to hate hate hate hate hate doing job applications

[wineoclocktimeyet]

I know I can do the fecking job standing on my head and am most certainly the best person for the position :)

BUT it takes me fecking hours to write "why I am applying for the post and how well I meet the requirements of the person specification"

and after spilling blood to get it right, I know there will be 2,000 other applicants and it will end up going to the boss's niece.

Bitter, me :(

I too am glad to hear it isn't just me that it takes hours or days to do them.

Take responsibility how lovely of you to do two pages of feedback.

Lexie, my understanding is the ethnicity/religion pages are just for statistics and don't affect whether you get the job.

I have been told you have to show that you can do every single tiny aspect of the job by giving examples, then another time told it is just the person specification, so give reasons why you are passionate about whatever it is etc. But the person specification usually has many points so still takes hours or days to think what to put.

I think I might try doing therapeutic sarcastic ones, giving myself a time limit to complete them.

just don't post the sarcastic ones off by mistake - or maybe you should, I bet job apps are as tiresome to read through as they are to write

May as well send them if I have spent time doing them. Part of the therepeutic effect will be knowing someone will read them.

Abit off topic but the monitoring questions are to see which demographics are responding to the job advert they are not used for selection. I can confirm this definitely is the case in the NHS where monitoring questions are asked but I have never in all the times I have recruited seen what people have entered in these fields with their applications.

I too thought I must be quite thick, rather inarticulate and/or semi-illiterate because it took me an age to complete application forms. I particularly hate those mini essay type questions - and there are usually more than one - which ask you to give an example of a time when, for example, you had to work as part of a team to solve a challenge, or, when you overcame your fear(s) to complete a task. So often - at least the way I read it - those type of questions boil down to more or less the same bloody thing, and it's a real pain challenge to think of something original, and true, in reply to each one. Presumably if you have a very busy and varied life, with lots of interests, activities, and a variety of past jobs then filling out that sort of question is relatively easy .... but it's not so simple when you're returning to work after having kids, or when family commitments/OH's working pattern mean you quite literally have no time to do anything much outside the house, or, when you've only ever had one previous job. Apart from it taking so long, I just end up feeling terribly inadequate and boring when faced with an app form like that because the answers don't come easily to me.

the other scam is getting interviewees to produce a presentation, powerpoint, notes etc. this means that the thieving employers get up to 6 free sets of ideas for nothing. it's a good trick.

Agree - I have for the moment given up. I have been working freelance for years as I have to pay the bills but I have been through the job application process many times and it is horrible. It is just too time consuming if you are already working, bringing up kids, doing loads of these.

Spent four days on the last one I did complete with an "essay" and a presentation. The interview was all day and there were about forty of us. We played stupid "games" for ages, (humiliating to say the least - if you were an animal what would you be? If I say the word "alarm" what do you hear? What does that tell us all about what Busy thinks?) These poor people only wanted a job FFS!! Some had travelled from the other end of the country and been up since 5am. Didn't get released for lunch until 2.30, (from an 8.30 start), ( some people didn't come back from lunch it was so bad). Found our time for presentations was cut in half because their ridiculous "team" had overrun so badly - oh - and there was no laptop/beamer so we were told "not to bother with our slides". Cost me a fortune in train fares and child care and of course I didn't get the job, (although it was clearly not the right place for me so they were right) Swore I'd never do that again.

Trouble is I might have to