Three down

I know you know this already, but I'm going to say it anyway.

Applying for jobs is a real pain in the arse. Seriously. I think I've spent easily 15 hours in the last 2 days looking for openings and applying to three of them. Fully 8 hours today (called in sick, oops), and I still have to go find somewhere to fax my damn educational evidence.

I'm exhausted to the point that by the time I got to the fourth application (today is the last day to apply to it), I actually looked for reasons I probably wouldn't get the job so I could have a good reason to not apply. I rationalized that this particular industry is one where they're all like, "Oh, 1 day short of the 1 year experience requirement? Out!"

So yeah. Perhaps I will get a few calls out of this. One is in current city, and two are in dream city.

Current city job would be AMAZING. At least on paper it looks like it.

Course, current job looks like an amazing job on paper too. But, I digress.

One of the dream city jobs took the longest to apply - 5 pages of a word document worth of online responses to their first batch of questions.  By the time I got to the end of the questions, I couldn't remember what the job was for, but I think I answered the questions so well that they'd HAVE to call me. At least I convinced me I was amazing.

I looked back at the job ad, and while I think I sort of know what they'd want me to do, I pretty much am relying on the fact they mentioned my particular field (which isn't mentioned or understood well in this industry) several times.

And last job - well, I think it would be fun and it is in my dream city, but I think the application process was so easy relative to the other two - that I feel a little less excited about it. Don't get me wrong - this is not an urge to get application process designers to increase level of difficulty. In fact quite the opposite.

I wonder if the application process is out of laziness of the reviewers so fewer people actually apply (instead of the research that suggests that applicants the persevere through multiple job hurdles may be more persistent and have higher performance.