Online applications: Lots of mass, little class

Half a year ago, Peter Keil placed a job ad in the weekend edition of the local daily newspaper, in which he also gave his e-mail address - "unfortunately". Because when the owner of an engineering firm came into his office at 10 o'clock on a Saturday morning, there were already a dozen applications in his mail account - even though the weekend edition of the newspaper had been distributed to households just three or four hours earlier.

A lot of junk in online applications

The quality of the applications was correspondingly high. "All junk," Keil sums it up. "You could see it in the applications right away: They just quickly changed the address in the standard cover letter and then sent the application just before the weekend shopping."

It was a similar story with most of the applications that landed "en masse" in Keil's mail account over the next few days. Not only that almost all occupational groups - from pedicurists to warehouse workers - applied for the advertised position of "office specialist (m/f)". Keil also clearly registered a lower quality in the online applications than in the written applications that arrived a few days later.

"Maybe I'm lucky"

Keil's impression: "With written applications, people think twice before applying." After all, printing out application documents and sending them costs time - and money. It's different with online applications. Many job seekers quickly sit down at their PC and change the address data in their standard application. Then they press the "send" button on their e-mail program and the application is gone. True to the maxim: Maybe I'll get lucky.

Many company representatives confirm this impression. Time and again, they discover "real stylistic blossoms" in online applications. Keil was amused, for example, by the following sentence in the cover letter of a hotel manageress: "I look forward to lively contact with your guests. With this, the applicant immediately catapulted herself out of the running. Because according to Keil: "We have a customer drop by every two weeks. And with him I immediately disappear into the meeting room." After reading the aforementioned sentence, it was clear to Keil that the woman had only added a new form of address to an application she had written for a hotel.

When he included his e-mail address in the ad, Keil also underestimated the extra work he was saddling himself with. In the days following the publication of the ad, he repeatedly received e-mails with the following tenor: "Before I apply, can you give me more information about the position?" With the first two or three e-mails, Keil thought: Great, someone is seriously interested in the job. So he took a lot of time answering them. But at some point he got fed up - because he had other things to do.

File salad produces extra work

In other respects, too, the online applications made Keil more work than the written ones. Printing out the applications that did not immediately fall through the cracks proved to be time-consuming. This was because most of the applications had the cover letter, resume and (work) references attached as individual documents - often in different file formats. Only two or three applicants had packed the documents into a pdf file, so Keil only had to open one file and had a sorted application folder in front of him. At some point, Keil decided, "I'm not going to look at the applications with "exotic file attachments. "Because it's not my job to first convert the stuff and then sort through the printed pages."

Personnel consultant Alexander Walz, Stuttgart, confirms that applicants often put little effort into creating online applications. "Many send their applications in 'scatter mail' without asking themselves in advance: do I have a realistic chance at the job?" Many applicants also don't ask themselves enough: What effect does it have on the recipient if the attached data has any cryptic names, so that you can't see what's hidden inside until you open it?

08/15 applications provoke standard rejections

That's why Walz understands that some companies only respond to 08/15 online applications with standard rejections, if at all. "If you don't put much effort into your application, you shouldn't complain if the recipient behaves the same way." Because small and medium-sized companies in particular would otherwise no longer be able to cope with the flood of applications that pours in after some job ads.

What experiences have you had with online applications? Write it to us in the comment field!

To the author: Bernhard Kuntz is a business and PR editor and owner of the agency Die PRofilBerater GmbH in Darmstadt.