A new survey finds a majority of job seekers lie about their qualifications on cover letters, resumes and in job interviews, and it cites eight more honest options.
Oh yes, that’s how I got my current job. I used to be an external contractor myself, said I was interested at working full-time for my employer (it’s a very stable and fun job) and had to go through an entire circus. It was guaranteed I would get the job but I still had to:
Write a resume (with cover letter!?)
Wait for the job to open up on their recruitment website (only for 15 minutes so I would be the only one who could apply)
Have several interviews
etc.
All because their HR software requires certain steps to be followed or it’ll refuse to process the application.
For our last contractor recruitment (new position, not a rehire) we got rid of our external selection agency (responsible for the first stage of resume scanning) and decided to do it ourselves, specifically for the reason in my last little rant. We didn’t trust them to select the right candidates because they had no experience with our line of work and just blindly searched for keywords.
It was nice to get to see all incoming resumes but I had to pick through 40+ of them manually. And because of procurement laws, I had to grade all of them on a 20 point list of criteria we got to decide. On top of that, an applicant (or their recruitment agency) can challenge the fairness of the process if they feel we rated them unfairly on a specific criteria. So it was important to have a proper substantiation for every single judged criteria. That was over 800 times I had to check for proof if what a applicant claimed lined up with what their resume said.
And again, it was the recruitment agencies that really ruined my days (yes, plural). You could see that the recruiter altered resumes, wrote nonsense cover letters and did whatever they could to get past the criteria. At least half of the people who applied were clearly not suitable, but I still had to explicitly say why they weren’t suitable for every single criteria.
Sorry, this is really something I can go on and on about.
It’s definitely a nightmare, but that’s what you get when you work in the public sector I guess.
Oh yes, that’s how I got my current job. I used to be an external contractor myself, said I was interested at working full-time for my employer (it’s a very stable and fun job) and had to go through an entire circus. It was guaranteed I would get the job but I still had to:
All because their HR software requires certain steps to be followed or it’ll refuse to process the application.
For our last contractor recruitment (new position, not a rehire) we got rid of our external selection agency (responsible for the first stage of resume scanning) and decided to do it ourselves, specifically for the reason in my last little rant. We didn’t trust them to select the right candidates because they had no experience with our line of work and just blindly searched for keywords.
It was nice to get to see all incoming resumes but I had to pick through 40+ of them manually. And because of procurement laws, I had to grade all of them on a 20 point list of criteria we got to decide. On top of that, an applicant (or their recruitment agency) can challenge the fairness of the process if they feel we rated them unfairly on a specific criteria. So it was important to have a proper substantiation for every single judged criteria. That was over 800 times I had to check for proof if what a applicant claimed lined up with what their resume said.
And again, it was the recruitment agencies that really ruined my days (yes, plural). You could see that the recruiter altered resumes, wrote nonsense cover letters and did whatever they could to get past the criteria. At least half of the people who applied were clearly not suitable, but I still had to explicitly say why they weren’t suitable for every single criteria.
Sorry, this is really something I can go on and on about.
It’s definitely a nightmare, but that’s what you get when you work in the public sector I guess.
This is the bureaucracy hoops people should be pissed off about. Ugh.