Mandatory documents of a basic job application

I’ve noticed that a lot of people are relying on their LinkedIn (or europass and so on) resume when they are applying. This might work in some situations. The only example that I could came up is the following scenario: Your skills are in great demand. But again, this might be accepted as a complete application.

From my point of view, a basic application consists of the following documents:

1. a personal resume having 2–3 pages, not more!
2. a concise cover letter

It depends on every country what would be the additional documents, like a copy of your diploma, references and so on.

Now you might say something like “A copy of my diploma? References? What the hell?!” This was my reaction, but after putting myself in the employers shoes I realized that he cannot hire someone without a diploma according to the local laws from that country.

And references from your previous employer will be demanded anyway for those who have more that two years of experience so you must provide them from the first place in some cases.

Back to the basic job application documents, let’s talk about them.

1) The personal resume

After doing your research, you can define your own template of creating your CV. This process should be done only once in your career — at the begging of it when you have plenty of time anyway. And this research takes up to 6 hours. After that, you can just complete your job history and your skills every time you want to change your job. And this takes up to 1 hour.

You can write anything you want, just make sure you follow some guidelines that you can find them easily on the internet. I am not going to provide them since this is not the scope of this article.

The main advantage of having a personal resume is that you can customize it anyway you’d like. Your resume should be a sketch/map of your profile. The interviewers will look at it and will know what to ask. So it’s in your own favor to send them a document that you wrote it from scratch in, let’s say using Microsoft Word. Then you can export it into PDF; it’s just common sense — your interviewer might not have Microsoft Word installed.

The more readable your resume is, the better for you, not for the interviewer. Trust me, the interviewer likes crappy resumes because if he has a good one, than the crappy ones will be deleted or taken into serious consideration of ignoring them.

And when it comes to interviews, do remember that you don’t need just to be good in order to get the job offer, you need to shine. A personalized resume will likely help you to get closer to the good enough.

Let’s see first why your LinkedIn resume is not good enough:

• it looks like crap. Try exporting it to PDF. It will not be well structured. The reviewer of your resume does not have time to spend more than 10 seconds on it. If you wrote there the story of your life, the reviewer will eventually move to the next job application.
• your skills and certifications are not be listed there — at least at this movement.
• you can’t customize it.

Your LinkedIn profile is good when the reviewer want to see extra details about you. So, to be clear, the reviewer analyzes your job application, and if he wants extra details that he can look up for you on LinkedIn.

2) Cover letter

I’ve noticed that a lot of people are saying that cover letters are obsolete. When I ask them if they send a blank email with their resume attached, they fail to provide a clear answer. The conclusion for me is that a cover letter is a must and I should ignore people who are saying that there are obsolete, because most likely they are lying. As I mentioned they are unable to say “yes” or “no” when I ask them “Does your job application consists just of a your resume — so a blank email?” It’s a straight and clear question with a binary answer, so I am ignoring those whoever fails to answer.

So, do write a small text when you send your resume!

There are loads of articles of how to write a cover letter. About myself I can tell that I write the reasons why I want to work there.

First and foremost it’s good for me. It reminds me why am I applying. Does it fit with the information that I have it on my research results that I’ve been doing it? Second, the potential employer is able to know my career objective and my expectations.

I used to think that people don’t read covers letters. Boy, I was wrong! Well, of course, this applies only if your cover letter is clear an concise.

A thought for the software developers job application

Of course every job application type has it’s particularities. As a software developer I can come up with a piece of advise for those who work in this branch. I hope I made it clear why do you need a personalized resume and a concise cover letter. But it weights a lot some personal work of yours — for example a pet project.

Conclusion

To wrap it up, a basic job application consists of the following two documents:

1. personalized resume — the sketch of your profile that was made by you, in your favor
2. cover letter — to let the interviewer your expectations so nobody will be wasting time on an interview that will definitely end up with no hiring whatsoever.