Shit like this just screams “bad company” to an applicant. Especially since some companies are always hiring because of tax breaks and other shady benefits, not because of actual openings. Such a waste.
Fun fact: this is for a UK civil service position.
Doesn’t surprise me. The US Federal government used to have a similar application process where you had to write what amounted to a small essay explaining your knowledge, skills, and abilities.
us gov is very similar. I to keep on thinking it feels like some sort of high school thing.
I thought the web page layout looked familiar.
Move along, move along. Nothing to see here, guvnah.
What they expect from this question? Some human is supposed to read this? Filling useless forms like those is the perfect job for a LLM
This is 100% what I went through for my gov job, way back. It was dumb then, and it’s dumb now.
And they still do that. One of my contract peers got a gov spot a few years ago, and I guess making everyone do that rinkydink shit is how they kept it ‘fair’.
I seem to hear of this ‘behavioural’ style a lot at unionized shops, and I really think it’s to avoid challenges and backlash.
I took a class on behavioral interviewing back when I was a food service general manager. It was very different from the question on the form above. I had to interview a lot of people. Hundreds over the years.
The essence of behavioral interviewing is actually very simple.
Rather than ask “Can you tell me about your leadership abilities?”
You ask “Can you tell me about a time when you used your leadership abilities to overcome a problem?”
Most of the time they will answer as if you asked the first question. Let them finish or wait for a pause, then say “What I’d really like to know is if you can tell me about one specific example of when you used your leadership abilities.”
You can encourage them to provide an answer by saying “This doesn’t have to be about work, it could be from a family situation, something from your community life, or something from school.”
I think it is very effective.
Maybe it’s so they know that they applicant can deal with tedious, unnecessary processes.
This type of question is common during the interview phase. It’s usually used (by the applicant) to show leadership and accountability.
It’s weird to see it as part of the application phase. I guess it’s just front-loading the questions, but it does feel like “jump through our hoops”
Agreed. This during the initial phase seems like they’re trying to avoid having a human listen to it.
