The lies of public-sector recruitment

As a temp I get called on to do all sorts of jobs, often in large institutions, and existing in these places for a short amount of time is often rather revealing about how things work in the public sector, but by far the most revealing was a job I took on a few weeks ago working for my own agency in their office, in their permanent employment department. I spent a whole week photocopying, in triplicate, something in the order of 20,000 pages. Why was a doing a task that was so wasteful of resources? The answer is that this is the direction that the public- and third-sector have gone in terms of applications for jobs. The move away from cover letter and CV to long application forms seems extremely problematic, from both a political and an environmental perspective.

Many readers will have had the experience of filling out extremely lengthy application forms. You know, the ones that take hours to fill in, that come with an attached job spec and person spec, each well over a page and including all sorts of silly little things, and the expectation that you’ll give examples of all of your experience doing all these things. They take hours to fill in, there’s no way to get around that, and you know that if you don’t put in the time you’re far less likely to get the job, so for the time spent to be worthwhile, you need to spend a lot of it. The big question, really, is what this tells the prospective employer more than they could glean from a cover letter and CV. The answer is probably not very much, but that because recruitment is often done on a basis whereby if you miss out one requirement you won’t be shortlisted, it’s easier (and in some ways lazier) to do it this way. There is no regard for the fact that someone may have no experience in executing a task, but after training would actually do it better and more expediently than someone who has been doing it badly or slowly for years, saving both time and money. With the implementation of application forms across the board in the public and third sectors, the idea of potential, of transferable skills (with intelligence probably being the most important) is being written out of the process.

All of this is done in the name of equality of opportunity. It’s more fair to give an application form because, apparently, it levels the playing field. Because, apparently, it allows the employer to select the most appropriate candidate for the role. Unlike the cover letter, which is of course culturally biased (I say in my most sarcastic voice.) Well the candidate is only most appropriate if you don’t consider any training that the selected candidate will get, only most appropriate if you believe people within the sector will always do a better job than those coming from outside. The truth of the matter is that there’s not a single person who gets through this process who couldn’t write a perfectly adequate cover letter. In fact, such a cover letter would probably not only include the same material as an application, but would give an even greater insight into what the candidate could bring to the role. The fact is that the current process is massively wasteful (assuming 100 people apply for a job, each spending a few ours on an application, you’re already talking about a quarter of a year of man hours), bad for the environment, and all on the basis of a false equality. The public sector would be better off being a little honest with itself about whether they actually want to employ people who can’t write a decent cover letter. It would certainly save a lot of paper and a lot of people’s time.  They may even begin to improve the quality of work done, by bringing people in who are intelligent rather than experienced.