Oh my.<\/p>\n
What an astonishing number of applications… and so many of such a high standard. You’re really haven’t made this easy on us, people. The worst part of this whole process is that we’re having to have to turn away a huge number of really smart, competent applicants.
\n
\nWe’ve been brutal in analysing the CVs sent to us for the Helpdesk job, and made sure the process has been as objective as possible. We drew up a very specific list of skills (hinted at in the application details on this very site), and used a spreadsheet to do the maths with a complex set of weighting criteria. Ticks in specific skill and attribute boxes—along with negative marking for badly written applications—were converted into floating point numbers in a way that took us plenty of time, but which kept our consciences clean.<\/p>\n
It’s also been an enlightening exercise, getting some real insight into how CVs can make people come across. We made the process as anonymous as possible, so that we didn’t include any prior judgements of people’s skills. Now it’s all over, though, it’s interesting looking back and re-matching names we recognise with CVs we didn’t. Perhaps at some point we’ll write up some tips on how to be likeable on your CV.<\/p>\n
If you’re one of the many people to whom we couldn’t offer a place this time, don’t be disheartened, you’re in some very good company. It’s not that we don’t love you, it’s just that some people really did hit all the marking points for the skill set we’re after this time around.<\/p>\n
If you’re through to the next round, though, be warned: you’re still up against some very tough competition. In mathematical terms, let us be clear that most<\/em> of you won’t make it to round two! Still, we looking forward to having some nice chats with people over the coming days while we narrow it all down.<\/p>\n Thanks again to everyone who applied, you’re all wonderful, wonderful people.<\/p>\n – HD<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Oh my. What an astonishing number of applications… and so many of such a high standard. You’re really haven’t made this easy on us, people. The worst part of this whole process is that we’re having to have to turn away a huge number of really smart, competent applicants.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":50,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-280","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/50"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":283,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280\/revisions\/283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.soton.ac.uk\/helpdesk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}