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DrewI am a thirty something married gay boy living in Sydney, almost on top of the gay scene but not in it! Why Sometimes blue?, because I love blue, but also I am sometimes blue :)
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Sunday, March 23, 2008

Lessons on writing employment ads

I have two open positions in my company at the moment, one for a junior designer and the other for an experienced programmer with a quite specific computer language.



I have been advertising for about a week or so on one ad and about three weeks on the other.



So far I have had no responses from anyone who I have been impressed with.



More importantly I have not had anyone apply that actually has the required essential skills.



Let's analyse this shall we?



OK



Essential skill - design knowledge & portfolio of work to demonstrate experience seems to have been read as:



Covered HTML in my degree

I use the web

I am open to learning new technologies



Essential - Australian Work Visa or ability to work in Australia, this seems to be a very loose requirement indeed. It seems that there is some sort of lost in translation that means my company is willing to sponsor someone to work in Australia.



But what really annoys me the absolute most is the total lack of care in writing the covering letter / note. Sure the responses are done online, but this should not mean the language used is any less important.



Look I understand that for most of the applicants English is not their first language, however you would think that you could get someone who is proficient in English to draft a standard covering statement?



My absolute favourite was the guy who sent me a link to his online portfolio of work, first off the link was just slightly wrong, which is OK because I could correct it. But the entire 'portfolio' was full of broken links and images.



Not the way to impress to potential employer!

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2 Comments:

At Mon Mar 24, 01:22:00 PM EST, Blogger Sunshine said...

We go through about 20 covering letters and resumes a year. My rule of thumb is - if they can't string a sentence together that is grammatically correct, they are out.

We can't afford to get someone but can't put them in front of a client. Besides, as you said, it just irritates me because it's simply a display of a lack of care.

 
At Mon Mar 24, 01:24:00 PM EST, Blogger Sunshine said...

LOL - "We can't afford to get someone but can't put them in front of a client" - that doesn't make any sense. LOL.

BUT - I'm not writing a covering letter. ;)

 

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