Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Patience is the key: Online job application dilemma

These days I have been visiting and applying to many company websites. Sometimes I feel so frustrated during the application. Some dilemmas and technical problems I experienced were not only time consuming but severely damaged the image of the related companies. Examples:

1. While applying for a position, some websites required you to register with them. After the registration you got to have an username and password. After that you need to fill in many information such as your education background, your working experiences, your contact information... What happened was after I login, I was filling the educational information. Once I finished, I clicked "next". And nothing happened. I got totally stuck on that stage. Sometimes it was due to browser problem but sometimes it just won't work on neither Mozilla or Explorer.

2. You are not recognized by the system. I clicked "next" and the application proceeded. But after a while it locked me out of the system. I reentered my username and password, but it said the username and password didn't exist in their system! I was so frustrated! I have to close the browser and go back to the website, and re-login, and then continue the information filling. It took lots of time and patience.

3. CV not able to upload. Sometimes I managed to proceed until the last step without problem. But then when they need me to upload my CV and cover letter, the system hung there. I couldn't finish the last step. Or, it would say that the system only accept doc or pdf file, but they just won't accept any doc or pdf file that I tried to upload. urggggg!

4. Online survey. Not any online survey, but a 30 minutes 70 questions survey, and it was MANDATORY! Eventually I spent like 90 minutes to play with the system and the online questions.

5. The information you want to fill do not exist in their system. For example, if you go to Ernst and Young website to apply for a job, you can see that the "nationality" section only include countries from A to T. That means any countries after T, such as Vietnam, is no where available. There is no "Other" option either. So what do you do in this case? You can't skip this question as it is mandatory. So do you simply put a nationality if your country doesn't exist in the system?

The whole application process requires a lot of patience, and most of the time you don't even get a reply. Somehow I wonder whether all these dilemmas are made on purpose, so that candidates who have no patience will simply give up. Big companies receive too many application per day. I read that Microsoft receives 5000 resumes per day just for an internship position. How many HR personal do they need to hire to process all these CVs?

3 comments:

  1. Anonymous3:52 AM

    BE,
    My best wishes for your application. I hope your patience will pay off.
    Cheers
    Jamy

    ReplyDelete
  2. Anonymous3:52 AM

    BE,
    My best wishes for your application. I hope your patience will pay off.
    Cheers
    Jamy

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hey Bee Ean,

    I did experience it before but ironically with either IT companies or large international companies. Haha...the bigger they are, the more problems! Well most of them have a recruitment team who screens through all applications. If you want to know especially for internships, most of them will look at academic info as the most important. Sometimes it's better to apply to smaller or medium-sized companies as they receive fewer CVs and thus, would look at each CV with "more" care.

    ReplyDelete