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.