Job application

As some of you know, I like to give out free career advice from time to time. (Often unsolicited; I hope not too often unwelcome.) I’m also in the position where I get a fair few people just emailing me their CV’s and asking if I had a suitable opening; to which the answer is usually no (literally once, in my almost four years here, has the right CV hit my desk just at the moment when I really needed to hire someone with those qualifications).

Got one this week which struck me as peculiar even by the variable standards of such things; a Scandinavian woman of about my age who said she wanted to move to Brussels, whose CV was full of decent enough academic credentials but not in any relevant field. I sent her a pretty brusque reply,

You don’t appear to have any expertise (or indeed interest) in international politics in the area where we work, so I think I must recommend that you try elsewhere.

She has now sent me a reply saying,

Indeed it has been very difficult to find an entrance/platform into the field of international relations/politics/diplomacy, but it is my main interest and subject. Often they require several years of work experience etc. and therefore it seems to be impossible to start somewhere, and often it is about unpaid traineeships.

Well, if that’s true, it would have helped if she had said so in her original covering letter, which instead looked as if she perhaps wanted to move to Brussels to be with her partner and was just randomly firing out CV’s and found my contact details somewhere (they are not difficult to find). I will send another more detailed reply now, giving my usual tips about how to get started in international relations (election observation being the easiest first step to take) and recommending that she be a bit clearer in future applications about what exactly she wants and why she is bothering to apply.

Edited to add: Exchanged a couple more emails with her during the course of the day, and it rapidly became apparent that she was simply not interested in my advice. If that’s her attitude to getting free tips from a moderately senior professional in the field, I’m not surprised that nobody will hire her.

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