How not to apply for a job

During my time as CEO of a bioscience association I wouldn’t like to guess how many rounds of recruitment I went through. Since I went freelance 8 years ago, I’ve not had to do this, but I’ve just recently been helping a client to recruit a freelance Communications Officer. It’s been an eye-opener. I was inundated with applications; I had about 7 minutes per applicant to read, triage and acknowledge. There were plenty of really good ones, but oh, the basic errors! So here are my 10 things to avoid.

1.      No covering letter. The ad asked for a CV and covering letter. It’s a communications role! Communicate with me about why I should select you for interview from almost 120 applicants. Grab my attention and tell me succinctly why you stand out from the crowd.

2.      Long, convoluted covering letter. Don’t repeat what’s in your CV in a long, dense letter. I haven’t got time to read it.

3.      Letters addressed ‘to whom it may concern’ or ‘dear sir or madam’ – my name was in the ad, for goodness’ sake.

4.      Fancy multi-column formatting of the CV. I’ve got a couple of minutes to see whether you’re a yes, a maybe, or a no. Fancy formatting makes it difficult to extract the key educational and experience points quickly.

5.      Spelling and grammatical errors. It’s a communications role. If you can’t get it right when you’re trying really hard, how will it be when you’re in a hurry? The difference between principles/principals and complimentary/complementary is not rocket science.

6.      It’s a part-time freelance role. If you’re currently in full-time employment (or just been made redundant from same), you need to tell me why you want to be a part-time freelance. Otherwise it will look as though you’re grasping at straws and would only stay till something full-time came along.

7.      Yes, it’s working from home, but it does require some travel to committee meetings. Perhaps if you live in New Zealand, India, Greece etc, it might be worth an initial enquiry about that? We’re not going to pay your expenses for the interview, let alone for committee meetings.

8.      Applications with no relevant educational background or work experience. I get that you are probably desperate, and it pains me to add you to the ‘no’ pile, but you really are wasting your time and emotional energy – not to mention mine.

9.      Be careful not to oversell yourself. If we want you to produce a specialist newsletter and do some tweets about our science, a letter that is all about your successful TV and radio career is going to make it sound as though our role will seem mundane to you.

10.  Don’t give in to the temptation to shoot yourself in the foot with regard to any future opportunities. A comms company asked if we would consider using a company. The officers considered this, but decided they wanted to build a relationship with an individual. I initially made a note of their details in case we had any future projects that they might be good for – but then they came back (twice) with incredibly snide negative comments about us. My client’s President commented ‘if this is their idea of communication, thank goodness we didn’t let them loose on our members’. Enough said about their future potential with us. Given that the President in question has very wide connections in TV and radio, a few other organisations might not be using them either.

But then there were the letters that were a joy to read – and therefore memorable (the marine biologist with ‘an ocean of experience’ – made my day); the CVs that were clear and relevant. It was so hard to get down to an interview list of five; the people on it should feel proud of themselves. There were a number of others that I felt really sad not to be able to work with and a few who I may well contact colleagues about (without passing on details of course).