> Not sure if I really should be publicising this yet, but part of my job is to write a program to screen applicants. Here in Australia it's more like 80 applicants for a position, but the purpose of this questionnaire is to reduce it to, say, 8-10. Potential employees such as you could take the test, then tell your potential employer(s) that you have done so, and they would be able to run through the applicants much more quickly.

Oh no. No no no no. There is nothing I hate worse than such questionaires. Several of the sites I have used for job searching use them, and all they seem to do is make it difficult or impossible to set out my qualifications and skills accurately.

My biggest gripe about these things is that they usually restrict you to picking one answer per question -- answers which, in the worst cases, are ready-made for you in a dropdown menu so you are often restricted to trying to choose the least inappropriate response. I'm not saying any or all of this is the case with your questionaire, but in general there is nothing I hate more, as a jobseeker, than knowing my application might be weeded out by a computer program or a third-party staffing consultant before it is even seen by the person who knows exactly what the job will require.

On one particularly bad job site, which I have now stopped bothering to check, you are required to register by filling out a vast questionaire in which you check a set number of skills from their list -- a list which is based on the SINGLE job title you are permitted to choose for your search -- with the result that day after day they tell you "No new jobs available which match your skills." You can't tell me there are no jobs available for somebody who has ten years of experience and has been in management, graphic design, writing, data entry, secretarial, web editing and office management work. No, Mr Form Email Writer, the problem is that your site only lets me pick one job title, three software packages and three job skills. My sole qualifications (according to what employers are allowed to see on this website) are that I can use Word, Excel and Outlook, and can type letters, work to deadlines and communicate well. Well, gosh, THAT sure grabs the attention and makes my application stand out from the approximately two billion other people on earth who can say the same thing.

Having been at the other end of the stick at various times, and remembering what it's like to wade through fifty applications which were metaphorically written in crayon by baboons, I can say that it really isn't all that hard to do the preliminary weeding-out. I can accept that if you have two thousand applicants, having a computer to do the weeding might be a good plan. But even then, I'd be concerned that one or more ideal candidates would get missed out just because their skills didn't fit into a narrow enough profile. There is a lot more to picking the right person for a job than just checking off a list of facts.