Attention employers! (or how definitely not to organise work in a post-capitalist society)

As part of the growing army of the unemployed created by the biggest crisis of the capitalist economic system since the Great Depression of the 1930s (and soon to be compounded by the onslaught of the Con-Dem government’s ‘austerity’ measures), I think it’s about time someone brought up one of the less talked about aspects of how shite it is being on the dole: constant job applications.

While most jobs under capitalism involve more than their fair share of boring, repetitive and socially unproductive tasks, few can compete with the demoralising process of filling out application form after application form, in full knowledge that with the vast majority of them, you are wasting your time. For young people especially, with dozens and even hundreds of people going after every available job, chances are someone with more experience is going after each and every job you apply for. Of course we’ve little option but to keep on plugging away, doing searches, filling out forms, writing covering letters, editing CVs, changing the focus to what we think each particular employer wants – much like a really dull office job but without the compensation of actually getting paid a wage for it.  This situation isn’t helped by the sheer irrationality of the job application methods used by many employers, most of which seem deliberately designed to produce an experience more frustrating than watching Nick Clegg on the news.

What follows is a list of some of the worst, most irritating features of contemporary job application procedures, compiled from my own experiences over the last few months. The list is far from comprehensive – please add some of your own in the comments section below. Consider this article as advice to employers (though I doubt they will take any notice), or as a guide for ‘what *definitely* not to do’ in organising work in a post-capitalist society; but for the most part treat it as some light entertainment for those of you (and I know there are plenty) who know exactly what I mean, having encountered exactly the same things yourself. For those lucky enough to not yet have experienced that depressing trip to your local Jobcentre Plus, to be condescended to and checked up on in return for a meagre £51.85 a week (£65.45 for over 25s – lucky for some!), consider it a sample of the kind of crap you’ve got to look forward to, especially if the planned government spending cuts are allowed to go ahead.

Attention all prospective employers:

  • If you don’t have a specific reason –e.g. genuinely unique (non-bullshit) questions – then you don’t need an application form. Consider the amount of time people have to spend copying out the exact same information (education, work history, other skills and experience, blah, blah, blah…) into whatever poorly formatted word processor document you’ve thrown together with little thought. Does it really help you all that much to have all applications fitting your arbitrarily defined layout, with 4 year degrees squeezed into one thin column of a table, and a big block of empty space to describe some crappy temp job, just because it happened to be the most recent?  Could you not just have mentioned what information you want a CV to include and save us all a fuckload of time and wasted effort?
  • If you do require a huge, complex, 15-page application form, maybe keep that for a second stage of the application process, for people already being seriously considered. Spending 1-2 hours filling out a massive form only to never even receive a reply is just taking the piss. To any employer who has ever done this (and that’s the majority of them): fuck you.
  • If you don’t know how to format a Word document so that blank fields work as blank fields, then don’t do it. Please do not just put blocks of underscores in the same way you would for a printed document. This does not work.
  • Stop asking stupid questions. You know the sort of thing I mean. “Give an example of a time you have succeeded in doing x” or “Explain how you have dealt with a situation where y”. These are more common at job interviews, but appear in some application forms as well. They are essentially designed to test the applicant’s ability to bullshit. In interviews they test your ability to bullshit on the spot. Generally there are two types – questions far too vague to provide any real insight beyond “can this person think of something relevant/make something up that sounds like what (we think) we want to hear” (examples include “Give an example of a situation where you’ve had to solve a problem”), and those that are far too specific, seemingly designed to test whether you already have the particular knowledge or skills that you could only really acquire by doing the job that you’re being interviewed for!  (Advice: don’t attempt to subtly point out how stupid a question is during an interview. This doesn’t go down well, it seems).
  • Online (web-based) forms are great, if:
    - they can be saved half-way through, or are short and to the point
    - they can be used for multiple applications
    - they work properly (most are buggy, poorly designed, and end up covering all the same information you have to submit in separate CV upload anyway)
  • Don’t make us repeat ourselves. Stop making us say the same thing more than once. If you base application form questions on the structure of a job description, be careful not to put very similar things in different parts of the job description. Clue: using the same word or word groups in slightly different ways (‘organisational/organising/well organised’) does not mean you’ve written a new question or have created a new type of skill.
  • Send a reply, regardless of the outcome. If you’ve got an email template ready it takes a couple of seconds per applicant. It’s not hard.
  • Offer feedback if possible – if someone’s making the same mistake in all their applications and you don’t tell them about it, you are a dick.
  • This one’s for recruitment websites – if your website is just going to convert my Word file to text, while fucking up the formatting, CV upload services are pretty much worthless. I can copy and paste text myself.
  • I don’t know what I’ll be doing in two years time. Nor in five years time. This is at least in small part because I don’t know if you’re going to give me this job or not. Be realistic – nobody only applies for one type of job. If you ask me this question, you are essentially testing my ability to lie convincingly.  Apparently I’m not that good.
  • Maybe, just maybe, it might be nice to let people know by when they can expect a reply.  And then stick to it. Y’know, like actually reply. Especially if they’ve already made the effort to travel across the country for an interview. kthxbye

9 Comments

  1. Muzza says:

    Here fucking here!

  2. Aidan says:

    Mentioning that a minimum 2 years experience in a similar job is required right at the bottom of the last page of the application so that it can easily be missed until it’s too late. I had one for an admin job like this and only noticed it after about 2 hours of ‘give us an example of a time you worked well with others’ torture.

  3. Andrew says:

    Why is experience in shop jobs so essentiel?

  4. Jack says:

    One thing that does my nut in about looking for jobs online is the sheer amount of bullshit entries you have to wade through and assess. These range from things that are easy to spot and akin to a spam email, to the various pyramid schemes and sales “jobs” that involve you shelling out money to work. I had an “interview” for one a couple of years ago, which was me and a bunch of other young guys sitting through a video of Donald Trump telling us that the chancers in front of us were going to “teach us how to be rich,” as a preamble to pitching a pyramid scheme. I sat through it for 50 minutes before they got to the part about how I’d have to pay my own money in to work, then stormed out – hopefully helping try and make sure none of the other people there got conned.

  5. Brogan says:

    My ability to bullshit is epic. It’s the one thing my dad taught me well. Despite this, my ability to get through one of these application forms is non existent. By the time they’ve repeated question 3, about 6 times, in many different words the only thing I want to do is take the application form to management and shove it so far up their arses it comes straight back out their mouths. Just so they can taste the shite they expect us to answer ‘intelligently’. FUCKING CUNTS.

  6. plaida says:

    The census collector job application form is the worst form of this I’ve seen lately. Took three hours to complete three levels of difficulty, that basically boiled down to answering the same couple of roleplay questions over and over to ‘test’ how lazy you are and whether you have the capability to ride a bus around town and knock on doors without mucking it up. And several sneaky mentions of how you’re going to be working late for no pay. Yeah, I think I’ll ask ‘Daryll’ how he’s getting away with three hour pub lunches and throwing his collection forms in the bin, thanks.

  7. Sophie says:

    lol. Ok I have some to add.

    Dear Highland Council,
    Please stop making us write away for your lengthy job applications, which come formatted with blank fields like computer documents and are not available online even though all of the other councils use myjobscotland. This requires us, if we want to look professional and not get binned first off, to figure out how to print answers that will fit into your boxes, then cut and paste them into the boxes and THEN photocopy the entire form (which is stapled in the middle like a book) so that we’re not sending you something that is cut and pasted like a P3 homework project. This is torture.

    Dear myjobscotland,
    Why can I not fill out more than one job application at the same time for you? Even for a different council? If a new job comes up that is better than the one I’ve already started an application for, why can I not fill that out without cancelling my current application? (Particularly because this appears to actually notify the employer that I have cancelled?!?)

    Also, hear HEAR on the one about the bogus jobs, or the jobs advertised in the wrong sections. Jerkwads, all of them.

  8. Sigi007 says:

    How exactly will this be solved in a post-capitalistic society? In my experience, socialist/communist countries have done bureaucracy at least as well as the their capitalist neighbours.

  9. Neil B says:

    Hi Sigi007,

    The title was meant in a tongue-in-cheek way – obviously I don’t discuss it, and your question is far too broad to properly respond to. Suffice to say that with the exception of the odd mad, dyed-in-the-wool tankie, no socialist/communist/anarchist/anti-capitalist is going to point to the Soviet Union or other formerly “real existing socialisms” as positive examples which ought to be copied, and you are certainly right about bureaucracy in general in such systems (I can’t speak to Soviet job application forms, mind).

    In terms of how work might be organised in a future society, I’d recommend giving some of this a read:

    http://www.zcommunications.org/topics/parecon/

    I should think that if work was socially and democratically organised, we would probably decide to do away with bullshit job applications….