Senior public service recruiters can tell by experience and by using AI-driven scanning programs, whether an applicant has written their selection criteria or whether they have hired someone to write it.
If you use someone else to write the selection criteria in totality, you won’t be short-listed for the job.
We had a client seek our help to apply for a fairly senior management job with a major airline. It carried a salary of around $120,000 and up.
When he found out we didn’t write them from start to finish, he ‘went shopping’ for other writers.
On his tour of Google, he will have met a sea of backyard shonks and text ‘cut and pasters’. He will spend about $400.00 to get the selection criteria written.
The shonks don’t actually write the criteria. How can they? They don’t work in the Australian airline industry.
They don’t have the context and they can barely write resumes.
They’ll copy and paste text from a style sheet used thousands of times before.
The recruitment assessment team really wants the applicant to answer the selection criteria from their own experience.
They’re trying to gauge what sort of applicant they are.
We give advice and help with writing and editing. This includes using the CAR method (Context, Action and Result) and then editing the selection criteria so the document is sharp and compelling.