Over the last couple of days I’ve been wrestling with a job application for an outpost of the civil service that looks after old buildings – let’s not name names in case they Google themselves regularly. It was run-of-the-mill for contemporary job application packs: application form with sections for ‘core competences’ that you had to fill in quite pithily; equal opps monitoring form; list of things you had to bring with you to the recruitment open day for security purposes – passport, birth certificate/driving licence, bank statement. On arrival, there was one more form to fill in, detailing reference numbers of passport & driving licence, also bank account number, then finally the guy behind the desk gave you an interview time, same day or next. (This is industrial-scale recruitment for temporary tourist season jobs – they need a lot of people, they get a lot of applications and throw enough staff at the interviewing process so they can do half a dozen simultaneously, all taking about 20-30 mins).
It was quiet when I arrived, just the guy behind the desk, myself and another bloke who seemed to be filling in his entire application form there and then; I imagine he hadn’t downloaded it from their website and done it in advance. While sketching in reference numbers on that ‘one more form’ I mentioned, I couldn’t help but overhear the conversation between ‘guy behind desk’ and ‘other applicant’. I would guess the latter was around 60, perhaps Scottish-Italian, spoke fairly accented English and could make neither head nor tail of the application form. To be fair, it was a relatively complex number – I needed MS Word, a laptop, the internet, a printer and a fair amount of thought to get through it – but the real sticking point for the other applicant was over core competences. He just didn’t get why writing ‘head waiter’ failed to explain that he had performed the duties of a head waiter. Guy-behind-desk had a very limited tolerance for this kind of thing, and wasn’t particularly good at explaining matters, so it reached a stand-off. Guy-behind-desk wouldn’t put the bloke through to the next stage of the selection procedure, the interview, if he couldn’t understand the form. The applicant just couldn’t get his head round the idea that stating ‘I have been a head waiter’ was a complete and utter fail when what the form required was ‘Why being a head waiter means I am good at communicating, with reasons’, ‘Why being a head waiter makes me good at teamwork, with reasons’ or ‘Why being a head waiter makes me good at planning, with reasons’, and so interminably on. While all this was happening, there was a quick switch back to me and I was told I could have an interview this afternoon, so I left to wander round the city centre for a couple of hours. I had enormous sympathy for head waiter man. Stating truthfully that you have that kind of experience implies a great deal about dealing with customers, dealing with other staff, planning shifts, liaising with the kitchen and all the other things head waiters do. Any reasonable person would work that out for themselves, but contemporary recruitment practices are a long way from reasonable. It’s a game and if you don’t know the rules, you lose.
When I went back for my own interview later, two staff asked me questions – from a list on the desk in front of them - that almost exactly replicated the core competence questions I’d already addressed on the application form. God knows how many people they had interviewed over the course of this week but everything was done by rote; the whole thing took around 20 minutes. I didn’t see head waiter guy but then he didn’t know the rules. I’m sure the HR department of the organisation will congratulate itself on a job well done, getting all the temps in the door in time for the tourist season, all of whom can show examples of how they are committed to excellence in customer service, and keeping out blokes who have actually done fast-paced and customer-focused work all their bloody lives (and who probably have foreign language skills as well).
If successful I will hear in the next three weeks. If not successful I will never hear from them again. If selected I then have to get a basic disclosure form, at my own expense, to demonstrate that I don’t have a criminal record although this will be reimbursed at some point. The job will last six months maximum and my best estimate of my takehome pay would be £996 a month after standard deductions for tax and NI.
When I got home, there was an email waiting for me. A communications company I’ve worked with, freelance, over a number of years was involved in a competitive tender pitch last week for a big contract from an enterprise agency – I went along as part of the pitch team. The staff at the comms company are desperately short of work and have slimmed down considerably since the credit crunch had its massive knock-on effect on media services companies in Edinburgh & Glasgow. (The buoyant nineties and noughties that saw big companies and public sector bodies with budgets spend money on copywriting, editorial, graphic design, web design, PR, branding, advertising, photography, film & video, and print have long gone. Media services as a sector of the local economy has been slowly fading away for the last three years.)
We didn’t win the tender. This means no freelance work, personally, but also that my mate who has worked there for the last six years is going to be made redundant by the end of this month (she was telling me this when I saw her three days ago). A continuing lack of cashflow means that the comms company has to slim down even further and will very soon have no copywriters on staff at all and probably only three graphic designers.
Blogging. Blowing off steam.
Conclusions: a certain public sector body will have a load of well-educated and low-paid staff this summer whose main responsibilities will be saying, ‘Would you like to buy a ticket?’, ‘The toy sword is £3.99,’ and ‘Please don’t steal that antique cannon.’ Once upon a time, this was a classic student summer job for anyone who could string a sentence together and didn’t drool, visibly. Now the recruitment process is subject to a painful amount of bureaucracy, the chill hand of HR orthodoxy and attracts a large chunk of people who are simply desperate for a job. It locks out those who just don’t understand that saying, ‘But I was a head waiter,’ is no longer an explanation for anything in a large part of the modern jobs market.

Not in the job market at the moment but have just been doing some extra training in the university I work at. and I've been asking final year students going through selection for jobs when they leave how they're getting on There seems to be a fashion for doing recruitment "more scientifically" right now. Which means making it more mechanistic, in essence.

What does that mean? Exactly what you said. Lots of paperwork, which a) acts as a disincentive to some, and b) winnows out those who don't complete the paperwork "properly", in the prescribed fashion.

Then you may have a number of selections to complete, Some of these will be over the phone or over something like skype. If you're lucky, you'll then get to something face to face, where the questions are highly prescribed and the panel are constituted to fulfill conditions of fairness and balance.

For large organisations, those likely to get the hob are those who will dutifully jump through the hoops and be a good little corporate citizen. The push to "fairness" has seemingly drained recruitment processes of spontaneity, or the ability to give someone a job who might not look that great on paper, but has something about them, because the audit trail has to provide evidence of competencies. I don't necessarily blame HR departments for this, it just seems to be a drift that has happened over time as we seem to have become more risk averse about most things.

I've been on both sides of the table and I loathe them. They actively conspire against you selecting the right person, as they preclude 'what if?' questions. Instead of "how would you go about solving this problem? What if such-and-such happened? you have to say 'tell me about a time you solved a problem' which may, or may not, elicit useful information.

Ironically, it's driven by a desire for fairness, I think.

Very apt.

The people interviewing you for the "tourist relations" job will probably be out of work soon as well...No one is safe these days..especially if you work for the Govt. Seems like the world used to be a much more optimistic place even if things got stressful.

... that there's no perceived upside to the HR team for taking a chance with someone slightly "off-target." If they're fine in the role, no-one cares, but if they're dreadful, and someone asks why you hired them, "I liked the look of them" just won't cut it.

Obviously it's a shame there isn't latitude for taking a chance in today's work environment. Years ago I gave a job to the worst (i.e. scruffiest and least articulate) interviewee we had for a role, because he was the most enthusiastic for the job (without coming across as desperate), and made a brilliant submission for the written part of the pre-interview (he did a comic strip.) I took a chance, he was brilliant, and from what I've heard about him, he's amazingly successful now... today, I don't think he'd get through the door.

as nearly everyone sees uni as a rite of passage these days and everyone and their dog has at least a 2:1 degree then it's no wonder we are all overqualified for the more mundane jobs in the market.
We need to stop this obsession with prolonging education for everyone although it is sad if money will be the deciding factor now.

I have heard it said that plumbing has been deskilled due to plastic pipes and push-in joints. So no more soldering copper pipes and fine measurements and so on.

With the type of employment screening you are experiencing, it is a simple task that has been over-skilled - the opposite of plumbing. It is putting clever hoops in the process producing a negative way of recruiting people: focusing on tripping people up rather than allowing them to express themselves.

My advice FWIW - get a temp job in an organisation that you'd like to work in where you would have to demonstrate from day one that you are a capable, good egg by working efficiently. Then you can move/progress internally without all the OTT external hoops.