We are in a strange situation at the moment, both my wife and I are between engagements, which means we are not currently employed. This is not a problem as my wife has a position to start and is just waiting on formalities being complete and I have a number of consultancy engagements to keep the wolf from the door.
However it does leave us with some free time. Last week, as reported we made a sudden decision to pop off to Georgia for a few days and this week I have been trying to persuade Mrs Beedie that we need to go to Cyprus but she’s not having that one. The upshot is we are both at home all day pottering around getting in each other’s way and not really achieving much. We did however go to the aforementioned Swedish shop and buy some sofas and contrary to what I wrote a couple of weeks ago the assembly was very straight forward, took hardly any time, no knuckles were skinned and I had no bits left over, not even any meatballs.
One of the things I have been doing is looking for a job. Although I am happy with the consultancy work it’s not really full time and does not really give me the opportunity to get my teeth into a project. As someone with over 30 years’ experience in the IT industry I would like to nail one more major project before they farm me off to the funny farm. I have been looking around and frustratingly most of the opportunities nowadays you have to apply online. In the past when a job was advertised if you did not have the required qualifications or experience you could mention in a cover letter the skills you had that would make up for the deficiencies and also explain why you could do the job. A real person would read your cover letter first before looking at your CV and if they liked what they saw then they would invite you to interview. Nowadays with online application systems there will be a checkbox for if you have a degree, a checkbox for if you have a specific skill or time served, a checkbox for a language, etc. If you cannot tick any of these boxes then the automatic system rejects you outright and your application never gets as far as a real eyeball. These systems may be designed to whittle down 200 applications to 20 but in the process they are definitely throwing out the best person for the job, because the best person for a job is not necessarily the one with the best degree or even the longest experience, the best person for the job is the person that wants it most and will totally own it and make it theirs, and you only find them if you read the covering letters.
So here is my tip to all job applicants, if you want your application to get past the automatic system then tick all the boxes. You do not need to lie on your CV, you can highlight your strengths in a covering letter but tick the boxes and get past the robot.