Public sector applications & discrimination - a rant

[EarthSight]

I am in the unenviable position of applying for a public sector jobs. By far, they are the most time-consuming and painful jobs to apply for.

To complete the application, you have to manually enter every single job position and all the gaps between positions, since you left full time education. The gaps all have to be explained as to someone left, and they ask candidates to include the start and finish date of all the positions down to the exact day (just including the month of when someone started a job 15 years ago won't do). This includes dates of one's school and university years.

If you've only had 2 jobs in your life, then this isn't too bad, but by the time you reach your 30s or 40s and beyond, this becomes a lot more time consuming & complicated for a lot of people.

Does anyone know where this information goes? I once had a manager accidently admit to me that they were specifically looking for young people (no surprises there given how incredibly young our department was), and that they looked at someone's university leaving date to tell them how old someone was.

As far as I'm aware, the details I provide in my employment history will be passed on in place of a C.V so by asking for school and uni dates they are forcing me to declare my age. There are also multiple drop downs they expect people to use to account for all the gaps, and some of them say 'childcare', which would effectively tell them that you also have children before you even get to interview. How are they allowed to get away with this?

I think it's for safeguarding to ensure people don't hide employment where they were disciplined for something that might be a safeguarding risk.

The public sector often has much higher standards of accountability than the private sector due to very public past safeguarding failings like Ian Huntley.

I very much doubt that the public sector is generally discriminating in favour of younger candidates. I agree it's a pain though - and even worse in your 50s and 60s.

As PP said it’s largely to do with safeguarding. Many public sector jobs require high levels of safeguarding, rightly so. If you’ve had large chunks of unemployment they want to know why, to make sure you weren’t in prison or been sacked from multiple jobs.
It’s nothing to do with age. I’m late 50s and interviewed for 2 jobs in different NHS hospitals last year and was offered both.

I work in public sector and can categorically say I have never had to list all my jobs since leaving school. Are you sure it's not just for roles in education?

(Just as well as I was a right job hopper in my younger years, and add in a few gaps due to unemployment)

I don’t think it’s to discriminate against age as the people interviewing are just using forms that someone else has devised. I think they are just vetting people’s backgrounds.

That said I have definitely witnessed age discrimination at the council as well as other forms, but not before interview stage. Mostly if you score well you’ll be interviewed.

Background vetting
Establishing currency of qualifications and experience

Yes can be used to identify age and children but tbh a lot of public sector employees are female so discrimination fears are irrelevant. We want dedication, experience and qualifications. The rest isn't important

Goodness, I had several spells of agency work and temp work in my 20s. I don't even remember the months and years of all of them, never mind the exact dates. How many people can produce this sort of detailed information after 20 or 30 years?

I work in the public sector and we use a blind recruitment system where we ask applicants to answer four or five questions in 250 words each about their experience and skills related to the role. No CVs, no list of jobs, no details of education unless you volunteer it (and no need to say when or at which institution even if you do have to state you have a degree in a relevant subject). We just want to know what you can do and how you approach it. I don’t even see anyone’s name unless they come out top in the blind sift and we invite them for interview. I don’t know where you’re applying but it doesn’t have to be like that.

Nope. Not education.

I work in local government and this is fairly standard. It's to make sure that any gaps in employment are explained. To my mind, it is no more discriminatory than stating when you took your exams. The fact that I have maths and English o levels from the mid 80s immediately identifies me as being in my late 50s without any other information being provided.

Exactly, but I think in some organisations it's not that unusual to have employees who've worked there for 10 + years, so they probably don't think it's a big deal. These days though, so many roles are fixed term that they should wake up and realise this. The role I'm applying for has nothing to do with health or children, but they just use the same blanket requirements for everyone. Today it took me about 1.5 - 2 hrs complete it, to write a small essay to address every one of their bulletpoint requirements as well as all the other info they want, and that isn't even the most complicated one I've come across.

‘Public sector’ is very broad, you’re talking about hundreds of thousands of jobs and thousands of different organisations all of whom may have their own application processes. I am CS and have never had to enter all my jobs individually into an application (I did when I worked in higher education), usually in the CS you have a free text space to do a CV and as it is name blind it’s encouraged to be vague where possible.

They don’t care about gaps as long as you can explain them

It’s a special test to weed out the people who wouldn’t last five minutes in the public sector.

It does work 😀 If people can't be arsed to complete a document in detail I don't shortlist.

In terms of listing every job you've ever had it is hard if casual, frequent changes, you're as old as me...but once you've done it once you keep those records. In the NHS in my area that application info is retained for every job you apply for so you only do it once.