Today's Hints
Responding to Selection Criteria in a covering letter and/or a Résumé.Recently in Western Australia there has been some changes in some agencies in the way people should apply for jobs. This might be to try to make it easier for people who do not know the standard Responding to Selection Criteria approach, or it may be to keep the size of applications down or it may be to move towards online applications. There seems to be no consistent approach across agencies.
• Some agencies are asking applicants to respond to the Selection Criteria in a résumé, or in both a résumé and letter.
• Other agencies give the applicant the choice of how they want to apply; use the standard response or a letter or a résumé or both.
• Many agencies have not altered their requirements and are asking for a complete response to the Selection Criteria.
Applicants should read the instructions very carefully to ascertain what is required. If nothing is specified, assume that the full response to all the Selection Criteria is required. But keep it succinct and to the point; no long applications.
If they require you to respond in a Covering Letter
My suggestion is to write the covering letter, keeping to the stipulated number of pages, and treat each criterion separately, as you would normally do, but keep it to one example per response. Aim for about a half a page total.
Start with an opening claim and then go straight into your best example. Don’t waste space with long claims saying how important the skill is, or where you have used it. A one-line claim is enough. Strictly limit the background information to your example to a couple of lines; focus on the action you took. In that way you can give a good example in half a page.
Be sure your example is as close as possible to an item in the Duty Statement of the new job.
When you have finished you can collate your examples in the given order and take out the headings but bold the key words that indicate which criterion you are addressing. For example, if the example was about your interpersonal skills, your opening claim might be, “My interpersonal skills have been developed throughout my five years working as a customer service officer”. Bold the key word. Not having a heading and bolding the name of the Selection Criteria saves space.
The resulting response will look more like an expression of interest. I have seen successful responses to six criteria in two pages.
If they want you to respond in a résumé
There are key places to change your résumé to suit this task.
Work History – past positions and duties
The challenge is to include all the Selection Criteria and the duties listed in the Duty Statement in the résumé . Look carefully at the Duty Statement of the new job and insert as many of them as you truthfully can in the list of duties you have in the past positions in your résumé. Move these duties to the top of the list. These are what the panel will be looking for.
Now look at the Selection Criteria. Make sure the duties you list in your résumé include the skills listed in the Selection Criteria. You will have to ensure that the each skill listed occurs somewhere in the duties you have performed and this means you will have to expand these duties to explain how the skill was used.
This can be done for Selection Criteria that ask for “skills” or “ability” or “capacity” but it becomes more challenging when they ask for a “knowledge” or “understanding” of something. You can say you did something and hope the panel will assume you must have had that knowledge if you carried out a certain duty, but it is not a real response.
“Experience” criteria will be fine because your Work History or whatever you call it, is your experience.
Competency statements.
You also need to change your competency list to cover all the Selection Criteria. Assuming that the panel will not spend hours poring over the details of the duties listed under each position you have held, the competency list will be a strong message so you should work this up into a few lines each to explain how you have used these skills and knowledge.
Achievements
If you can list some Significant Achievements under each position you have held, you could use this to reinforce your message that you meet the Selection Criteria. List the achievements you have had in using the Selection Criteria.
Professional development
You may be able to list short courses or qualifications in specified areas as ways of gaining knowledge and skills in required areas. Current study in specified areas should be included.
Unfortunately this makes a short (perhaps three page) résumé into a longer document. It is clumsy but if it is what they want you can force a résumé to do it. Many of my clients have done this with success. How the panel makes sense of all this I can't imagine. There are always two victims of an application process; the applicant who needs to make sense of it and try to meet the requirements and the panel who must also make sense of the process and interpret what the applicant has written in terms of their understanding of the Duty Statement and Selection Criteria. The clearer the process is the better it is for everyone.
Personal opinion.
These changes are ostensibly made to make the application process easier. It may make it easier for the panel (which I doubt), but from my experience it certainly does not make it easier for the applicant. I get so many calls from people asking for help in understanding what to do.
Trying to respond to the Selection Criteria in a résumé is an illogical thing to do; anyone can write anything in a résumé and it contains no actual “demonstration” of skills; just claims to have done it.
A targeted résumé is a good thing, but a résumé cannot be verified unless the applicant is being interviewed so it makes it a useless tool for selecting staff to be interviewed. Anyone can say anything in a résumé – and we all know that many people just “make it up” to sound good. How can a panel produce an assessment of a résumé against a Selection Criteria when there is no real evidence of any skill presented, only claims.
Research shows that if applicants are required to give a specific example of what they did in a specific situation they are more likely to be honest in their answers.
My serious concerns is for transparency and accountability in terms of the EEO Act which is supposed to ensure that personal factors cannot be taken into consideration when staff are selected, and that the Selection Criteria are the only factors to be considered.
Résumés can include anything the applicant wants the panel to know, including personal information such as religion, marital status, family details, schooling, memberships of clubs etc. Once the panel reads this, there is a strong possibility of bias; once read it cannot be unread, no matter how impartial the panel might want to be.
This could well lead to an appeal against this type of selection system.
For comments on this please email me on: lloydwhite@iinet.net.au
Common problems in responding to selection criteria
By Lloyd White, Consultant in Career Change and Job Application.
Author of “Write A Winning Job Application, A guide to responding to Selection Criteria.” 4th Edition.
http://www.lloydwhite.iinet.net.au
When reviewing the responses to the selection criteria for job applicants I see the same recurring mistakes that can spoil an application. Luckily they can easily be remedied with a few changes.
Spending too much time on setting the scene.
When you are give an example to demonstrate your skills, the story should be about YOU and how you applied the skills. Applicants often want to explain all the background to the situation, how important it was and who else was involved. Keep the background information down to no more than three lines. Then get quickly on to your action (how you applied the skills) step-by-step. This is what gives you your marks.
Describing your duties instead of give a specific example.
It is very easy to describe the duties of your job and hope the panel will realise that if you carried out those duties you must have the skills required. They won’t! Describing your duties proves nothing. You must give a specific example of some task or action you took, in detail.
It may be hard to believe, but your fate will be determined by one example, from possibly hundreds, from your whole working life. A judgement, by the panel, on your level of skills or knowledge will be made from reading that one example that takes them through the steps you took.
Writing too much.
One page per response is the very maximum for any job. Half to two thirds of a page is sufficient. If the first criterion is the most important for the job, and it usually is, you could go to one page. (Unless it is a qualification.) Long responses are a pain to read and the panel will hate you! A good communicator is a succinct communicator. Any fool can write three pages of drivel but it takes skill to write concisely.
Don’t use jargon.
It impresses only the stupid. “My mandate was to leverage a clear, insightful understanding of operational performance into the implementation of practical initiatives that improve business outcomes”. Come off it!
Focus on the Duty Statement.
Too many applicants ignore the duty statement and focus only on the selection criteria. The duty statement will tell you what examples to use. Any example that is close to the duties of the new job will be excellent. Examples from non-related jobs will not encourage the panel to think you can do this new job.
Giving hollow or template responses.
This is when you spell out the steps that are required but do not add sufficient detail in each step to make it real or understandable. E.g.
- I made immediate plans to address the situation.
- I carried out a threat and risk assessment keeping in mind the OHS issues.
- I prioritised and set myself a mental time frame as to how, who, what, why and when issues would be addressed.
These are hollow statements because they look as if they are doing the right thing but they are telling us nothing. What immediate plans? What were the threats and risks? What were the main priorities?
Always give enough detail for the reader to understand what you are talking about.
Mixing the tenses.
You are telling a story about something that happened in the past: so use past tense. If you start using words such as. “I do…” you are in the present tense.
Stick to “I did..” I consulted, I reviewed, I set up the committee, I negotiated” etc.
Use only successfully completed tasks.
If the task has not been completed or the result is not known, you cannot use that example. To prove that your skills, or your approach worked, there must be a positive outcome – a good result. Work in progress does not do that.
Don’t quote other peoples’ opinions of your work.
Some applicants think that quoting a positive comment on their work will influence the panel. It won’t. The panel knows that no one quotes criticism or negative feedback. Explain your actions in applying the required skills and let the panel make their own decision about how good that was.
Bullet lists.
Bulleting a few actions, say three or four, is fine and makes it reader friendly. But the reader cannot comprehend long lists of bullet points. A mixture of paragraphs and bullet lists is fine, but don’t overdo it.
Read the Information Pack
There is a current approach to keep applications down in size and very often the Information Pack tells you how many pages are expected, what size font and margins etc. Some agencies give a number of selection criteria, say nine, but instruct you to respond to, for example, number 2,5, 6 and 8 only. The other criteria will be assessed at the interview or through the resume. If you have not read this you will waste a lot of time and may have your application rejected.
Set your spell check to English (AUS).
Too many applicants have “English USA” spell checking as a default on their word processor. To fix this in MS Word go to Tools, come down to Language, select English (AUS), click on Default, and again on OK and the problem is fixed for all documents from now on. No more nasty American spelling like “recognize”, "organize", "organization", “counseling” or "standardize".
Never say, “see my resume”.
It is too easy to direct the panel to search your resume for information they want, instead of you re-writing it in the response page. They won’t search for any information you should have given them. This applies especially to criteria that ask for “Experience in…” Applicants are tempted to say, “As can be seen in my resume I have had considerable experience in …” Don’t be tempted.
Responding to criteria that ask for “Knowledge (or understanding of ..”
There is always confusion about how to respond to a criterion that asks for “Knowledge and understanding” and not experience” or “skills in “. Some people respond with a purely academic “essay”. This will be accepted in some places. Others stick to how they applied the knowledge and this is also acceptable. I think a combination of both but with more emphasis on personal involvement is best.
If you would like your application to be reviewed before submitting it, go to http://www.lloydwhite.iinet.net.au/pages/consultancy.html
