Hopefully some helpful advice to those writing their job applications

A few weeks ago I was shortlisting for one of the roles I manage and noticed a lot of the repeated errors that people seem to make over and over, even with the inclusion of AI. For example, there’s obviously a lot of people having ChatGPT or Claude write their personal statements and yet it’s incredibly obvious because it’s perfectly structured, with almost perfect grammar and yet their previous roles write ups are full of grammatical errors and the structure is all over the place.

I’m in a Senior Management role in Healthcare but I believe the principles relay across sectors.

Use the Job Spec as your guide to structure the content of your Person Spec So this is an important one, the majority of shortlisting operations I’ve seen has your application scored against the criteria. That criteria is very commonly what is in the person specification. You want to make it as obvious and easy as possible to find that criteria. Managers are shortlisting 50+ applications in a day in some roles, don’t hide your related experience and use the same terminology as much as possible. This worked a treat when helping a friend get an interview at a Simulation management role he didn’t think he had the experience for.

If you use a writing structure across your tasks in one previous role, keep that across all your roles

I’m talking bullet points, or a small intro sentence leading into bullet points or a full paragraph. If you do it for one, do it for all. It will look a lot cleaner to the person reading it.

If you use AI for your application then use it to clean your application, not write it entirely You need to tailor your application to your experience and you risk either something random appearing in your application or the terminology not relating to the job specification as much. Some of the common mistakes I see are people using AI for the person specification but not for the rest of the document and the grammar being far from consistent. If you’re being sloppy in your details section not using capitals to start your name or previous employer information and then suddenly you become Shakespeare for your supporting information, it may set off some concerns.

If you’re struggling, I’m genuinely happy to have a read through any applications you’ve put together.

I’ve got a couple more points listed here if these have actually been helpful and you’ve got to this part of the text.