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.