Are you really just your CV?

It’s that time of year again. ‘Careers’ has quickly become an overused buzz word to indicate such exciting topics as job fairs, your future, and something mysteriously known as ‘transferable skills’. Something that often gets overlooked, however, is the very simple fact that we are not all the same person. A group of Warwick students – the group that receives the inevitable ‘There’s a careers fair!’ email, the group that attend – are not a a bunch of standardised blank slates, able to write themselves into job application after job application until someone says yes.

That is, in a way, the very point this week ladies and gents: We are all individuals. Different things make us laugh, different things make us cry, and judging by Warwick’s hundreds of societies and sports clubs, we all like doing very different things with our spare time. Why is it then that the application forms for graduate jobs at a multitude of conglomerates, banks and law firms have remarkably similar application forms, into which it is remarkably difficult to infuse your personality.

This is a careers-based issue (of the paper), and that is why we have chosen to have a grumble about this now. We are hoping, perhaps in vain, that we are not the only ones who feel this way. We am hoping that we are not the only ones who wished that at some point in life, the professional world would care a little more about the things that matter, and a little less about the grades on a CV. Perhaps the application process for a job, in an ideal world, would be to sit down with a partner for a coffee, and to see if after one hour, he would consider hiring you. Perhaps it should involve ‘a day in the life’ scheme, whereby you are observed for a day in your normal environment.

This last option seems favourable in light of some of the wonderful people at Warwick. There are people who dedicate vast amounts of time to volunteering projects, working tirelessly to help those less fortunate than themselves. There are those who spend time organising, developing and managing projects such as One World Week, Warwick International Development Summit and various other events. These people work tirelessly to achieve something that they can be proud of. They work effectively, they are dedicated, and the end result is often something to be enormously proud of. I hope that you’ll join us in tipping our hats to the people that dedicate so much time to causes such as these.

Why is it then, that when these dedicated, amazingly well organised people, who have managed to develop themselves, their projects and continue a degree at a top University at the same time, come to filling in a graduate job application, they are met with a kind of professional hostility. The average application form, in our experience, has a way of taking an achievement to be proud of and reducing it to a small, almost insignificant sentence, which becomes lost in the aether as you struggle to demonstrate yourself as a person in ‘250 words or less’. This isn’t right, surely?

Obviously, there are practical considerations to take into account. We appreciate, of course, that if a partner from your employer of choice were to spend a day with every potential candidate the process would take years. We appreciate that there must be, for the graduate recruitment teams of the world, a practical way to reach a decision as to who should be hired; who will make the cut. It simply becomes hard not to wish that there wasn’t more to it…

We hope this editorial won’t be taken as the bitter rantings of a few grumpy, overworked editors. Our only meaning is that there are some truly fantastic people at Warwick, and we believe that every one of us has something unique and valuable to offer. It simply seems disappointing that all the wonderful people here may one day be forced to explain themselves; their achievements and their joie de vivre, in just a small text box, to be printed, filed and lost in an office somewhere.

No what mould you have to fit, and no matter how many times you need explain ‘a problem you have encountered and how you overcame it’, remember that you are unique. You are awesome.

Be proud of that.