Applying Effort: Going beyond in a job application
A few weeks back we opened a fairly junior role in our company. A role we currently have three exceptional young professionals in and needed one more. My hiring lead worked on an awesome and descriptive (but not too descriptive) job overview and up it went. Knowing that junior roles tend to get a lot more activity and knowing that we were open to hiring someone without “traditional” work experience we added one extra step to the application process.
If you’ve ever applied to our company you will have noticed that we typically put some interesting questions at the bottom of our applications. Not trick questions, just questions allowing us to get a little insight about you beyond just what’s on your resume. We love it. We get so many interesting and intriguing responses and it’s such a great spot for candidates to let themselves shine.
For this role we added two simple enough questions:
Forget a cover letter, tell us a little about why you’re awesome
What makes you excited about this particular industry? (we allowed this one to be interpreted as either the industry the role was covering OR Tech OR something else we may not have thought of)
Our reasoning for this was that the application volume for this role was going be huge (at close it had over 130 applicants) and since we can’t phone screen everyone we wanted people to have a chance to tell us something intriguing.
What I was floored by however wasn’t the amazing responses (I knew there would be, there are so many fantastic people out there!) it was the LACK of responses. Just over 50% of applicants didn’t even bother answering them and roughly 50% of the ones who did clearly put ZERO effort into it.
On the plus side, it made it very easy for us to parse through resumes, we decided that if there was no additional effort put in we would focus on the candidates who had. On the negative side, there are likely many bright, young, talented individuals who are likely having a hard time finding a job (it’s not the 90’s anymore!) who got completely overlooked and they did it to themselves.
We had phone screens set up with 15 candidates, they ranged from new grads with no experience outside of summer jobs, to some with 1-5 years of experience, we had candidates from the banking, blogging, retail, media, and marketing sectors to name a few. We had candidates from all over the world who’ve found themselves starting a new life in Canada or just looking to start a new career. Every single one of these candidates put in effort on their application, they were thoughtful and researched, and showed passion and drive. These are the things I am looking for when reviewing resumes.
So, let me leave those of you that didn’t put that extra effort into your application with some guidance, it’s a competitive world, and no, you may not get as many interviews as resumes you send out and yes, it may be wildly frustrating to be applying and never hearing back HOWEVER you cannot stop putting in the effort. Every time you send out an application you are presenting yourself to an organization. It may take 50 applications to find the one that appreciates the extra effort but what’s your alternative? Never standing out from the crowd? That doesn’t sound like a decision that’s going to get anyone very far. So, if you’re given an opportunity to stand out in an application, even if the company made it optional, take it, stand out, sell yourself, because if you don’t someone else will.