This Is Not A
BLOG!
Date: 18/10/13
Impure And Applied
As I mentioned last time (near the end), I've now applied for a different job to the one I've now been doing with increasing anomie for a touch over five years.
The guy who's running that particular show came up to our office a fortnight last Thursday. We were told that he would be holding a meeting for anyone who was interested to go along to in order to find out what these new positions were about.
I think it boggled his nut a little to see that about ninety per cent of the eligible staff turned up. That may have been the reason why the application process changed from 'expression of interest' on the Thursday morning to 'application form and interview' by the time the vacancies showed up on the Civil Service's job site the next day. They must have been suddenly desperate to winnow out those who might have applied on a whim.
As I said last week (and way back in 2008, now I come to think of it), I loathe 'competence-based' application forms; the way you have to torture your work experience into not one but two Procrustean beds (the second being a 250-word limit) just to get through them just jars with me.
On top of which, our local senior managers most generously offered each of us one whole hour to complete the application. As a friend and colleague remarked, it takes at least that long to find the application form and complete the preliminaries. But then, we can't have 'production' being adversely affected by staff who are wilfully trying to improve their situation, can we?
In the end, and as much as I am - as a matter of principle - against doing anything work-related in my own time, I lugged my paperwork home on two consecutive days to get my head around completing the two competencies at my own pace and without the surrounding distractions.
I managed it, and suspiciously easily as well. In each case, I just typed out everything I wanted to say on the subject and then edited it down to below the word-count limit whilst maintaining the salient matching of buzzwords. I then took all that into work on Thursday morning and used what was left of my one precious, shining hour inputting it to the online form. Which is where I hit a small snag, in that both LibreOffice and MS Word™'s 'word count' feature told me that the first competency was 249 words, but the online form told me it was 251 and cut the last word off. A little tweak and all was well.
I had intended, in my procrastinating way, to merely save the form for one last review on Friday before sending it off. When I got to the last screen, where I had to declare that I met the criteria for application, or declare that I was free of fowl-pest, or declare that I was in fact the heir to the throne of Romania, I forget which, there was a button at the bottom marked 'Submit'. Which I was beginning to wish I had done by that point. Thinking it would take me to another screen (as had the rash of 'Save and proceed' buttons on the previous pages), I clicked on it. Well, bugger I down dead if it didn't actually, y'know, submit my application.
It mattered not; I'd done as much as I could with it, and further tinkering might have robbed it of its power, or something.
So now it's just a case of waiting for the applications to be sifted sometime during the second half of next week. At least we now know that there won't be interviews to follow after all; they're going to appoint directly from the sifting process, it seems.
As I said last time, I've no great hopes of getting any of the six positions up for grabs. For all the additional faffing about which completing the form involves, I would reckon that about fifty or sixty people have gone for them, and some of them have received a certain degree of 'coaching' from their managers or other sources. My manager would almost certainly have done that for me had I asked her to; but I prefer to stand or fall by my own efforts, if only because it saves me from the strain of trying to remember what I had bullshat about and how. I may be too honest for my own advantage.
So, as Valentine Michael Smith would put it, "Waiting is". Watch this space... 
