back” button disappeared. I could cancel the whole thing or submit it. Half-complete or not at all? I tried half-complete and emailed them to see if I was able to fix it. I didn’t hear from them again.

Patronising, novel and pointless

Mostly in the part-time job field, I found a number of applications that insulted my intelligence, and I would hope most people’s. The first took me on a tour of a cartoon town, responding to certain questions from the townsfolk about, if I remember, dealing with customers and so forth. This was to get to the application form, as I discovered when they decided I wasn’t right for the post. Stupid cartoon people.

Others ask stupid questions such as “what kind of pizza topping would you be?” as if you can accurately gauge someone’s personality by their preference for being things on pizza.

There are also those that employ personality quizzes, usually run by third parties, which repeat similar questions over and over again to assess you. Eventually you aren’t sure if you’re answering honestly or how you think they want you to answer. It’s pointless.

There are more, but there are also some good examples…

Speaking as a job-seeker, a good job application should not be over-burdensome (it can certainly, and should certainly, be challenging), will be engaging, thoughtful and tell you something about who you are applying to.

One recent example did just that – it asked for a CV, as CVs tell you a lot about somebody anyway, regardless of content – and then asked a few, word-limited, qualitative questions that specifically applied to certain aspects of the job and job specification. Rather than just asking for the same information as your CV and then asking you to respond to everything from a job spec, it picked apart the role and asked for specific instances, experience and knowledge in key areas.

I’ve seen this done to the extreme in other applications, but these applications ask in the scheme of 10 questions or so, with no indication of intended brevity. They take a long time.

Another thing I’ve found useful is setting (short) tasks, as these are a good test of a prospective employee and give a lot of insight about the job – though usually this comes after an offer of an interview

Ultimately, it’s always nice to be able to just send the appropriate CV and a well-written and relevant cover letter, but we can’t always have it that way. This has been a bit of a rant, and it’s certainly not the end of the world. But given it’s an everyday experience for most people, the least employers could do is make it as hassle-free as they can.

I’d be interested to hear what experiences anyone else has had with crap job application processes? And what can we do about them? Have you ever complained about a particular application?

When supporting Blackburn Rovers isn’t all that bad…

I like statistics and I like football. These two things go together very well. As the new football season is but one night’s sleep away, I thought it might interesting to take a look at how representative the Football League and Premier League are across England (as well as take a detour from my usual political posts).

A little while ago I got into an extremely exciting discussion centred on which county Aldershot Town were from. Football League teams and English counties have always been interesting to me. Coming from Essex, for as long as I can remember, we’ve had just two teams, Southend United and Colchester United, both of whom have shuffled up and down (though mostly down) the 2nd, 3rd and 4th tiers of English football. In recent years, Dagenham and Redbridge have joined us to make it three professional league teams across the county (well, two and a half). Even so, given our proximity to London, it always seemed a paltry number of league teams, especially for the 11th biggest and 7th most populous county in England. But then I began to think.

In terms of ceremonial counties, there are 48 in England. There are 92 English (and the odd Welsh) football league teams at any one point. That means that if evenly distributed, the average number of teams per county should be just under 2. However, given that London alone has 12 professional clubs, this number goes down considerably.

Returning to Aldershot Town, the person I was talking to mistakenly placed them in Surrey (rather than Hampshire). After being corrected, we realised we couldn’t name a single league team from Surrey. As it turns out, that’s because there aren’t any. However, in writing this article, I discovered that there are in fact 10 counties in England without a single league team: Bedfordshire, the City of London (not a shock), Cornwall, Herefordshire, Isle of Wight, Northumberland, Rutland, Surrey, Warwickshire and Worcestershire. This means nearly 21% of counties in England are without a professional team. The total population of these counties is over 4 million people.

In contrast, there are more Welsh teams (Cardiff, Swansea and Newport) in the English football league than teams from these 10 counties, Cheshire and Kent combined.

So let’s put the Football League in perspective. As the new season approaches, I decided to work out the representation of English League football teams by county for the season 2013-14. This first table below shows the top 10 counties based on the number of league teams per county.

Rank	County	No. Teams
1	Greater London	12
2=	Lancashire	7
2=	Greater Manchester	7
4	West Midlands	6
5	South Yorkshire	5
6=	Nottinghamshire	3
6=	Staffordshire	3
6=	Devon	3
6=	Merseyside	3
6=	Essex	3
6=	West Yorkshire	3
6=	Wales	3

Unsurprisingly, Greater London comes out on top, with Lancashire and Greater Manchester and the West Midlands trailing behind. Surprisingly from my point of view, Essex comes 6th equal. Given that just five counties, Greater London, Lancashire, Greater Manchester, the West Midlands and South Yorkshire account for 40% of English football league teams, Essex and those around it don’t seem to fare too badly.

Rank	County	Points
1	Greater London	38
2	Greater Manchester	18
3	West Midlands	17
4	Lancashire	14
5	South Yorkshire	13
6	Merseyside	10
7	Wales	9
8=	West Yorkshire	8
8=	Tyne and Wear	8
9	Staffordshire	7

This second table ranks the counties based on a points system, with 4 for a Premier League team, 3 for a Championship team, 2 for a League One team and 1 for a League Two team.

Once again, it isn’t a shock to see Greater London way out on top and the top 5 remains relatively unchanged. The only major differences this table makes is to drop Nottinghamshire, Essex and Devon out of the top 10. They place 12th, 14th and 19th on this measure. Unsurprisingly, the more teams you have, the more chance you have of seeing higher level football.

Things get more interesting however when you look at the number of teams in a county based on both its population and its area. This should give a better idea of how well represented each county is.

Rank	County	Area/km2	Km2 per team
1	Greater London	606	50.5
2	Bristol	110	55
3	West Midlands	348	58
4	Greater Manchester	493	70.5
5	Merseyside	249	83
6	Tyne and Wear	209	104.5
7	South Yorkshire	599	119.8
8	Lancashire	1187	170
9	West Yorkshire	784	261
10	Nottinghamshire	834	278

Going by area alone, Greater London just pips Bristol and the West Midlands to being the most highly represented county in England. Bristol is the second smallest county in England and would have made the top ten even if they had only one of Rovers or City in the league. Lancashire is by far the largest county in the top ten, and does well due having the equal second highest number of teams at 7.

The largest three counties in England: Cumbria, Cornwall and Cambridgeshire share just two teams between them, meaning just two teams in a total area of 13720km². That’s over half the size of Wales.

The most interesting table to look at is looking at representation by population in each county. This is the measure that arguably matters most – physics tends to limit the number of fans who can fit into each stadium – so just who has the most choice in England?

Rank	County	Population	People per team
1	Lancashire	1,461,400	208771
2	Bristol	428,100	214050
3	South Yorkshire	1,343,900	268780
4	Nottinghamshire	1,090,600	363533
5	Staffordshire	1,098,300	366100
6	Buckinghamshire	756,600	378300
7	Devon	1,135,700	378567
8	Greater Manchester	2,685,400	383629
9	West Midlands	2,739,800	456633
10	Merseyside	1,380,800	460267

On this measure, as absurd as it may seem to say, people in Lancashire are the most spoilt. For every 208,771 of them, there is one team in the English Football League. Again, Bristol are well served, but then if Sheffield or Nottingham were their own county, they too would have similar levels of representation. Devon and Buckinghamshire are surprisingly well represented. There are around 380,000 people for every team in Greater Manchester, meaning Old Trafford could conceivably sell out 5 times and Eastlands 6 times every week.

But what about the Priestfield Stadium in Gillingham? Of the counties with at least one team, Kent has the highest population. If people in Kent wanted to only support their most local league team, they could fill the Priestfield stadium nearly 150 times over!

You may be wondering what happened to Greater London. Based on representation by population, Greater London falls way down to 21st in the table, with around 683,000 people for every team. So despite 13% of English league teams being based in London, London is not as well represented as nearly half the rest of England. My own county of Essex fares only slightly better, coming in 17th place.

So if you’re a Blackburn or Morecombe fan, spare a though for the poor folk of Cornwall or Warwickshire. And next time you’re thinking about criticising your friend who lives in Worcestershire for supporting Manchester United, think twice. After all, the biggest side in the whole of Worcestershire is Kidderminster Harriers.

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You can download the data for Excel yourself here. Full table below:

County	Number of teams	Points total	Population	Pop. per team	Area/km2	Km2 per team
Bedfordshire	0	0	617,000	N/A	1235	N/A
Berkshire	1	3	863,000	863000	1262	1262
Bristol	2	3	428,100	214050	110	55
Buckinghamshire	2	3	756,600	378300	1874	937
Cambridgeshire	1	2	806,700	806700	3390	3390
Cheshire	1	2	1,028,600	1028600	2343	2343
City of London	0	0	7,400	N/A	2.9	N/A
Cornwall	0	0	536,000	N/A	3563	N/A
Country Durham	1	1	902,500	902500	2721	2721
Cumbria	1	2	499,800	499800	6767	6767
Derbyshire	2	4	1,019,500	509750	2625	1312.5
Devon	3	3	1,135,700	378566.667	2590	863.333333
Dorset	1	3	745,400	745400	1021	1021
East Riding of Yorkshire	1	4	590,800	590800	957	957
East Sussex	1	3	800,200	800200	698	698
Essex	3	4	1,729,200	576400	1417	472.333333
Gloucestershire	1	1	861,700	861700	1216	1216
Greater London	12	38	8,196,700	683058.333	606	50.5
Greater Manchester	7	18	2,685,400	383628.571	493	70.4285714
Hampshire	2	5	1,176,600	588300	1455	727.5
Herefordshire	0	0	183,600	N/A	842	N/A
Hertfordshire	2	5	1,119,800	559900	634	317
Isle of Wight	0	0	138,400	N/A	147	N/A
Kent	1	2	1,731,400	1731400	1442	1442
Lancashire	7	14	1,461,400	208771.429	1187	169.571429
Leicestershire	1	3	980,800	980800	833	833
Lincolnshire	1	1	1,042,000	1042000	2687	2687
Merseyside	3	10	1,380,800	460266.667	249	83
Norfolk	1	4	859,400	859400	2074	2074
North Yorkshire	2	4	1,072,600	536300	3324	1662
Northamptonshire	1	1	693,900	693900	913	913
Northumberland	0	0	316,300	N/A	1936	N/A
Nottinghamshire	3	6	1,090,600	363533.333	834	278
Oxfordshire	1	1	654,800	654800	1006	1006
Rutland	0	0	37,600	N/A	147	N/A
Shropshire	1	2	473,900	473900	1347	1347
Somerset	1	3	910,200	910200	1610	1610
South Yorkshire	5	13	1,343,900	268780	599	119.8
Staffordshire	3	7	1,098,300	366100	1048	349.333333
Suffolk	1	3	730,100	730100	1467	1467
Surrey	0	0	1,135,500	N/A	642	N/A
Tyne and Wear	2	8	1,104,100	552050	209	104.5
Wales	3	9	3,064,000	1021333.33	20761	6920.33333
Warwickshire	0	0	546,500	N/A	763	N/A
West Midlands	6	17	2,739,800	456633.333	348	58
West Sussex	1	2	808,900	808900	769	769
West Yorkshire	3	8	2,227,400	742466.667	784	261.333333
Wiltshire	1	2	684,000	684000	1346	1346
Worcestershire	0	0	566,500	N/A	672	N/A

Sources: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ceremonial_counties_of_England_by_population