to be shocked at the poor quality of graduates

[tredaswe]

At work we are recruiting for a graduate trainee position and we have been swamped with applications. I've been doing the sift and the standard of applications is absolutely woeful. At least half of them have spelling and/or punctuation errors in, many of the cover letters are so general you get the impression that they are sending them to every job they are applying for and there are even some that are applying to different companies than us.

From the initial 79 that we received only 6 don't have at least one or more of these flaws. AIBU to think that with youth unemployment people should be putting far more effort into their applications.

"I don't want Mrs Schadenfreude to line manage me. I have a first class honours degree and an MA. She didn't even go to university, so I don't think there is anything she can usefully teach me."

Wow! I have heard some stunners over the years from precious graduates but that is amazing! Was this before they had been offered the job?!

LOL, no, it was a few weeks after she had started! For her first few weeks she was clearly under the happy illusion that I was as well qualified on paper as she was. It must have been a terrible shock and disappointment to her to discover that you could get to the dizzy heights of senior manager without having a degree.

Well, I don't have a degree and am not in a position to employ anyone, but my DH has just had the year from hell after his employers (a bank!), employed a history graduate to do the job of an accountant! who had failed his maths GCSE! and didn't know what a "row" or a "column" was on a spreadsheet! Says it all really!

MrsSchadenfreudeit seems your company is employing the wrong people. Have you ever wondered how long your company has been doing it and how far up the chain it goes?

Why on earth is your company employing graduates to do admin jobs? What opportunities are there for non-graduates to do those jobs? What are the rates of pay for anyone, if any? Or do they just get someone to be an intern and work for nothing?

I come from the University of Life, as I believe you might do too. However, it seems that unlike you, I believe that if there is a job to be done, the best person should get it without having to jump through too many hoops.

And the bottom line is that they should be paid. It was like that in my day. Maybe I'm a bit older than you lot.

Oh, come on, limited, it's not her fault if her company employs overqualified people under her. And being overqualified doesn't excuse taking that sort of attitude at all.

The place DH works for often employs graduates at pretty low-level positions, because the idea is to see how they will work out, and if they're good, they progress. It's not fundamentally demeaning to start at the bottom, I think.

I don't think it's demeaning to start at the bottom lrd

That's where I started with A levels and no degree in 1983.

However, I do think it is very wrong to say of young people with a degree, which has become the entry level for any professional job, that they're not trying or being lazy.

I think it's even worse for someone with communication skills that I'd raise my eyebrows at in my professional existence, to criticise anyone else's.

I'd be the first to knock into shape someone who was trying it on at work. That's the privilege of seniority. But someone who's trying to get in and has played by the rules? No. It's mean.

I doubt you're older than me, Limited. But if you read my post, I said, in the first line, that we only ever get graduates applying to work for us. We certainly don't ask for graduates. We don't ask for any qualifications at all, except that they be literate and numerate (it's helpful to have people with a general familiarity with the alphabet to do the filing), and have a working knowledge of the local language, so that they can call the electrician, plumber etc. I would love to employ someone who wanted an admin job, and who was good at it, and didn't have a degree and an attitude. But sadly, they just don't apply.

We have a specific policy of not getting interns - we don't agree with getting someone to work for nothing. The salary is competitive - a new graduate would be taking home the equivalent of around £1600 per month, at least, and that's to do an admin job. Obviously if they're doing something demanding, then they're paid more.

I find your post quite offensive actually, Limited. So many assumptions and accusations, and you didn't even read my post properly! But then I generally find that those who use the expression "University of Life" to be a bit chippy. Which is why I never use it.

Yes, I do agree. I didn't get the sense mrsS was suggesting that they were lazy necessarily (and I don't like the whole concept of judging 'graduates' based on a few spelling errors or overly general covering letters).

But what those graduates said is incredibly rude, and that's not on.

Cross post, sorry.

Some are lazy, some are entitled, some are rude. Like in any walk of life. Some are fantastic, some are outstanding, some are mediocre. I wasn't generalising. I wads giving you examples of what we've had over the past few years!

I can't see where the error is in the OP! Someone enlighten me, it's driving me mad.

LadyBigtoes, I would say, maybe no "in" after "errors" and "different companies to us" rather than "than."

Maybe.

Different from is more correct than 'different to'. Different than is simply US not UK.

Oh, OK thanks! I did notice those but just saw them as being colloquial. I was looking for glaring howlers.

LRD, I am sitting here, saying to myself "different to us" and "different from us" now, and can't decide which sounds better. I do have problems with these little words though, which I like to put down to the fact that I work in a multilingual environment, rather than my lack of qualifications.

It's her punctuation that's really a bit shit, lady, but it's a rule of MN that people who complain about SPAG inevitably come a cropper.

Sorry, cross post.

I cannot begin to imagine who would care about different to/from/than. It's not like anyone doesn't know what you mean.

Different to used to be considered incorrect, mainly because people used to enjoy applying Latinate grammar rules to English, but DH tells me that 'different to' has been accepted into the dictionary.

Oh sod it. I would just say "completely different companies."

So what's your industry mrsshadenfreude?

What jobs are you advertising and how are you describing them?

At the risk of sounding like an old bat, many young people today have degrees of some sort, whereas I didn't.

Maybe people attracted to your firm have degrees, even of the inferior sort, and people without degrees don't feel worthy enough to apply.

I don't know. As an employer, or the employee of such a company, it's your problem, not mine. I'm baffled as to why are your company is attracting and apparently employing people who are vastly unsuitable. Take it up with them. They might welcome the input.

It seems to me that the arrangement is frustrating for you and for the people your firm employs. Maybe they ought to rethink that because it's not the fault of their new or existing employees but it is clearly creating conflict.

No, I defend her punctuation! It's low on commas, but grammatical and that's the way I like it. :o Not suitable for a children's book, fine for adult readers IMO.

Unless there's something else I haven't spotted!

Sorry OP you are still here aren't you...

limited, your post reminds me of someone I know, who spends her life alternately banging on about how cleverly she screens applicants by certain infallible snobbish tests, and bewailing the fact her staff are all useless.

I don't get it: do some people not follow there's going to be a correlation between the criteria they use to hire people, and the skills of their staff?

lady - no question mark at the end of a question; incorrect use of comma in the middle.

I really don't think it matters, btw, I just think it shows how easy it is to make slips.

Btw my DP works at a university. He would tell you the problem is partly the numbers of people coming into university who can barely string a sentence together, let alone spell, punctuate or write cogently. Universities can't spend all their resources teaching them this basic stuff, and at the same time they can't fail them for this, as that would mean chucking out vast numbers. And the system as it is now lets them treat their degree like a consumer product they are buying, and complain about anything they're not thrilled with. Result - lots of barely literate, entitled graduates.

However he does also say there are a minority of absolutely brilliant ones - they are still there.

Can't see the comma problem. There's only one comma altogether and it's correctly used in a list of three things, with an "and" before the last thing.

Question mark, you're right I suppose! I think I just have entirely different standards for MN, where it seems OK to be that casual. The standard of writing on here is incredibly high actually, when you know how many people are seriously bad at it.

(No it doesn't matter, I'm just obsessing...)