to think that people have no idea how to apply for jobs?!

[myteenytinyteapot]

Just that really. Hiring for a senior admin person at the moment and have had hundreds of applications but honestly only about four shortlistable ones. I have had:

• CVs which include full-length glamour model style photographs of applicants
• CVs without cover letters when the advert clearly asks for a cover letter
• CVs and cover letters riddled with spelling and grammatical errors
• CVs which are 20 pages long and go into loads of detail about the hobbies and interests of the applicant. Also hardly anyone uses page numbers!
• Cover letters which are obviously just generic copied and pasted mass send out jobs - "I am writing to apply for the position advertised". Couldn't even be arsed to put in the job title!
• People applying who don't have any of the essential requirements listed

AIBU that I'm not surprised people can't get jobs if this is the general standard considered acceptable?!

Sorry nothing helpful to add but thank you for this thread - I'm currently looking for work and the comments made me giggle! Nowt as daft as folk!

avalanching there is a difference between Dear Sir - writing to an individual and assuming that individual is a man -totally offensive and misogynist- and “Dear Sirs” writing to an organisation which you know is likely to contain a mixture of men, women (and maybe non-binary persons) and using a collective form of address that happens to derive from the male form of address but for which there is, so far, no obvious alternative. As I explained earlier, in some contexts such as certain types of legal correspondence you have to write to the whole firm, not the individual. I’d dearly like there to be a sensible non-gendered alternative to “Dear Sirs” but I can’t think of one.

@myteenytinyteapot you complained that the applicant wrote “Dear Sirs” when she could easily have found out that you were all women but in fact it turns out that she clearly ignored an instruction to write to Jane Jones. So even if she had used a collective female form of address she’d have been wrong (and, as I said in my post, the default approach should be to find the name of an individual before resorting to using a collective or impersonal form).

Becky

The link you provided literally contradicted your assertion that Dear Sirs is correct!

"Sir/Madam – you start your letter with “Dear Sir or Madam” when you don’t know to whom your letter should be addressed; for example, if you’re writing to the general university admissions department and don’t know exactly who would be responsible for the handling of your enquiry.
Mr/Mrs/Dr etc – when you know the name of the person to whom you are writing, address them using their surname and title. For men, this should be Mr Smith (unless you know that he has another title, e.g. Dr Smith or Captain Smith) and for women, this should be Ms Smith unless you know for sure that she has another title or prefers to use Mrs or Miss."

If the job advert contains a name, you should be using it.

@notcopingwellhere yes I know we get Dear Sirs as an establishment, and it is still sexist and outdated. Just because it is accepted in the context you describe (which I still think is outdated and will eventually change) doesn't mean it's accepted in other environments. I'm not saying I'd go as far as the OP and disregard someone for a job for it (I wouldn't be allowed!), for the reasons you describe as I do work with people from the legal profession, but it still causes me to roll my eyes!

Dear Sirs reproduces male/men as default.

I instantly bin any cover letters addressed "Dear Sirs". Firstly, because all jobs I recruit for have me listed as the contact. Secondly, because it raises alarms that the applicant has not recognised the problem with the default male and rectified.

If you're unsure who the person recruiting is, address "To whom it may concern" or "Dear Sir/Madam" (though the latter sounds like the start of a letter sent from a seventeenth century man of science to an aristocratic householder requesting to stay at their manor during a European grand tour).

avalanching unless you are a lawyer working in a job where you are on one side of a dispute and the other side is writing to you, you should never get a letter addressed to “Dear Sirs”. I would not send you one if you were my client/supplier/an expert witness, I would use your name. Or if we were 2 law firms working jointly in a project we’d use the individual lawyers’ names. It should be confined to the very narrow litigation context only.

I am placemarking this thread as an unsuccessful job seeker . Very educational

This is why we need 'life skills' lessons in schools, how to apply for jobs, how to behave in interviews, how to do taxes, how to make and stick to a budget etc etc. We seem to have a world full of people that lack common sense when it comes to basic life skills these days and it's worrying.

Definitive advice always seemed to help me.

I’m a 6th form tutor. My form have had roughly a week of learning how to write applications, CVs, UCAS statements, etc.
We start with a simple questionnaire on strengths/weaknesses and so on after all the training. I have one tutee who “isn’t really interested in anything other than football” and another one who “just loves people and is a social butterfly”, including a drawing of a butterfly. Tutee number 3 has just failed mocks in chemistry, biology and maths and wants to apply for medicine, biomed and pharmacy. No Miss, no plan B. I despair.

Since there’s lots of recruiters on here can I ask for the best way to explain a gap on a CV?

I finished my post graduate qualification at the end of last year and had a few months of unsuccessful job applications (mix of graduate jobs and admin type jobs). More recently I got a part time job to tide me over but before I could start I had an accident which I’m currently recovering from. I already had a large gap from the months of job applications and not being able to work while recovering is increasing my anxiety about my future prospects.

Any advice would be very much appreciated!

They do teach life skills in schools, AFAIK. Certainly more about personal finances now. DD (14) was explaining the difference between simple and compound interest to me the other day.

You have to wonder how some of the people making the obvious errors have ever managed to get a job...
For those not doing anything obviously wrong and meeting the criteria, do you think it might be geographical? Too many similar applicants maybe?

In more recent years I’ve had to recruit with application forms rather than CVs. We tend to ask for quite a bit of stuff and it does weed out the complete time wasters. I do love it however when people say totally inappropriate things in forms, often of a political nature. I get a lot of students linking to their blogs which is often a bad idea too.

One of the biggest things schools can do to break down class barriers is teach kids how to present themselves confidently and write about themselves in a professional manner. I could do this at a basic level when I left school and university, but it wasn't until I got a foot in the door and got a job as a paralegal in a law firm, and taught myself by emulating colleagues and so on that I could present myself sufficiently well to get a job as a trainee solicitor.

Kids whose parents who were professionals and had been to private schools themselves already have that advantage and ability earlier on. The effect is, of course, that you get a load of glib hoorays running the country. Must be a bloody good bloke because they come across a certain way and speak with a certain accent.

We consider it a convention that has lost its gender association over the years (in the same way that female lawyers in the US style themselves “Carla D. Jones Esq.”)

Long ago and far away (when Dear Sirs was a perfectly acceptable way to address a formal letter), the only people entitled to add Esquire were members of the Privy Council.

[Thirty years a legal secretary - wasted!]

Oh and interview etiquette. I don’t expect a suit for junior positions but I’ve had someone turn up in a see through blouse and a black bra. Surely you’d look in the mirror before leaving the house?

There’s also the curse of recruiters who decide to send your CV without telling you. I had been warned some would do this and refused to hand it over except where there was a vacancy I wanted to apply for.

Also recruiters miscorrecting a technical term in my CV. I refused to let them apply for jobs for me.

Only done the applying thing once but am deeply suspicious of all recruitment agencies after these experiences. (Did find several decent ones amongst the dross).

Thanks for an excellent thread, OP. My own personal favourites:

Those who get a mate to write their covering letter, and the mate is stupid enough to sign their name instead of the applicant's

Applicants for a job requiring a good science degree who insist that an NVQ in hairdressing really does count

The one whose answer machine "message" was 30 seconds of Arthur Brown's "I am the god of hellfire ..." (in the week of 9/11)

The Bruce Forsyth obsessive
Achievements: I've met BF 7 times
Current role: Admin for BF Appreciation Society
Aims: To develop the aforementioned Society

The covering letter which explained a CV hadn't actually been prepared yet and asked me to delay selections until it had; apparently it would be "well worth it" when it came

May I add people that use email addresses like '[email protected]'?
I have had to remind more than one student that an email address such as ‘[email protected]’, is not appropriate for a professional role.

I’ve had:
The wrong covering letter which stated how desperate they were to work for our competitor
Photos attached
Coloured paper and twirly fonts
CVs with huge unaccounted for gaps of time missing
Applicants writing Id be stupid not to give them an interview
Parents as referees
Someone told me off for interrupting them ( they had rambled on and we were overrunning)
Someone demonstrating a karate move in an interview ( karate was not an essential skill!)

Also recruiters miscorrecting a technical term in my CV. I refused to let them apply for jobs for me

Once a recruiter 'fixed' my CV and changed the name of my current company to something she felt was more descriptive. She also changed the name of my university. Imagine if I went to Univeristy of Cornwall and she wrote down university of Truro because the campus was located there. It was very weird.

Job advertised: 24 points of what the job entails; another 32 points for person specification and then a competency framework. All to be answered a prescribed box, unclear where you are supposed to address the job requirements (or at all?) or the person spec, or the competencies...

Then there are the jobs (non-public sector) that don't tell you the wages, but the job spec is so bigged up it looks like it might pay what you need, but actually, it most likely doesn't. Give me at least some idea of what level of expertise you're looking for, an accountant paid 25k is a different job than one paid 45k, if alone for the first one probably not requiring a qualification.

A friend's wife once asked me to help with her CV. She had had one job, for 10 years, about which she wrote nothing other than the name of her employer - a bank. Didn't even have a job title - manager? Tea lady? But she put the full address and postcode of her primary school

I gave her some pointers, in the nicest possible way, but the next time I saw her CV it was pretty much the same....

There’s also the curse of recruiters who decide to send your CV without telling you.
absolutely unacceptable I agree

Also recruiters miscorrecting a technical term in my CV.
any decent agency wouldn't make any change on your CV should ask YOU to do it -what's the point of ending with a different CV when you get an interview!
(they should obviously format it to add the agency name, and delete your contact details)

Not agencies are decent, some have no idea of the business, are running for their monthly targets without thinking long term and end up flat on their nose. Some big names also have a very high turnover, but have enough numbers to get away with all the rubbish. Or they wouldn't exist anymore, and they do!