Job Hunting in UK Higher Education VI: Making an Application

As I have already stated, there were several methods by which applications were made. At each institution, the process required the submission of some of the following:

• a completed, downloaded, application form in word processor format
• a curriculum vitae
• other relevant files (e.g. a , supporting statement, covering letter, or publications list)
• an online application form completed and submitted by web browser (discussed in the next post)

There was, of course, considerable variation in the information asked for in the application forms (or asked to be included in CVs and supporting statements. There could be more than one application form; generally this meant one was for the panel, and one for monitoring the effectiveness of the institution's equal opportunities policy.

I'm not going to be discussing what should be in a CV in any detail. There are so many places which discuss it, and it seems pretty arbitrary, as the following anecdote illustrates. I worked for a few months as a temp, between completing my Ph.D. and starting a permanent job. At one point, I removed this from my CV, as it isn't experience which is at all relevant to what I do now and what I want to do in the future, and  my CV is long enough already. The next interview I had, I was asked about this gap in my CV, so I then put it back. And then in the following interview, I was asked why I included something completely irrelevant to the post I was applying for. So no advice would have saved me from critical questions in both cases. I've already talked about the requirements made in the person specification, so I'm not going to comment on that here.

What I do want to talk about are the requirements the various applications used to get the information the applicant wishes to convey to the appointment panel, by submitting it to the human resources department.

Word Processor Application Forms

As a long term Linux user, I object quite strenuously to the use of Microsoft Word as a de facto standard as a document format. Interoperability between Word and Openoffice is now pretty good. Where things don't work, it is likely to be due to font issues (many fonts available to Word users on Windows being proprietary and only legally accessible with a Windows license), or, more seriously, to extra complex formatting. Unfortunately, application forms which are to download and complete electronically tend to fall into the latter category.

Even for Word users, some forms I have seen will provide problems. In this case, the problem has been a lack of imagination on the part of the form designer. Examples include using a set number of fields for qualifications which is too low for some applicants: I for example have 12 O-levels, 3 A-levels, a degree and a doctorate - and this can't be unusual in applicants for academic positions. Another problem is setting up the form in such a way that a lengthy answer ruins the formatting; this again affects me because I have been in my current post for over 12 years, have carried out a variety of activities including programming, software design, research and management and have been funded through over a dozen different projects, which means that not only is my current employment complex to describe, but also it is useful to include formatted information - a table listing the projects by name and date, and summarising my involvement. Where it is not possible to be flexible for some reason, it should be possible to allow the submission of additional documents.

Sometimes the form designer has just been too creative with the design. This screenshot shows a (content redacted) version of an equal opportunities form I completed as part of one application. The original form was a Word document, and this is what happened when it was saved (still in Word format) by OpenOffice.

Clearly, this was not the intention of the form designer. I haven't looked in detail at how the form was set up to try and work out why this happened: but it has never happened to me with a table based document before, no matter how complicated. And complexity is surely unnecessary: all the information about the applicant appears either as check boxes or as short snippets of text. The main application form from this institution worked fine; I would have found it very hard to complete a sensible looking application if this had happened to it, but for an equal opportunities form which isn't submitted to the panel, I wasn't too bothered.

Job Hunting in UK Higher Education V: Crafting Job Specifications

As someone who has put together the person specification for a post as well as applied for vacancies, I was worried somewhat by many of the specifications I was expected to show I fulfilled in this round of job searching. The problem is basically this: large numbers of requirements, almost all of which are listed as essential. I don't know if this is a trend, or whether it just affects the more senior roles which I have been looking at.

The information given to prospective applicants usually falls into four parts. There is the administrative information necessary to make the application (closing date, how to apply, contacts for queries, and usually an equal opportunities statement of some kind). There is information about the organisation offering the post, usually fairly directly lifted from the university and departmental web pages in the case of an academic sector post. (It is not usually very informative to the potential applicant, however, as it is like a student prospectus: marketing literature to tell them that the university is a wonderful place to be.) There is the job specification, which is mainly useful to help decide whether the post is really one the applicant would want to hold. And there is the person specification - what the appointment panel will be looking for in the applicants to shortlist and eventually appoint.

Usually, person specifications are divided up in two ways. The criteria are categorised into groups such as "education and qualifications", "experience", "personal qualities"; about four or five of these are quite common. Then each cirtierion is either "essential" or "desirable", to put off applicants who are really unsuitable. In many cases, though, it is possible to have a successful application without satisfying all the essential criteria, depending on how good the other applicants are. In my case, I have no formal computing/IT qualifications: I grew up in the era when a school's computers consisted of four or five BBC Micros in a little room, and there wasn't any opportunity to formally study even in quite a sciences oriented school. But it is possible to argue that my experience is at least equivalent to a graduate level qualification, and probably beyond in some areas. It is of course advisable to check beforehand that an application which doesn't meet the essential criteria will be considered; it is not worth putting in the time to complete one if it will be automatically rejected out of hand. This is where the email address usually given in vacancy details for informal queries is extremely useful.

Now, some of the vacancies I applied for, and others which I considered in detail, had over twenty criteria, and of those only one or two were desirable rather than essential. I have two issues with this: it's a lot of work for an applicant to show that they do indeed satisfy that many essential criteria, and it is questionable whether many of the criteria really are required.

If you are on the panel deciding who to interview, it can be quite difficult to work out whether a candidate satisfies the criteria - usually because a generic CV has been used for the application which doesn't specify the information asked for. But you have to take the attitude that if they don't clearly indicate that they have personal quality or experience which is asked for, then they are not going to be suitable. The flip side of this is that what is asked for should be clear, and it should be relevant to the post.

The most typical unclear requirement for a post is that an applicant should be "able to work as part of a team". That this is almost meaningless is shown by the fact that almost every post advertised has this requirement, meaning that virtually any work experience should be evidence that a candidate can do so. This is despite the fact that I have had to work (on teams) with several people who were absolutely incapable of working as part of a team. This doesn't necessarily make them unemployable, impossible to work with, or actually unsuitable for the work they were asked to do as part of the team: they could do the work, just not really relate to the team. Perhaps potential employers should think a bit harder about precisely what aspects of teamwork are required for a post: ask for someone who is good at relating to people from different backgrounds, or who can be relied on to produce work when asked for it.

Teamwork is a particularly laughable requirement when it is, as is often the case, combined with a requirement that the applicant should be "able to work independently". While not entirely the opposite of being part of a team, it would perhaps be better to indicate that applicants would need to be able to adapt to different working conditions as circumstances dictate (though this is also a pretty meaningless requirement for any post beyond the most mind-numbingly dull, tedious and repetitive).

Other effectively meaningless and unclear requirements include "ability to work under pressure", "ability to meet deadlines", "willingness to travel" and so on. Generally, criteria like these should be reserved for posts where it is particularly of importance, beyond that required for any white collar worker. As an interviewee, one of the questions I have to ask at the end is often about travel, as the personal circumstances make it impossible to be away from home for long periods, or to travel on short notice. However, it turned out that "willingness to travel" just meant being happy to work occasionally at the other campus of the university involved, about 40 miles by road. The requirement in the person specification suggested that it would necessary to make frequent overseas trips to conferences and meetings, and be away for days at a time.

Many applicants put a lot of thought into job applications. It seems only reasonable that those who write the specification should put some effort into doing so too.

Job Hunting in UK Higher Education IV: Other Sources of Vacancy Information

Other Job Sites

The THES and jobs.ac.uk dominate the academic sector job market. People like myself who find that the academic world suits them will almost certainly find these the best sites to use for a general job search. Is it worth augmenting a search using other sites?

There may be more important factors than working in the academic sector for job choice, and it is obviously advisable to look at sites which work well for the searcher's requirements. For example, the British Computer Society site has much narrower location restrictions to its searches than either THES or jobs.ac.uk, while its "IT Industry Sector" criteria are much wider than the kind of academic subject based searching jobs.ac.uk offers, making it very useful for people searching for IT vacancies who do not want to relocate to a new job. Other more localised sites might also help - such as Cambridge's Science Park vacancy list: but in this case, not all companies based in the Science Park list their vacancies on the site, and during the period when I was searching, the site went through a major facelift, which meant that the bookmarked link I had to the vacancies page became obsolete twice, which is irritating.

For people interested in specific universities, their own sites may include vacancies which are not more widely advertised. (Most of the links in advertisements elsewhere will direct the enquirer to these sites.) Their design is quite diverse, with the University of Cambridge being to my mind particularly good: clear, without too many website bells and whistles to get in the way of the content. On some university sites, there is no obvious "browse current vacancies"; a full listing is usually then obtainable by entering nothing into the search form and just pressing the search button. Leicester is an example of this, and compounds what I would view as poor usability practice by imposing a time out on the results listing in addition to only displaying 10 results per page, which means that the searcher needs to view all the results (about 40) in fairly quick succession. However, generally speaking the smaller number of vacancies makes a university's own listing easy to browse.

Other Information Sources: The Future?

Another source of vacancy information is through mailing lists, forums, and other online communities which are relevant to the vacancy being advertised. Although I had in every case already seen the vacancies advertised elsewhere, I saw several on lists which I subscribe to, and others were forwarded to me by friends. The vacancies which appear on such lists tend to be posted by individuals who have an interest in the post and who happen to be users of the list: the prospective line manager, for example, rather than the human resources department posting them on relevant lists as a matter of course. The reason is of course obvious, as there are far too many lists and forums around for non-specialists to know which are the most useful ones on which to post a particular vacancy.

Most of these methods are, to be honest, fairly backward looking - email mailing lists have been around for decades and were, along with usenet, used for job hunting almost as long as they have been in existence. The vacancies now seen there seem (from the admittedly limited sample available to me) to be mainly technical IT posts with fairly low salaries.

But social networks are now beginning to be used for job hunting and by headhunters - and this is, I think, likely to be the future of the job market. LinkedIn is probably the best example around in 2010 of how this might happen. I didn't use it myself, but I've found several useful looking pages which suggest how best to use it: here, here (probably particularly good for beginners), and here. You may think you need to build up a large network of contacts on the network to make it useful for job hunting, but this post is good news for those of us who haven't done this. Other professional networking sites might well be helpful, particularly subject specific ones - the British Computer Society runs one for its members, for example, which is just getting off the ground. But LinkedIn has the biggest reach, among professional networking sites; personal sites like Facebook are likely to be less helpful.

Job Hunting in UK Higher Education III: Job Hunting Websites and Making Applications

Aids to making an application

Once a the user has found a vacancy to consider, how do the two sites help? What happens is to a certain extent dependent on the advertiser, rather than the site itself. Adverts will link back to the website of the human resources department, to give more information about the vacancy, typically a job specification and a person specification, and some background to the department and institution/organisation. This further information will include details on how to apply.

Clearly, this is not an ideal situation from the point of view of the job seeker. No two vacancies of interest to someone with over a decade of experience are going to ask for identical requirements, and for a serious application to a vacancy with complex requirements will need to be customised. It is not likely that the approach taken by many seeking first time employment, sending a standard letter and CV to every poition for which the seeker meets the basic requirements, will gain an interview; and more and more positions seem to require the completion of an application form specific to the organisation, to ensure that standard information is available to the evaluating panel. More experienced applicants will be more sparing with their applications, and should expect a higher proportion of interview invitations.

The problem is that much of the information required is standard, and it feels like a waste of time to insert it into differently formatted forms time after time. So it would be nice to be able to register on a site, complete a basic form of details (including the equality monitoring information), and upload a general CV. Then for each post, be able to submit the general person information, which is then expanded with a specific to the post additional information document. (I like to go through each of the requirements and point to specific examples showing how I satisfy that criterion, but other candidates will want to do other things: I know of one individual who sent a portfolio of poetry with every job  application, whatever type of work it was.)

Neither service offers anything like this, but it should not just be possible to do this, but to make it interface with existing web applications used by organisations for candidates to apply for vacancies (something which is new this time round in my job hunting experience). Such an interface could also ask for the candidate to complete questions which are non-standard, though I feel that adding a custom document should be the way to do this.

Job Hunting in UK Higher Education II: Searching Job Hunting Websites

In order to find vacancies, I used 14 different websites, which can be divided into the following types:

• web sites covering the whole of the UK concentrating on the academic sector (e.g. THES, jobs.ac.uk)
• web sites covering the whole of the UK concentrating on IT posts (e.g. the British Computer Society)
• web sites listing vacancies at a particular university or organisation of particular interest (basically, those nearest my home plus JISC, UKOLN, and JANET)

I'm going to try to establish the features I would like to see in a jobs website, by comparing two of the first type: the Times Higher, and jobs.ac.uk. Both contain a wide selection of UK higher education vacancies, along with some other positions in other sectors and abroad. According to the two sites, the THES has 662 vacancies listed, and jobs.ac.uk has 4143. The principal reasons for the difference are that vacancies are listed on jobs.ac.uk until the closing date for application, while the THES lists them for four weeks only; the THES is more than twice as expensive; and (as a result) jobs.ac.uk includes a much larger number of Ph.D. studentships. Despite the large difference in numbers, many vacancies are in fact advertised in both websites.

Creating a Search

Most users are likely to want to create a search to pull out the vacancies which match their requirements in a new post. Such searches are likely to be quite complex, encompassing such requirements as location and minimum salary, as well as the more complex job type requirements (including "subject area" requirements such as "mathematics", broad classifications such as "academic related", and the basic responsibilities of the post, such as "manager", "technician" - at least three independent search term types.

Let us attempt to create a search for full time posts in the Midlands or South East of England, in computer science, either a lecturer or a senior lecturer.

On the THES site, such a search is created through the "Advanced search" interface.Other then entering keywords, it is only possible to search by "location" "contract terms", "roles", and "contract type". Some of these filters are in themselves not very helpful. For example, the location has to be all, a continent, or the UK, none of which restrict the search as much as we want. It is only possible to choose one role, out of  a very long list (even if some choices are groups, such as "Lecturers, Fellows and Tutors", which means that a choice which spans two groups as the one we are trying to carry out is not possible, and choosing the group which seems closest will also list studentships. For contract type, as well as the obvious full or part time choices, it is also possible to select "All contract types" and "Full or Part time", and it is not obvious what the difference between these two choices will be. The listing is like this because vacancies can be advertised as "full time", "part time" or "full or part time", and selecting the first or second of these will not list vacancies of the third type despite this being clearly desirable. There are no pre-set subject area fields, so the the keywords need to be used here. It appears from a little experimentation that a stemming algorithm is used, so that "computing" also finds "computational", "computer", etc. Another positive aspect is that although many of the advertisements in the THES have generic titles ("Lecturer", "Research Assistant", etc. -  often because multiple posts in several academic subjects are advertised together) and the keyword search picks up the words in the text of the advertisement as well as the title.

So the search closest to what we want is going to be to have the keyword "computing", the location UK, permanent contract terms, the role group "Lecturers, Fellows and Tutors", and the contract type full time: a search which is fairly likely to miss many of the vacancies we might actually be interested in. Indeed, this search returns 0 results (on 9 April 2010). In my job search, I found the THES search interface infuriating, and always ended up browsing through all the adverts by role.

On jobs.ac.uk, the advanced search form is accessed by clicking on one of the categories on the front page. This is rather counter-intuitive, as these categories look as though they should take the reader directly to browse through all the vacancies in that section (as in fact the A-Z of employers at the bottom of the page does, just to add to the potential confusion).

The advanced search screen has rather different categories from those on THES, with a lot more options in most categories and the possibility of choosing more than one where this makes sense. The subcategories are tailored to the chosen category, also a sensible method to do this (and obviously the reason why the advanced search form appears after the choice of a category).

Of our criteria, it is not possible to filter full time roles from this form, and the lecturer or senior lecturer requirement is reasonably sensibly fudged by choosing an Academic or Research role in a UK and Irish HE institution. This search returns 8 results, of which one is actually a lectureship vacancy; the remainder are research fellow or research associate posts.

In this first test, neither site proves perfect, but jobs.ac.uk is far better. For the kind of job hunt I was carrying out, the search on THES is virtually useless.

Browsing / Reviewing search results

An alternative method for finding vacancies of interest is to browse through the whole collection of advertisements, filtering them by hand. This is actually not much slower than searching, particularly as a vague search can be used to rule out some posts which are definitely not going to be of interest. It is a technique particularly useful for the job search I was carrying out, as I was basically looking for an interesting sounding post not too far away from London which pays not too much less than I earn now. The posts I applied for included lectureships, research fellowships and middle management positions.

With the THES, the most useful category for me to use for searching was to restrict to vacancies with location UK. This gives a large number of vacancies (359 on 10 April 2010) in batches of 10, sorted in order of addition to the website, most recent first. For each post, a paragraph of information is given which makes it possible to reject many of the vacancies almost immediately. The amount of information given varies; in the screenshot, we see some of the most recent adverts, which have about fifty words of information, easily enough that it should be possible to work out whether to instantly discard the post from consideration. But slightly older posts include less information, only about ten words from the first paragraph of the advertisement, which may not be enough to decide whether the vacancy is of interest. This means that it is important for advertisers to think carefully about how their vacancy will be displayed, so that the first sentence of the text is about the position(s) and not merely a puff for the institution - as is in fact the case in the text for main post in the screenshot. Another problem has also been fixed. The searches I carried out in November timed out quickly (in a matter of a few minutes), which meant that every so often it was necessary to recreate the search and navigate through back to the page which was being viewed.

There are two remaining issues with the list. First, the summary results do not give the date at which the advert was first placed, which means that on repeat visits the browser needs to try to guess which adverts have already been seen. This information does not appear in the detailed information for each post, either. A star is placed by those posts which are "New this week" - but it is not made clear when the week actually starts (it is in fact on the day when the weekly paper edition of the THES appears). Second, it is not possible to choose to sort the list in any other way, say by salary, and this might be useful to many potential applicants.

With jobs.ac.uk, the browser has a lot more options to control how the list of results is displayed. Not only is is possible to sort by four different criteria, the number of results displayed can be changed, and the search which produced the results can be modified. Less detail is given for each result, but the titles for advertisements on jobs.ac.uk tend to be more informative so this is actually less of a problem than on THES.

The comparison here is much closer, but jobs.ac.uk comes out just ahead for ease of browsing.

Saving Searches / Email notifications

Having constructed a complex search once, users don't want to recreate it every time they access a site. So an important aspect of a job hunting site of any size is that it should be possible to save searches in some way, after registration, and/or to organise for new search results to be sent to you regularly - and then easily stopped, once the job hunt is over.

On jobs.ac.uk there is a button on a search results page, "Email me jobs like these".  When this is clicked, the user sees a simple registration page and can from there set the search results to be emailed weekly, or when new matching vacancies appear. To stop the search, the user logs in on the website, and follows the link to the unsubscribe form near the bottom of the page - not ticking the "suspend email". (As an aside, making changes to anything on the profile page and submitting makes the application assume that the user also wants to change their password, so in order to do anything, the password needs to be entered in the "new password" box - an irritating little design flaw.) An unsubscriber needs to complete a form, to explain why: obviously a useful tool for the managers of the website.

Job Hunting in UK Higher Education I: Overview

The first posts I'd like to make in this blog is a series of commentaries on the process of applying for job vacancies in UK higher education in 2010.

Although I am lucky enough to have been employed in a job I (mostly) enjoy since 1998, I have spent much of the last four months job hunting. The post has always been entirely dependent on external funding: the LSE's main budgets pay for none of my time. It was something of an achievement that we've always managed to keep the post fully funded - until March 2009. Since then I've been part time, between 1.5 and 4 days a week: hence the job search. I've found the process itself surprisingly frustrating: much less Internet savvy than I'd expected. Especially considering that the LSE post was one I found through a web site twelve years ago; things have changed rather less than I feel they should have done since then.

I searched for jobs on 12 weekends, considered about 30 posts in some detail (looking at the job and person specifications), made applications to 6, or which was offered interviews for 2, and pulled out from consideration for 1. The jobs I was looking for were academic or academic related (my post at the moment is research, but is academic related, so I'm interested in both) in computer science and IT generally. I was not considering posts which paid more than £15K less than my current salary, and was only looking in southern England and Wales. I list these constraints because some of my comments may not apply elsewhere.

I haven't precisely planned how many posts I'm going to make, but I'll at least include:

• a comparison of two job search sites, one I think is good and one I think is poor, with mentions of some of the other sites I also us: split into part one | part two
• some comments on other job sites 
• a critique of the job specifications I tried to fit myself to, as someone who is not only a potential applicant but who has been involved in the appointment process from the other side
• a roundup of how I think the sector should manage the process and application methods in general
• a discussion of a specific web application used by several universities to manage the process

By the way, I am now back full time at the LSE, so I am staying where I am - for the time being.

Introductory Post

I've run one blog for a long time, of book reviews, but I also want to be able to publish some of my opinions which aren't concerning reading. Hence this new blog. The subject matter of Matters of Opinion and Science will mostly be concerned with IT. I'll also treat it as a personal blog of sorts, so there might well be posts on other topics. I may only post fairly rarely, as I don't tend to hold particularly strong opinions. The opinions expressed are  my own, and are not those of my employer or anyone else.

The title comes from David Hume's Of the Standard of Taste though the context doesn't quite match what I wanted.  I just thought that the phrase sounded like a blog title. The context is:

"The sentiments of men often differ with regard to beauty and deformity of all kinds, even while their general discourse is the same ... In all matters of opinion and science, the case is opposite: The difference among men is there oftener found to lie in generals than in particulars; and to be less in reality than in appearance."

(The picture of David Hume is from Wikimedia Commons, and is listed as public domain.)