I need to start job hunting again. The delightful Flora, the reason I was employed as maternity leave cover in the Sussex Language Institute, was christened yesterday, is growing and her equally delightful mother Alexandra will return to work before long. I must make contact with the useless agencies, blow the dust off my cv, and start composing covering letters.
I find this last task extremely hard and pointless. The correct form is to gush about how wonderful one is at everything, which is never true and only comes naturally to the egregiously egotistical. The tyranny of the person specification means that both candidate and employer approach letters with a check-list foremost in their thoughts. Clarity of expression, never mind elegance or wit, all these are subordinated to the list of essential and desirable characteristics. I offer the following as a parlour game: each player writes pastiche applications in the style of a famous writer in reply to a series of real advertisements. The applications are submitted to the gullible employers and players score a point for every interview they are offered. In a refinement, players might be required to attend the interviews in character. I myself have often attended interviews in the personae of Evelyn Waugh or of Wyndham Lewis.
UCAS are now using plagiarism detection software on personal statements in undergraduate applications to university; the Guardian story cited above includes as an example candidates for medicine who claim that their interest in the subject was sparked off by an 'elderly or infirm grandfather'. I would throw these candidates out on the grounds of indecisiveness: the use of the connective 'or' makes the reader think that the mythical grandparent was either elderly or infirm, but not both.
I wish someone would apply the same software to job applications. When I served on the other side in the war between applicant and employer I used to wish I could throw straight in the bin all the applicants who 'relished' this or who had 'passions' for that.
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