JUST APPLY YOURSELF

I'm very uncomfortable with the online application process. Those boxes always seem very rigid to me. There's no room to go over the edges, to add any personality to your application.

The worst online forms are for applying for a new job. They clearly weren't designed by someone who has ever had to fill in a form. Why do they make all the boxes so small? They know you have to type your answers in, it's not like some people are writing bigger than others. And then the boxes start to expand as you add to them, and you're all "Whoa, back up... Too much, come back here". It's the application form equivalent of sliding on the ice - you can try to compensate all you want now, you're never getting back to the point you started at.

It's with a sense of dread that you turn up at the job interview from the online application form. The interviewer's there, sitting across the table from you, and they're trying to work out how the form all fits together now. The first page is fine, name, date of birth, address. But the education section has split funny, and the pagination's out on the "previous experience" pages, and they have that random blank page in the middle where the tail end of a sentence got lost. They started the interview listening to you as they read your details, now they're trying to sort out this Sunday newspaper-style mess of paperwork with all those sections and weird numbering on the pages. When you reach that point, they're really not paying attention to you.

"Yes, and then I spent three months on attachment to another department. That's on pages three and page four, with a single line on page five and just the word 'Summer' on page six... here. I don't really know what happened there - it looked okay on the screen, I swear."

Unfortunately, if your potential employer thinks that you can't fill in the application form they tend to think you're not going to apply yourself to the job at hand.