By Bongani Matshisi
In response to a job advert I had put in the paper a few months ago, I received more than 150 applications. Needless to say, the process of trimming the applicants down to five candidates was very difficult and extremely time consuming. The reason for that is because the applicants were more similar than different and I therefore had to carefully study their CV’s to find those that had outstanding qualities, skills or achievements. After 3 days of doing nothing else, I had my five candidates.
A few days after I’d completed the short-listing process, I received a call from a friend of mine. She told me that a friend of her boyfriend’s would like to apply for the job even though applications had closed three weeks prior. Obviously there was no way I was gonna allow that but I didn’t say that to my friend. I was a bit taken aback by the nerve and the audacity her boyfriend’s friend had to ask me, a complete stranger to him, to consider his VERY late application, not to mention the means he used to try to enter through the back door, so to speak.
Instead of giving him, through my friend, an outright no, I decided to teach him a lesson. What lesson, I wasn’t quite certain then. But this is what I said to my friend: “You and your friend both know that the closing date for applications was 3 weeks ago but you still want me to consider him. That would be unfair to the people who to applied on time. But I’m not saying no because you never know, this guy could be a star. But since he wants special treatment, I need him to tell me, through you, in two days time what is special about him. In 8 words or less.”
Two days later, I got this response from my friend via sms: “dedication, passion, ambitiousness, being ethical*, drives me daily”.
There’s nothing special about that. And I told my friend as such. I can say with almost certainty that almost all of the applications in circulation out there have the same exact words in them. Even if the guy had applied before the deadline, chances are he would have been one of the 150 applicants that didn’t make the shortlist. And that’s because there’s either nothing special about him or there is, but he just doesn’t know how to communicate it.
What could he have said that would have made me consider him, you may wonder? Plenty of things. He could have told me he speaks 10 languages, or he can play 5 musical instruments well, or he has spent 2 years travelling around 20 countries in Europe or Africa, or a lot of other things that most people cannot do or have not done. Learning one language takes discipline and dedication, let alone 10. The same goes for learning musical instruments.
The world of work is changing and you and I have to change along with it. It’s very competitive out there and it is only those of us who have something special or different to offer who will survive. How does an employer differentiate one BComm or MBA graduate from another? Unless you’ve got that something special, you’re leaving a lot to chance. And against 150 or so other applicants, I’d say those are pretty steep odds?
*(italics mine. The irony of what he was saying was completely lost to him.)
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