I am back from our short holiday and into reality with a bump, I’ve been applying for jobs today. It seems the days when a CV and an appropriate covering letter were the required form of application are long gone. How many businesses realise how difficult they have made life for applicants by complex application processes via websites? I’ve applied for six jobs today and one of them – a temporary job working on a supermarket checkout – took four hours to complete online because it was so badly designed and difficult to use. I was required to send my CV along with the application and most of the information required on the application was the same as the content of my CV. I also had to write 100 words on each of the following topics: why I wanted to work for the company, what experience I had of working with money, experience of working with a team, experience of managing a team, what the most difficult thing I’ve ever done was, how I manage my time effectively, how I manage under pressure and what experience I had of business admin. I can understand that businesses need to make sure they don’t waste time by interviewing unsuitable people but I struggle to see why they make application so complicated.

What’s most frustrating was that after spending all of this time completing the form and sending it in, I got an on-screen message saying if I’ve heard nothing in 28 days then I should assume that I’ve not got the job. 28 days? I need a job NOW, not in 28 days. I have bills to pay, food to buy and a home to try to run. Also, call me old-fashioned, but wouldn’t it be great if companies who make applicants jump through hoops to get considered for jobs extended those same applicants, who’d sweated over their applications, the professional courtesy of dropping a “thanks but no thanks” email to unsuccessful candidates. Let’s face it, it wouldn’t take a programmer more than a few minutes to set up something that sent an auto-response.

A remedy was in order to sooth my tattered self-esteem, which already stands at zero after a year of being systematically ground down by my course and now I feel even more like pond sludge after a day of writing miserable applications for jobs. My chosen home remedy? Painting my toenails with ten-year-old nail varnish that I found in the bottom of a cardboard box. At least this pond sludge now has a little colour.