Many jobs advertised in newspapers and other boards and platforms do not have valid email addresses. This is not the fault of the publishers, but those who commissioned the advertisements. The problem is pervasive which costs time and money for candidates who have to track down alternative emails to resend their CVs.

They may have to resort to applying by ordinary mail, if they can find a postal address, which is also absent in a lot of cases. It shows a distinct lack of professionalism and makes people wonder if such advertisements are even true.

Other IT job application problems exist also. Applying for jobs early in the week, especially after a long weekend, is particularly problematic for people trying to get work in this country. Emails bounce back due to full inboxes or ‘out of office’ replies, despite advertisements beckoning urgent applications. Both he private and public sectors seem to share these hard-to-fathom problems.

Email has been around for some time, and yet the application processes for jobs in this country appear to be unduly difficult, even sometimes impossible.

And that doesn’t even get to the silly business of ‘captcha’ codes on some company websites, which involve painstakingly deciphering words that can barely be made out, causing many failed attempts.

Once might think these advertisers do not want people to apply for such positions, and they are just covering themselves legally while they fill roles internally or through the grapevine? There is no need to fill out an entire CV onto a company website, requiring unnecessary time and trouble, when a valid email address can receive the same in seconds. 

The government’s own Jobs Ireland website, which posts jobs daily, refuses applications unless a very tedious résumé is filled out and published. I’ve experienced a litany of technical problems with this website; it is very difficult to complete a profile and requires form fields to be filled out within very strict criteria, such as numbers of characters. 

Many of the jobs advertised have no detailed job description, no company address, no phone numbers, no email addresses or redundant ones.

Elsewhere, advertisers can pay for a very impressive advert notifying of a job position, but in many cases they will be no contact name, no address, an email that doesn’t work or is questionable, a poor or nonexistent job description. In other cases, an advertisement maybe be repeatedly published though the position is already filled. The practice seems endemic, and perhaps it is time for strict rules to be brought in to govern job advertising that misleads or is wastes people’s time.

Applying for jobs in this country is a nightmare full of bureaucracy and obstruction. There is a sense of fiction about it all.

Maurice Fitzgerald
Shanbally, Co Cork