Job Applications Editing and Proofreading Services

The form has a box: "Why do you want to work for us? (200 words)". Underneath it, the applicant has pasted the second paragraph of their cover letter, which is about their own career progression. The box was not asking about them. Every form has three or four of these boxes, they are the only part a human reads before the shortlist, and almost everybody fills them with material written for something else.

We edit applications made through forms and portals — free-text answers to application questions, supporting statements pasted into fixed fields, screening and knock-out question responses, equal opportunity and adjustment declarations, internal application forms, and the covering notes systems allow. Our editors work inside boxes with character limits.

The free-text answer is the part of an online application that actually differentiates candidates, and its failure is prose written for a letter dropped into a box asking a different question. A box is a question, and most answers do not contain one. We work through these so the first sentence answers the question asked rather than approaching it, since a 200-word box spent arriving at the point has about eighty words of content; so material written for the CV or the letter is not reused, because a recruiter reading the same paragraph twice learns that the applicant has one thing to say; so each box is answered with a different example, given that four boxes drawing on one project is the commonest weakness in an otherwise strong application; so the character limit is treated as the design constraint it is — checked including spaces, and written to about ninety per cent of it, as a two-line answer in a 200-word box reads as indifference and an over-length one is truncated mid-sentence by the system; so anything the form asks that seems trivial is answered properly, since screening questions are often scored automatically before anybody reads a word; so a knock-out question is answered accurately even where the honest answer is unhelpful, because a false answer discovered later ends an appointment; so the formatting survives a plain-text field, with no bullets, symbols or curly quotation marks that will arrive as question marks; and so every box is read once more inside the form rather than in a document. Answers written this way get past the screen.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including applications, employment history and material about current employers. We are editors rather than recruiters or careers advisers, and we offer no view on your prospects, any employer or any decision. What we can do is answer the question the box is asking.