There’s nothing like hiring a new member of staff to get me hot under the collar. You’d think it’d be exciting getting to choose a new member of your team from a pool of enthusiastic, talented, qualified applicants. Wrong. Rather it’s an exercise involving mainly time-wasters and I’m a busy person.
I took a much more thorough approach to advertising our latest vacancy. The ad makes it really blindingly obvious that you need a certain amount of relevant experience to be considered for an interview. It also requests that certain criteria be addressed specifically in the cover letter. It also posts a salary which should give another indicator, as if there weren’t enough, of the sort of person we’re looking for. But STILL I receive applications with no cover letter at all, one applicant looking for “paid work to fund studies and accommodation” (pretty much anything going, by suggestion), cover letters full of typos (the job is for an editor) and phone calls from interested applicants whose grasp of the English language is, at best, ropey.
What winds me up most is this. I spent years working long hours for bad money in the belief that one day it would pay off and I’d land a well paid, enjoyable job with some work/life balance thrown in. Ten years on, I have. So what makes people think they can send off a CV with no cover letter, and having no relevant experience or qualifications, and they’ll be considered for a $65,000 a year job? You have got to be kidding me.
I despair….
