Especially these days. The mortgage, after all, needs to be paid and the kids fed.
But applying for a job can be frustrating, unnerving, even demoralising.
What follows is addressed to employers, management consultants and personnel managers:
I am writing this in response to your ad in the newspapers.
You mask your identity, saying all replies should be addressed to The Advertiser at a box number.
Whatever your reasons, you leave the applicant in a quandary. How is he to know he is not applying for a job with the company he's now with? If that turns out to be the case, would you congratulate him on seeking to better himself or chastise him for wanting a change?
Then there are those among you who insist on a photograph.
Can I help it if I have a face only a mother can love? Why should one look like a Brad Pitt or a Zhang Ziyi before one is considered for an accountant's post?
A friend in personnel was once instructed not to entertain any candidate with a moustache.
And what of women applicants and the prejudices they face?
A friend told me that a prospective employer, unable to tell her sex from her Chinese name, called her for an interview, only to dismiss her application when he found out she was a woman.
Some announce that those 'earning less than $2,500 need not apply'.
Has it ever occurred to them that I could be grossly underpaid in my present job, and it is for the money and other benefits the ad has promised that I feel I am going to be the best sales executive the company has ever employed?
Recruitment ads can also include bad grammar and spelling and, worst of all, a lack of clarity.
I myself have been to a job interview, only to realise that what the employer wanted and what the advertisement said were not quite the same.
Employers, in an effort to cut costs and save time, usually announce that only short-listed applicants will be notified.
How much would it cost them to add that the short-listed applicants would be told by a fixed date, to relieve those unsuccessful of their suspense?
It won't harm some of you employers to think of what it is like to be an applicant.
Who knows, in these uncertain times, you might just find out the hard way.
The writer is a former Singaporean marketing professional.
This story was first published in The New Paper on 31 October 2008.
