Things that trigger me #1: ‘Upload a CV’

I never used to have triggers. None. I wasn’t even familiar with the term until recent years.

Things that troubled other people effortlessly failed to perturb me. Even those individuals who managed to make most folk turn purple in the face by their mere presence didn’t particularly wind me up. I could accept the arrogant, the garrulous and the self-centred with equanimity. And the ways of the world never struck me as particularly irksome.

Happy days, but sadly lost. One of the unfortunate by-products of getting older, and more to the point feeling your years slipping away, is that certain tiny facts of life reveal themselves as monumental wastes of your precious time. Or stupid. Or illogical. Or unnecessary. Or more convoluted than they were thirty years ago, despite the supposed time-saving glories of technology. The more of them you notice, the more you begin to wonder if they’re a deliberate plot to deepen the frown lines on your forehead.

I could, of course, let these things bubble under, eat away at my soul and cause me to spit passive-aggressive barbs at unwitting perpetrators. But I’ve decided it’s healthier to write them down in mini-series form. I’m trusting that this will be therapeutic for me and mildly entertaining for my readers.

Also, when people push my buttons, I’ll be able to send them links to these dispassionate, pre-written pieces. Then – goes the theory – it won’t get personal.

How well that’s going to work out in practice, I’m not sure. But I’m going for it anyway. So let’s kick off with the first thing that gets old blood pulsing in my ears: being ‘required’ to upload a CV for a job or assignment application.

More specifically, being required to upload a CV when I have poured days of work into 21st-century alternatives.

A curriculum vitae (or resume, if you’re American or Aussie) has its place, of course. If I didn’t have a personal portfolio website (you're on it) and didn’t have a professionally filmed CV video and didn’t have a LinkedIn profile that’s been filled to the brim with recommendations and updated to within an inch of its life, then I would appreciate the opportunity to send or upload a CV. And I’m all for letting people who haven’t built such a showcase do exactly that.

But why make it a ‘required field’? Is it just to annoy me?

Because what you’re asking me to do is undo all the initiative I’ve shown and the work I’ve done, and instead create convenient, regimented data sets that match some arbitrary standard. You’re asking me to spend further time copying and pasting bits of that work into a template that hails from a time before the internet, when there really was no other way. You’re asking me to do all that when I could spend the same time exercising my human creativity or enhancing the skills you’re making me laboriously copy and paste from one document to another.

To meet an objection I know will come at me here: it’s never just a case of keeping a stock CV on file. If you’re going to do a CV, you have to do it properly and tailor it to the job in question. Especially if, like me, you’ve been everything from a truck driver to a pharmaceutical proofreader to a cricket journalist in your time. This is most decidedly not the work of a moment.

All of which means that unless your job is spectacularly interesting and well-paid, I’m probably not going to apply for it. I know this may sound stubborn, arrogant and pig-headed…but did I mention how much time I have put into honing my three ‘digital CVs’? That I spent several hundred pounds on the production of a video that’s a thousand times more revealing and personal than yet another standard-format Word document or, worse yet, cookie-cutter form? It has become a matter of principle.

Honestly, putting a red star next to ‘Upload CV’ makes you as an employer seem a little regressive. Stuck in your ways. Unable to embrace technological trends. Unwilling to process information that may come at you in different ways. Happy to let others jump through unnecessary hoops just to fit your cookie-cutter. All of which may ring alarm bells in the minds of some applicants.

If you’re recruiting via a job application platform, or LinkedIn’s (sometimes) Easy Apply, you may not have actively opted for that red star. Maybe it’s a default you never thought to change.

To be clear, I don’t mind putting time into a cover letter. That, to my mind, is the correct place to draw attention to a few matters that may be specific and relevant to the job in question.

I’m also aware that some professions are more conducive to traditional CV formats than others. And I’ve nothing against these, nor the people in them who choose to go the resume route.

But as a content producer and a creative, should it not be considered a good thing that I’ve gone above and beyond Word documents? That anything you need to know about my professional skills, record, experience and references is already on the internet?

So please, please consider removing that red star. It’s really not good for my blood pressure.

For the second Trigger in this series, entitled 'Sorry I missed your call', head here.

Would you like to read an entire book of me complaining? Then give Never Drive a Hatchback to Austria a try here.

*A sensible living wage to write articles like this one, or the kind of sports pieces I occasionally put out on my Substack, or the kind of travel pieces you'll find in my portfolio, or a combination thereof, would qualify.