Would you pay for a stamp?
Applying for a job has never been easier. Just hop on to one of the many job boards enter a few search terms and scroll through a list of all the relevant roles for you, press apply and you might not even have to attach your CV, the job board will do it for you. Then just sit back and wait for all the calls and interviews to roll in.
But, the interviews aren’t rolling in and your phone isn’t ringing with recruiters (at least with relevant jobs that you’re interested in). Why? How can this be?!
The answer could lie in the fact that you’re not being discerning enough with the roles that you’re applying for. Are you reading the job descriptions and have you got the relevant experience that the advert requires? At AF Selection we receive well over 100 CV applications per day and we then reject about 80% of those because their experience doesn’t match the required skillset. Of course, there are many who aren’t right for the job they’ve applied for, but we might be able to help them in other ways, but the vast majority are just completely irrelevant.
But surely this has always been the case, we hear you say? Well, no actually. It may be a bit ancient to recall, but in the dark old days when adverts for jobs were placed in newspapers and in industry magazines you’d probably have to send an application through the post and actually pay to put a stamp on the letter. Would you have sat there on a Sunday night and carefully printed out 70 copies of your CV and applied 70 stamps? No, you wouldn’t, and you certainly wouldn’t now with a first class stamp costing 70p – you’d have sat there and worked out which roles you stood a good chance of being interviewed for and been a little more focussed. You’d also probably remember which jobs you’d applied for because you would have been more invested in reading the advert and seeing whether the company was for you.
Some of our favourites include recent graduates with no experience (and we mean, not a day of relevant work experience listed) applying for £45,000 Marketing Director roles. If you’d had to pay to apply to that job, do you really think you would have done?
Now, we know that this doesn’t just affect us recruiters. It affects those companies trying to recruit for themselves. “It’s not that we haven’t had applications,” we often hear from clients, “it’s that none of them are suitable”.
What we do love is when we see an application from a candidate when they’ve really read the job description and recognised that they might not be right for it, but hope we can help them with something else – absolutely, we’d love to!
We love how the recruitment industry has evolved (mostly), but perhaps next time you’re scrolling through the job boards test yourself at the end as to how many roles you’ve applied to – you might just be shocked!
