Just over a year ago I posted about a tale of two recruitment streams, the focus primarily being on the job market via CV and the job market via direct application and how they differed. At the time, experience was telling me I did much better via direct application, the primary reason being direct applications invariably provided the tools to target one's skills and experiences effectively. Once you get to a certain point in your career, especially if that career could be interpreted as wide rather than focused, it's all about the context in order to market yourself effectively so the potential employer can see how your skills, brand and experience works for them.

This continues to be true, the dysfunctional nature of the private sector job market at the moment aside, the usual strategy of (1) a quick summary of the job, (2) not being told the company at CV stage and (3) submitting a CV in the hope the employer will catch something he likes is positively ludicrous. You are simply not given enough information to target the CV or, more often than not, the information to actually target it via research. I no longer believe my CV writing skills aren't up to scratch, after significant improvement in early 2008. I continually test the CV against practice and I can usually tick most of the boxes and refine as appropriate, it is a lack of information to adequately target. After all, I'm nailing the skills testaments on application forms, a targeted CV is just a bullet point, highly focused version of that.

On the other hand, consider the rich nature of the direct application form with the role specification and person specification documents. You have all the information you need to target and research your testament of skills on the application form. Not only that, it works as a tool through the whole process as the person specification is often tagged with where the skills will be assessed. As an example, I'm researching and preparing a presentation at the moment, but I can see the six areas that are assessed by the presentation on the person specification, 3 are general presentation, research and communication skills and 3 are specific strategic skills for the role. That can act as my guiding light for presentation content and delivery. The same is true of the interview, I can prepare and mine my rich experience for achievements that match the person specification items that will be assessed in the interview. It allows for a targeted, multi-layered approach which can only provide benefits to both candidate and potential employer.

No one can lose by doing this. There is nothing really to be gained from obscuring these 'employer' desires from the CV submission process or the interview process. How weird is it that most private sector processes I've experienced leave it up to almost complete chance a CV will be targeted correctly or that the candidate will pull the right experiences out of his ass when hit with the questions he can only use 'vague interview experience' to establish a framework of likely expectations? The chances that the private sector, sans visible person specification process, could result in the strongest candidate losing out in the CV submission stage seems obscenely high? What I suspect they get is individuals who happen to have a targeted CV purely by virtue they are within a similar role domain already, if I was employing I'd not be satisfied with that implicit filter due to the process.

Having both private and public sector experience on both the supply and demand side, I'm in a position to make observations on how both work. One observation I will make is, there may be plenty of things the public sector can be criticised for, but I'm not sure their recruitment processes are one of them (since they invariably go for person specification focused, direct recruitment). I believe the risk of finding the wrong candidate, or unknowingly losing the right candidate, is mitigated via their process.

The fact their list of candidates, historically, may have been found wanting is another issue. As is the fact they can have a bias towards internal candidates even when they are sometimes not the best candidate.