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.