APPLYING FOR JOBS

Most recruiters will spend far less time than you would imagine reviewing your application. The simple tips in this blog post will help you ensure that your qualifications, skills and experiences do not get overlooked.

Given the amount of time most recruiting managers spend reviewing job applications, you need to make the process of reviewing your application as easy as possible. If I’ve got a stack of applications in front of me and a diary full of other things to be getting on with, I might realistically spend one or two minutes looking at your application. This is very much an average, and if you grab my attention I will likely keep on reading (and re-reading). Imagine that you’ve got 90 seconds of my time, and at the end of that 90 seconds I will either dump you in the “no” pile, keep reading, or give you pride of place on the “this one gets an interview” pile. In order to avoid the “no” pile, you need to make it easy for me to find the information I’m looking for.

Add Structure to Your Application

When writing an application or cover letter, many people seem to just sit down and bash out their application as they are hit by waves of inspiration about why they’d be perfect for the job. The problem with this is that it usually means their writing doesn’t follow any logical structure, which makes it much harder for the reader to find the details they are looking for.​Using a structure to format your application, such as the Q&A format, will make it much easier for the person shortlisting to see how your qualifications, skills and experience match those of the job requirements. This will drastically increase your chances of getting shortlisted. 

The Q&A format simply pairs the information that the organisation has asked for in the job description and personal specification, with your response. So, if they have asked for someone with an undergraduate degree and project management qualification, you would have a heading called “Qualifications”, and underneath write something that answers the question they have posed. Below is an example of how this may look.

Qualifications

I studied for my undergraduate degree in engineering at Bristol University where I graduated with a 2:1. As my career transitioned from hands-on engineering to the management of projects and teams, I gained a PRINCE2 project management qualification which has helped me to apply a consistent methodological approach to my work. 

Make Me Feel Special

When I read an application that has clearly been written as generic job applications or recycled from previous applications, I am immediately turned off. It is usually incredibly obvious when someone has just cut and paste from an old application. Occasionally you even find people have forgotten to change the name of the organisation they are applying to, which is highly embarrassing and a guaranteed one-way ticket to the not getting shortlisted pile. I want to feel like you really want to work for me and my organisation, and have put significant effort into writing an application that showcases why you’d be great for the role.

Think About Your Audience

As you write, rewrite, read and edit any of the documents that you are going to submit as part of your application, you need to consider that every sentence is an opportunity to either improve or worsen the reviewer’s opinion of you. You need to try and view your application from their perspective. If you were hiring for this post, what would you want to see? What characteristics and behaviours would you be looking for?

Make Your Application Visually Attractive

If you have to write large blocks of text as part of your application (e.g. as a cover letter or long answer questions on an application form) it is really important that you make your writing as easy to read as possible. Below are five tips for how to make your application visually attractive.​

1. Everyone loves white space. Big blocks of text are challenging to read and hard to focus on for long periods. Clearly differentiated paragraphs with a line between them make your document easy to read and visually pleasing.

2. Keep your text consistent. There is nothing more distracting than when the body text changes font or size within a document.

3. Differentiate your headers. When the same size and style of font is used in both the body text and the headers, the end of one section and start of the next won’t stand out.

4. Justify. These days word processing packages do a wonderful job of justifying text rather than aligning to the left-hand side. Justified text makes the page look balanced and symmetrical, which is what our eyes like.

5. Don’t indent paragraphs. When you add space between paragraphs, you no longer need to indent the first line of the text in each paragraph. Doing this looks very old fashioned.

Avoiding Errors

Given the importance of avoiding basic errors in your application, you need to make sure you’ve got a robust system in place for proofreading your work. Below are my top tips for avoiding simple errors that are commonly seen in applications.​

1. Don’t start proofreading too early. Don’t worry about proofreading until your application is fully written. Spending hours proofreading and re-editing your work when you’ve only written the first few paragraphs is a classic procrastination trick.

2. Don’t rely on your computer’s spellchecker. Spellcheckers are wonderful, magical things, but they are not fool-proof. While they are getting better all the time, there are lots of errors they won’t pick up, such as the incorrect use of a correctly spelled word.

3. Read it out loud. Reading your text out loud often reveals errors that you might not see on paper.

4. Proof-listen. For a number of years, I have been proof-listening to letters, emails, board reports and anything else I deem important enough. By having a neutral, computer-generated voice read your text to you, you completely eliminate reading errors.

5. Use friends, family and anyone else who can read. One of the most underutilised (and free) resources at your fingertips are your friends, family and colleagues. Find one or two people that you really trust and ask them to read your application and give you feedback.