23 July 2010
By Hannah Dee
I seem to be spending a lot of my time right now filling in forms. I've done a bit of web work and I've also done questionnaire studies as part of my research, so I know a little bit about form design and usability. So it's understandable that one of my current bugbears is form design.
There seems to be three application procedures for academic jobs:
- CV and covering letter (in which you tell the employer what you think they want to know.)
- Application form with CV and covering letter (in which you copy bits of your CV across to Word or the uni website, re-work and reformat, and then try to get it all to fit in the little boxes, all the time hoping that they'll read the CV anyway because the boxes are too small.)
- Application form only (in which you copy bits of your CV over, reformat, rework, try to get it all to line up nicely, wonder if you are expected to fit all the details of the PhD into an inch-wide box on the form, wonder where you should put your publication list, wonder if "You may continue this section on an extra sheet" means you could add 3 pages, not just one, and generally swear at the computer.)
There's a particular piece of form design that is often hard to interpret on the web (but that is usually done OK in forms designed for print, i.e., in Word or similar). If people are given a form with a box that is tiny, they will usually write one or two words. If people are given a form with a box that takes a quarter of a page, they'll write more. If you give them a whole page, they might not write as much as the size of the blank space can be daunting. So if the web form asks you about your previous employment and says "Brief description of duties" next to an input box of about 1x3cm, how brief are they expecting you to be? Is it a clue that you're supposed to be very brief, or is it poor web-design?
So I would say that some indication of the expected field length is a good thing to include - the point of a form is (I think) to provide an easy way to compare people, but if those of us who interpret "brief" as "3 or 4 sentences" end up competing with those who interpret "brief" as "1,000 words", that's not a particularly level playing field. Although you can take this too far - one application form I completed recently asked me to describe my previous jobs in 250 characters each.
Sarah Davies23 July 2010 at 01:39 PM
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This is definitely one of my bugbears too - not only are application forms often incredibly badly designed (I HATE having to mess around in Word or, even worse, print a form and fill it in by hand) but I think that it's a complete waste of time. For these kinds of jobs - ie research posts or lectureships - all the information required should be in your CV and covering letter. Getting people with PhDs to fiddle around inputting all your GCSE grades and exactly where you went to school is just a bit silly, and frankly I have better things to do. I also think it's a bit embarrassing that so many university recruitment procedures are so technologically backward. I'm amazed that I'm still asked, at times, to send off multiple hard copies of an application to an HR department. Do these people not have printers? Or pdf viewers?
Elizabeth Dodson27 July 2010 at 02:12 PM
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Having sat on the other side of recruitment, I can understand why so much value is placed on a generic application form rather than simply asking for CVs and covering letters. CVs vary enormously and everyone seems to have a different interpretation of what makes a good one. For some it is all important that it fits on a single page - sacrificing much detail, for others it could be akin to a thesis in length as it documents every experience they had since the age of five. Some people will tailor every CV to the job for which they are applying, some will send the same generic CV in response to every single job advert that vaguely catches their interest. When you're making the initial sift through applicants, you need to identify who meets the essential criteria - and this is far easier to do from a well designed application form. I agree that many generic application forms are not ideally suited to this task, but in my experience, people are not penalised for their individual interpretation of what constitutes a 'brief' description as long as they answer the question. You'd perhaps be surprised how many people leave some of the boxes on application forms entirely blank or fail to write anything of relevance to the job for which they are applying.
Elizabeth Dodson27 July 2010 at 02:13 PM
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Should also add, if the recruitment panel is hoping that the person they appoint will be able to write grant proposals, then the ability to fill in badly designed forms is an important practical test!