Top Mistakes Applying For Rope Access Jobs and 5 Tips To Correct Them

A while ago we had a job application from a very well qualified technician, he lived in a large European city and was interested in traveling for work. On first sight, he looked an ideal candidate for this type of work - His location was central for international travel; his qualifications were great along with a decent amount of background experience in a related industry and his written communication was good.

We replied to his enquiry and suggested a few employers he could try in the locations he was interested in working in (we have a great company map on our website that lists them all). We then gave him a link to the latest jobs that we had running for his skill-set. Good deed done for the day, we sent him on his way, confident we’d see a success story appear in the Rope Access forum sometime in the near future.

A couple of weeks later we had the same person enquiring again, he said he’d tried and tried many times to apply for jobs with no success. He had made numerous speculative enquiries via email and also via telephone with no success, not even a reply once the initial contact had been made. He talked of getting initial contact, then once his details were in the company’s possession all would go quiet. We took a look in a bit more detail about his activities, what we found will shock you.

Firstly, he was looking for jobs in our social media feeds (great right?) BUT instead of applying for the position online (as suggested in each job ad) he would simply write ‘interested’ in each post.

This is a big mistake.

Companies who post job ads expect candidates to apply to them; they do not want to spend time employing people to trawl through social media and get back to you with further details on the job, qualification / CV requests etc. Competition for jobs in our industry is fierce right now so getting the best jobs means a little effort on your part. For every person writing ‘interested’ in a media feed below a job ad, there are a dozen more actually following the instructions and applying for it in the correct manner – which ones get the jobs?

We dug a little deeper.

As mentioned earlier his credentials were great, CV up to date, skill-set great and all the rest seemed fine. Then we got to his social media profile. It was clear then that we had found a problem. His profile image contained a huge image of a marijuana plant, with him standing in front of it (grinning), with his thumbs up toward the camera.

Now we know that no one is perfect, employers think this way too however having a bad media profile that is viewable by anyone is career suicide. We passed this on to him, he made corrections to his online profile then carried on. Shortly after we heard from him again, he wanted to thank us for the input and also to let us know he had secured a job.

We decided to conduct an informal poll of companies that advertise with us, the findings give a good insight on how important your online behaviour is.
Here is what we learned:
• Almost all companies say they review a candidate’s online footprint prior to offering a job. Things they don’t like to see are:
    - promotion of drugs / drinking
    - negative comments about past jobs / employers / colleagues
    - aggressive or threatening posts against anyone
• They never reply to ‘interested’ or posts similar underneath their job ads
• Attaching a CV to your application makes a difference to whether or not they view your application

This is not rocket science, but the power of the digital world means it’s much easier to post online, reply to jobs and interact with others, so you have to present yourself well. When it comes to your career, you need to spend just a little more time on your presentation so here’s a few tips to keep you pointing upwards:

1. Read each job ad carefully and only apply if you are suitable, reply using the instructions given in the job ad. NEVER just write ‘interested’ or such like under the job ad
2. Review your online footprint, remove any content that is sensitive, especially any drug related posts, abusive posts or posts that show you in a negative light. If you can’t / don’t want to remove them, make them private and not publicly viewable
3. Don’t apply for jobs in countries you are not able to work in
4. Don’t lie about your qualifications
5. Make sure you send in your most recent CV

Hopefully the above tips, if adhered to will give any new candidate a better fighting chance to land that perfect job.

####
Rigg Access Ltd
W: www.rigg-access.com
Details: Rigg Access Ltd Info