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.

pretty sure you meant uninterested Boo

Haven't read all the thread, but as far as not putting effort in, please don't tar everyone with the same brush. DS has just graduated with a Physics degree from a Russell Group uni, and has spent the last two months applying for graduate positions that begin in September 2014, after he has completed his masters at Imperial. After going through the online assessments, he's got through to several interviews, and is waiting to hear from one assessment centre, and has currently been invited to attend two more.

But nowhere has anyone expressed any interest in him as a person, or what he's achieved outside of the 'education' box - and he has so much more to offer. He wasn't accepted by one of the 'big four', although he had scored well in the group exercise, etray and interview, but was 1% below the passmark on a verbal reasoning test (that he had previously passed). He was told that they asked for him to be considered, as his other marks were so high, but there is a rigid cut-off mark and no flexibility.

So although I agree that some applications might be rubbish, others really put their heart and soul into it, only to be left feeling pretty worthless.

I don't think it's pedantic to expect people to write clearly, accessibly and fluently. But I will freely accept that my view of the world is aggressively word-focused.

And while I take Limited's point I've had my bellyful of shockers that I've commissioned and had to edit into graceful, coherent prose....

I very much look at what people do outside of work/student jobs etc. I have little time for those who do one internship after another - all this says to me is that they can't get a job/don't know what they want to do/won't do anything they consider beneath them and are being bankrolled by Mummy and Daddy. Give me someone who's worked in an old people's home, McDonald's etc, and I know I'm getting a grafter who's not going to be afraid of hard work. And someone who's spent time doing something useful at home or overseas, also good. I also like people with external interests - musical instruments, rock climbing etc. All this enables me to see something of the whole person, not just work achievements.

Disinterested has apparently changed its meaning over the last fifteen years. One used to be able to be disinterested and interested simultaneously, now there is confusion.
I see affect and effect going the same sad slovenly way.
Don't ask me to discuss contemporary, I will only weep softly and wibble.

On the bright side, at least it cuts down the number of applications you have to look at closely. I once had 400+ applications for a commission of which about 90% were decent I felt so awful only being able to offer two jobs after that all that wasted work (and I was there till gone 10pm two nights sifting).

You interview to get the best person for the job. If you score points over irrelevancies, you're a chippy idiot who will probably end up with the wrong person and then whine: 'why, oh why?'

That says as much to me about you as the people you're interviewing.

Ah yes, calligraphy, that archaic skill.

A degree is about teaching people that subject at a high level. Good SPAG are helpful, in that they enable people to communicate clearly. But that's really all they are.

When you're selecting an employee, of course, if SPAG is crucial or important, you can reject people who are no good at it. But assuming it'll come automatically with a degree is (obviously, as the OP indicates) mistaken, and quite daft when you consider what degrees are trying to teach.

It just seems like a daft thing to worry about when you might as well just look for someone with the qualities you need, as limited says.

When I look back at my first CV, it astounds me that I got any interviews at all, let alone a job - I remember sitting in the one interview I did get, where they said, "Now, you say in your covering letter..." I hadn't kept a copy of my covering letter, and I was thinking, "I said that? Why?" But I blagged it and did get the job, and I was good at it, but I was lucky to get through the process.

I don't remember having been to the careers service at all during my degree, although I think I must have, just to find out about the vacancies I applied for. If they provided any courses on how to write CVs, how to apply for jobs, the milk round or anything, it passed me by (and I was an annoyingly diligent type who did read all the information letters and so on.) I am sure much of this would have been provided, and it is my fault (my mother gave me my old school reports a few years ago - I remember thinking, I don't remember any of this, why didn't I listen, it would have made such a difference! But I was 17, and I knew everything anyway...)

I am sure in a lot of ways I wasn't that unusual, either then or now. I just needed to go through the learning experience of doing a lot more job apps and to recognise that if I wasn't getting interviews, I needed help from books and people with more experience (mostly my parents' friends who were recruiters in their fields.) I'm quite good at CV writing these days (especially if it's not my own), and I get quite a good interview hit rate from applications, but it's a skill I've developed over years, and I'm sure many graduates also need to do that. It's part of growing up, and unfortunately, not everyone has got to the point they need at the time of graduation.

I never felt entitled to anything (thanks, Mum,) and I sometimes wonder if perhaps those who do feel more entitled will have fared better - they've probably pushed more for promotions and so on. Certainly many people I was at school and uni and on a graduate trainee scheme with are doing way better than I am career wise, and while some undoubtably are better than me, they're certainly not all, except in self-promotion perhaps.

However, when you have a large pile of applications, dumping the ones which can't use a spellchecker is a quick and easy way to do a first sift. (We had one where he hadn't even finished the statement he was making, literally finished mid-sentence.) Attention to detail is important to what we do, and I agree it does suggest a general attitude - if they can't be bothered to get a CV checked and corrected, how will their everyday work be? If you know spelling and writing isn't your top skill, wouldn't you get someone else to check it for you? Even if you are good at it, it's good practice to do that. Recognising your weaknesses and getting support where you need it is a useful work skill in itself.

I'm glad I'm not graduating now. It must be so depressing.

(And the Job Centre really expects people to do 60 applications a week? How could anyone do a decent job if they do that? It's around 10 a day.)

No one has suggested there is anything wrong. You just haven't bothered to read posts before deciding you must be disagreeing.

Apologies for the typo and the joke about the typo which then fell competely flat!

Ahhh, it was a 'joke'.

Very funny.

YANBU I teach ad hoc at postgraduate level, and its now a minority who spell and write well. Worse still is the lack of attention to detail and grasp of basic skills, such as formulating an argument, writing an essay, using proper sources - not Wikipeadia, etc.. When you fail ten or give them a poor mark, invariably they complain...

I did my Masters abroad, and the attitude was just so different. There wasn't this lack of personal responsibility towards your own work and dumming down.

I also did an evening class A Level for personal interest recently, and I was shocked at how it was spoon fed to pass the exam, rather than to gain knowledge and skills.

DH had to recruit a computer programmer and set a short test as part of the interview process. Most of the (graduate) applicants failed it woefully as they didn't really have programming skills, as opposed to copying and cobleing together bits of code. However a Polish appkicant did well so she got the job.

I hate dumming down too.

Correct, or almost perfect SPAG, shows basic effort and commitment. Unless english is not your first language. In which case, I personally would put that on a application form and cv letter, and state that you are doing your best with it. That that also shows effort and commitment.

yellowballoons Correct, or almost perfect SPAG, shows basic effort and commitment. Unless english is not your first language

I also find that that students for whom English is not their first language often have better spelling and grammar! Not always, but its certainly not unusual. There really is little excuse at postgraduate level for native English speaking graduates not to know when to capitalise words, how to use paragraphs, to know the difference between "lose" and "loose", "there", "their" and "they're", etc.. Or that if you use a quotation from a text, you should give a page reference and full book reference!

Asa oarent, I soon realised that the english cirriculum as it stood, and probably still stands, is not hot enough on SPAG. So I always monitored my kids' SPAG. still do! Partly, because I knew that someday, they were going to enter the real world, and it would be one way in which they would stand out, or at least not fall at a hurdle.

As a parent [we have to be careful on this thread!]

"Actually according to my little Pocket Oxford 'disinterested' does mean not influenced by one's own advantage. "

i'm pretty sure that the Little Pocket Oxford doesn't have a massive lot of room that it can fit indepth explanations for words.

TheWickedBitchOfTheBest Sat 24-Aug-13 09:00:29
My DB works for an IT company, so the vast majority of the work involves computer coding and systems set up etc and they employ a lot of IT graduates. A flawless grasp of SPAG isn't 'vital' to their abilities and some of them are very talented IT people. But they still sometimes have to communicate with clients and the outside world via emails.

This is something that confuses me - I work in IT, and I have had many colleagues over the years whose grasp of written English leaves a lot to be desired. But computer coding and scripting isn't at all forgiving of errors. If you make a typo, it doesn't think, "oh yes, I know what you meant really," in the way that human readers usually can (because we can work out what the majority of misspelled words are meant to say) - it just doesn't match it and will fail as a result. So you'd think that sort of requirement would spread into the rest of what they do, but it seems not.

I work with a lot of people round Europe, and most of them have better written English than some of my English colleagues (there is one notable exception.) I like it, because I get to have some good conversations about linguistic details - irregular past participles are something which commonly causes confusion.

Oddly, I find no problem in pointing out to my non-British colleagues that the word they really need is X or Y and explain why, and I will often proofread stuff for them when asked. But I find it really difficult to handle an English colleague who says and writes, "she done that" or "he should of read that" - it doesn't matter so much on internal emails (though I hope our non-British colleagues don't think it's how to write good English,) but I've seen it go out on external emails, too. This person isn't a graduate, but when it's going externally, I still think the English needs to be correct.

YANBU. I teach undergraduates and am often shocked by the work that gets turned in. I don't know how they've reached this level not knowing how to spell certain basic words or how to structure a sentence coherently. I feel like some of the work I read wouldn't have passed at Higher (I'm Scottish) when I was at school (left in 2003).

I think a lot of it's to do with a person's own motivation and discipline. Last year I proofread essays by a couple of friends who are both at art school and I was amazed at how excellent they were, in comparison to the university ones. I went to art school myself and we had next to no tutoring or supervision for our written work, but the marking was harsh, so if we wanted a good dissertation grade, we had to work very hard for it. I got into a uni masters and PhD without a uni degree. I think sometimes students just get coddled and babied too much through university and not pulled up for 'basic' errors which are actually pretty important.