(Do Not) Apply Here!!!

As a HR practitioner, I have noticed a very annoying trend amongst Nigerians. I find this trend so very annoying that I recently found myself tempted (almost to the point of yielding) to send a 'stinker' to an absolute stranger. All that held me back was the knowledge that my mail would have been unprofessional. So I've decided to blog about it. I don't have to be professional on my blog ‘cos here, I'm just a girl, saying it as she sees/thinks it. Hell, I can open my ¤@*#? and jiggle my  #@+* in your face if I please. Mind you, the missing words are mouth and tongue, respectively, so get your mind out of dark funky smelling corners!

But I'm not doing that now (jiggling my tongue in your face). Nope, I'm talking about/to those who send in their CVs for ALL and ANY job. Those who claiming to be literate, read a vacancy ad saying 'Engineer Needed' and send their CVs pronto, never mind that they are practicing accountants with degrees in Banking and Finance. What is it they hope for?! That the poor person sorting through the thousands of CVs would fall asleep while on-the-job and mistaken save his/her CV?! Or that the recruiter would be so besotted with the annoying passports they usually have on the top right-hand side, that qualifications and experience would become secondary, or even irrelevant?! Well, it doesn't usually happen that way! All they end up achieving is a very pissed off recruiter who thinks about them in words and terms that should never be documented and even mentally note and black-list them.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with aiming a little over the bar, with the hope that the prayers we prayed on Sunday would somehow vault us beyond where we naturally would have landed. No, I do that myself every now and then, but ‎​​ there's a ton of difference between that and been plain silly and annoying. An example of the former would be a situation where the ad states that Accountants with 10 years work experience are needed and ‎​you, having only 8 years of RELEVANT work experience, give it a shot. The latter however could be a situation where ‎​you are an integrated science teacher of 6 years, who studied Economics but somehow think ‎​you read your name in the fine print of the same ad.

I know I sound really pissed... I am!!! But that aside, my question is, why do so many of us do this? I say 'so many' becos the incidence of this is about 6 in every 10 job applications (never mind that I'm the one who has to repeatedly hiss then hit the 'delete' button). I understand we want jobs and we want them NOW, but wouldn't it really suck to get that job that ‎​​‎​​you're clueless about? I really doubt that the euphoria of landing such a job would last more than the first week by which time you'd realize the job is a ticking ‎​bomb that's gonna blow up in your face sooner than later. So the next time ‎​​you, an IT person, are tempted to send in your CV for a HR job, please don't! Take a few deep breaths and let the feeling pass.

Picture source here