Conservation Careers

Earlier this week we ran a training event for 400+ people on how to apply for conservation jobs.

During the live event, we walked through our tried and tested approach to crafting CVs, Resumes and cover letters which significantly increase the chances of landing an interview.

We chose to run the event for three reasons:

• We estimate that 90% of conservation job applications are of poor quality, and unlikely to make a shortlist.
• When we asked our audience what they saw as a major barrier in their career, ‘crafting job applications’ was in the top three.
• 86% of our job seekers are reporting burnout when crafting applications. (NB These are likely to correlate strongly with the 90% of poor-quality applications we see across our desks…)

I find these figures shocking, and a cause for optimism in equal measure.

It’s shocking because so many talented conservationists are spending huge amounts of time, effort and money to become employable for their chosen niche, only to fall at the last hurdle by submitting crappy applications.

It’s like running a marathon and sitting down just before the finish line, then wondering why you’re not getting a medal.

But it’s such an easy problem to fix.

All job seekers need to do is present clear evidence of how they meet the employer’s criteria for their chosen role.

No more, no less.

That’s it.

On Tuesday night we showed people how to do this by reviewing their career to date against the employer’s criteria, and then crafting career success stories to highlight in their cover letters and CVs and Resumes.

Having done this once, the application process gets easier and better with each submission.

However … when you stand back and take a 10,000 ft view of the typical application process it’s quite clear that CVs, Resumes and Cover Letters are a huge waste of time for everyone. Employers and job seekers alike.

Looking from the employer’s perspective it’s perhaps easy to see during in the shortlisting process, which looks something like this:

• Share a job advert – including a list of essential and desirable criteria.
• After the closing date, review all the applications (often this can be a large digital pile…) to painstakingly identify clear and high-quality examples of how each criterion has been met*.

The problem is examples can be found anywhere in the application documents, in any order and in any format. So it becomes a nightmare to continuously cross-reference anything that looks like it might be evidence against the list of criteria.

It’s a slow, important and hugely painful job which is likely to lead to errors when the employer fails to spot evidence against each criterion, because it wasn’t easy to find or well presented by the job seeker.

Which leads to my question: Why ask for cover letters, CVs and Resumes at all?

I was once asked when teaching about applications at Cambridge University, “why don’t employers just ask for a simple list of evidence against their criteria?“

100%

It would be SO much easier for job seekers to make applications, and SO much easier for employers to review them.

Sure, there’s some extra information needed beyond the ‘criteria evidence’, but that can easily be captured and systemised.

For example, a LinkedIn profile provides the majority of this already and only needs to be reviewed for the candidates who meet the requirements in the first cut.

When experience beats education hands down, I believe it’s time to simplify and streamline the application process for everyone.

Let’s stop requesting CVs, Resumes and cover letters, and ask applicants to provide a simple list of examples of how they meet each criteria, along with a link to their LinkedIn profile to find out more information about their career history, education etc.

How much quicker, easier and more effective would that be for everyone?

Founders Desk, Careers Advice