Show Notes for The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast Episode 151: Top Application Form Mistakes (And How to Fix Them)

In this episode of the Aspiring Psychologist Podcast, Dr. Marianne Trent is joined by Dr. Claire Pitt to explore common mistakes found in assistant psychologist application forms and how to fix them. Together, they dive deep into what makes a standout application, from highlighting your clinical and research experience to ensuring your application aligns with the job specification. They also discuss the importance of supervision, reflection, and avoiding pitfalls like copy-paste applications.

Whether you're applying for your first assistant psychologist role or looking to refine your application, this episode offers invaluable guidance to help you secure those all-important interviews.

Key Takeaways:

1. Avoiding common mistakes when applying for assistant psychologist roles.
2. The importance of tailoring your application to the specific service.
3. How to effectively reflect on clinical and research experience in applications.
4. How to address gaps and use supervision to support your growth.

Highlights:

• 00:00 - Introduction and Overview of the Episode
• 01:24 - Guest Introduction: Dr. Claire Pitt
• 02:12 - Common Mistakes in Assistant Psychologist Applications
• 04:50 - The Importance of Tailoring Applications to the Role
• 07:08 - Placement Years and Their Limitations
• 08:56 - Copy-Paste Applications and Why They Don’t Work
• 10:07 - The Role of Supervision and Reflection in Applications
• 12:25 - Tailoring Applications for Specific Services
• 14:10 - Addressing the Ethical Concerns in Exaggerated Experience
• 16:20 - Clinical Experience Reflection and Learning Gaps
• 18:35 - Research Experience and Its Application to the Role
• 21:00 - The Use of Subheadings in Applications for Clarity
• 24:31 - Common Errors in Job History and Gaps
• 28:03 - Ensuring Competence and Safety in Your Claims
• 31:19 - Proper Use of Language in Describing Clients and Disorders
• 36:12 - The Time and Effort Behind the Shortlisting Process
• 39:21 - Final Thoughts: Resilience and Ethical Application Writing

Links:

📱 Connect with Dr Claire Pitt here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dr-claire-pitt-bb920354/

🖥️ Check out my brand new short courses for aspiring psychologists and mental health professionals here: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/short-courses

🫶 To support me by donating to help cover my costs for the free resources I provide click here: https://the-aspiring-psychologist.captivate.fm/support

📚 To check out The Clinical Psychologist Collective Book: https://amzn.to/3jOplx0

📖 To check out The Aspiring Psychologist Collective Book: https://amzn.to/3CP2N97

💡 To check out or join the aspiring psychologist membership for just £30 per month head to: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/membership-interested

✍️ Get your Supervision Shaping Tool now: https://www.goodthinkingpsychology.co.uk/supervision

📱Connect socially with Marianne and check out ways to work with her, including the Aspiring Psychologist Book, Clinical Psychologist book and The Aspiring Psychologist Membership on her Link tree: https://linktr.ee/drmariannetrent

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What if you could learn how to supercharge your application to become an assistant psychologist, what if you could make every word can and every buzz phrase sing out and earn you shortlisting points? What can we learn from applications which have not been shortlisted to help optimise your application, to get you through the door and being offered an interview? My guest for this episode is Dr. Claire Pitt and we are covering all of this and more hope you find it so useful. Hi, welcome along to the Aspiring Psychologist podcast. I am Dr. Marianne Trent and I'm a qualified clinical psychologist. Now I get asked so many times, why aren't I getting assistant psychologist interviews? So I thought as part of our special season on assistant psychologist, it would be a great chance to have a deep dive onto this exact issue. Now, my guest for today had a cat in the room who was vocal at times, so you may occasionally hear little meows and that's what that is. If you do find this episode helpful, please do like, subscribe, share with your friends. I will look forward to catching up with you on the other side of this. Hi, just want to welcome along doc at Claire Pitt to the podcast. Hi Claire. Hi Marianne.

Thank you so much for being here. We had got chatting on LinkedIn because your brilliant post had caught my eye. You had been shortlisting for assistant psychologist roles and you were kind of surprised really by some of the quality control aspects of what you were seeing and kind of thought it would be a really useful learning point for people to maybe think about why they're not getting shortlisted for interviews for assistant psychologist roles, roles.

So I remember what it's like to apply for these roles. I was in a similar position probably about 10 plus years ago now, and I remember how hard it is when you are putting in all of these different applications and you're never getting any feedback and you kind of don't know why it is that you are not getting shortlisted. And obviously once you reach an interview stage you'll get feedback, but the application you don't. So that's why I wanted to do a post. I remember how hard it can be. I thought do a post around the general themes why people aren't getting selected and then hopefully that would help people with their future applications in terms of thinking about things they might need to change or edit.

Yeah, absolutely. And it made me think about just my own beliefs about myself and maybe a sense of entitlement. Actually when I first graduated, which was a long time ago, it's 2002, but I immediately sort of thought, well, I'm qualified to get assistant psychologist jobs, but I wasn't being shortlisted. And it's only really with hindsight that I see I needed to be able to think about psychological concepts, which would only really come to me when I'd started to work in clinical populations and when I'd started to rub shoulders with professional psychologists. So for me, it was only once I'd worked as a support worker rehab work actually in local government for about two and a half years really, that I was then able to really bring a game to the application form, which ultimately got me an assistant psychologist job

And I had a bit of a similar background to you did support work for I think it was around two years, and then was able to progress into an assistant psychologist role. I was a little bit fortunate in that the hospital I worked at it created an additional assistant psychologist post, so I was able to interview for that, but similar to you, I was like, why am I not getting these jobs? I have a psychology degree, I should be able to get an assistant psychologist job. And obviously it is a graduate role, but it's perhaps a different type of graduate role compared to different professions where you do a degree and you do just walk straight into that graduate role.

Absolutely, and actually we can never know who our competition is for a role, who else is applying? But I mean, I guess what you would've seen is sometimes you might get someone that's freshly graduated, maybe even that summer who's maybe even had two paid full-time equivalent or more assistant psychologist roles who are applying for that role. They may already have done a master's, they may already have done some relevant experience as well. And so just even on paper as you compare those two applicants, even if this is a first class degree student for example, you just can't compete really with that level of quality robust clinical practise.

Yeah, absolutely. And that we did have quite a lot of that where people had only graduated this year and some of them were still pending their results and one of our shortlist criteria was that they actually need to have the degree not pending the results. So those applicants automatically didn't go through to the next stage of shortlisting. So I think yeah, really thinking about that when you're doing these applications, if you haven't got your degree yet or you've only graduated this year unless you've done one of those degrees where you get a placement year as an assistant psychologist where you can perhaps get a lot of that exposure to clinical work and working under the supervision of a clinical psychologist, if you don't have that or don't have any clinical experience working in a population with people that are struggling with their mental health, chances are you're not going to get shortlisted for a role at this time.

And interestingly, this episode forms part of our assistant psychologist special season and one of those episodes is actually looking at the brand new BPS guidance on employing and recruiting to assistant psychologist roles. And I don't know if you know because I certainly didn't before I read it, the placement years don't necessarily count as assistant psychologists because they say that an assistant psychologist must already be a graduate, which I think is really interesting as well and potentially levels the playing field a little bit for people if people are not going to ultimately be able to call those placement roles, assistant psychologist roles, what they do get called is different question entirely, but in terms of shortlisting, technically we shouldn't be counting those as the same as assistant psychologists not a graduate.

It's a good point, isn't it? Because assistant psychologists are graduates and coming on to my previous point where you have to have the degree to be eligible to apply for the role. So those placement experiences aren't perhaps legitimate assistant psychologist experience, but I still wouldn't rule out if somebody's doing their A levels and thinking about where they're applying for their undergraduate degrees. I do think there is some valuable experience that you can get on that placement year that also might help in terms of getting onto other roles such as those support worker roles, that again then going to be a stepping stone into an assistant psychologist role.

Absolutely. And if I had my time again, I probably would look at courses that did offer placement because nothing helped my development and continues to help my development as a qualified psychologist more than supervision with a practitioner psychologist. It's just non-comparable to anything else. I think especially an attuned, compassionate, supportive one, they've made all the difference, don't they?

Yeah,

I completely agree. And I probably would've similar if there was the opportunities, I dunno how popular it was when I did my undergraduate degree, whether those placement years were a thing. It certainly seems to be a lot more popular now than previously. And yeah, it does give you that useful experience.

Yeah, I wonder if it's almost been to try and help people find more employment in the psychology profession after graduation when you were shortlisting, could you tell a cut and paste application with no tailoring? Could you see that?

Yeah, I mean it was really, really obvious. The first big, I guess red flag that is a copy and paste application was there would be no explanation as to why they were applying to work in a float, which is the service that I was recruiting to. So that would be my first piece of advice to anybody doing these roles. And when you've got that experience is make sure you are tailoring it to the service you're applying for. Why do you want to work in that service or in that general area because it just shows the shortlists that you've done a bit of thinking about this role. And I know how hard it is with these assistant psychologists posts because they go up and they cut off once they have a certain number of applications. So have your cut and paste statement, but make sure you just add in a sentence or two where you're saying why you're applying for that role or reference it during the application at different points. And there are a couple of applications where people had left in the previous services that they'd obviously applied for that are very different to the area that I'm working in. So it was very obvious it was a cut and paste

And I definitely have the sympathy for the stopwatch. Many a time in my own aspiring journey, I would see a job alert come into my emails and I'd be like, amazing, I'm going to apply for that tonight. How exciting. And then I'd get home and it would've closed very, very difficult. And actually another little loophole in the NHS if you are working in the NHS is that you're allowed to use technically some of your time to apply for another NHS job in NHS time and to attend NHS interviews in NHS time, which might then help people to really think about trying to better adapt their applications to the role they're actually applying to.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the other thing that BPS are trying to make psychologists that are recruiting think about more is ways we can try and level the playing fields a little bit for applicants. And I think the next time I'm involved in recruitment for an assistant psychologist post, I'm going to do a post saying when that job is going to go live, see if I can get the trust to do the same on their comms pages so people are aware when this job is going up so they can hopefully maybe be able to set aside some time to ensure they can get an application in.

Absolutely. And it reminds me of two podcast episodes I did with Dr. Alistair Teager. One of them was looking at assistant psychologist and the other was looking at his time working in Ukraine, trying to help think about trauma informed work there. But his service have done really great consultation model really for thinking about how to make this more equitable. So if anybody watching or listening to this wants to hear more about the kind of steps that Dr. Claire has explained there, please do check out the episode as well. But yeah, it's just not making a surprise is it This thing is coming, you may want to get ready, you may want to mark some time in your diary, perhaps discuss this with your supervisor because it doesn't always need to come as a surprise when you say to your supervisor, I've got an interview or I've been offered a new job. We can communicate, we can be transparent about that. As a supervisor, we hope we'll be really, really gutted to lose our brilliant members of staff from the team. But we absolutely understand about career progression and we know when we see a really, really brilliant member of staff, really, we know we're not going to get to keep them forever, so you don't need to look after our feelings.

And just more generally in the NHS for things like support worker roles and assistant psychologist roles, they do have a relatively high turnover. So we are not offended when people move on. So they want to get experience working in a different team or hopefully the wonderful news that they've got on the doctorate and that's why they're going to be leaving.

And sometimes some of the people I've supported in getting doctorate places have been like, oh, I'm almost like a bit embarrassed to tell them that I've got a place. I've only been in this role six months. And I'm like, they will be delighted for you. They will be completely thrilled because they know just what this means to you. You're allowed to celebrate. You're allowed to be proud.

Yeah, absolutely.

Of course. What I know as a qualified psychologist and someone helping support aspiring psychologists is the importance of research audit, project design. Was that coming through in your applications?

It was a bit of a mix. So we had some people that were very strong in describing their research skills and then they struggled to describe their clinical experience. And we obviously did have some applicants that did both very well, but that did seem to be something that people fell short on quite a lot, was describing their research skills. So as an assistant psychologist, one of the things you're going to support the team with is things like audit service evaluation and potentially there might be opportunities for small scale research projects as well. So we want to be able to see those research skills. And the common thing that I was seeing in applications was people saying something like, I have research skills from doing my undergraduate psychology degree and I've used SBSS. And that was kind of it. There wasn't much there in terms of, well, talk me through the process what that was like.

Obviously you're limited with the number of the character limit on the personal statement, but talk us through at least a paragraph in terms of what skills you developed in terms of learning about recruitment for projects, ethical considerations, designing and deciding what analysis that you are going to use, organising your time, so the different stages of the project, the writeup of the project, once you've done that and how you've gone and communicated that to other people. So don't just sort of list, say I did research, we need to know more about what was involved there, but also what you learned from that. And the other thing I think some applicants did really well was they kept linking it back to the job role. So saying things like this will help me in the role as an assistant psychologist in a float and supporting with things like service valuation and audit within the service. So those were the applicants that really stood out because they kept referencing back to the role and they clearly had understood the job spec and the person spec.

Absolutely. That sounds like a gold standard application, doesn't it? A bit of reflecting, a bit of linking the theory and the practise and the experience, but not just paying service to what you see in the person spec. You've got to go above and beyond. You've got to do a bit more than that.

Yeah, absolutely. But I mean make sure you referenced that you've used SPSS as well. Those are sometimes the shortlisting criteria. And I think there was a couple of applications where maybe there was an assumption that we knew they'd used SPSS because they'd done an undergraduate degree. So don't assume the recruiter knows about your experience or something that you would've done within a particular role or within your degree.

Absolutely. And even thinking about the term SPSS, so you and I both know that means statistical package for the social sciences. And I think largely speaking, most people watching this podcast would know that. But what I know from all of the applications I've seen over the years is acronyms are not always as understandable as you may think they are. And so we've really got to be explaining what they are before we start using them. Then we put them in brackets, and that's for every acronym. I think even if you're saying CBT, you need to be saying cognitive behavioural therapy because other variations of CBT are available compulsory basic training that it could mean that as well. So we've got to be explaining the terms we're using.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the qualification to ride a motorcycle is also called CBT. Did you do cognitive behaviour therapy or can you ride a motorbike?

Well, can you do both maybe? Brilliant. So another really important aspect of certainly assistant psychologist roles in clinical practise is the ability to describe and reflect upon clinical experience. Was that a bit of a mixed bag as well?

Yeah. Yeah. So a bit similar to research in a way in that people were very good at saying, I did X, Y, and Z, but weren't as good in terms of thinking about what they learned as a result of that, where their learning gaps are in terms of their clinical skills. But also, again, coming back to the idea of how it transfers to the role they're applying for. So we had some applicants that had loads and loads of experience in different types of specialist services and very different types of services to the service I work in, but they hadn't described how the skills they developed there would then apply to this role. So again, it's very difficult to shortlist somebody, they've got good clinical experience, but thinking about how that then relates to that, for example, we had quite a few applicants that had worked in neurodevelopmental services, so clearly had a lot of excellent assessment skills, but what they didn't do was think about how that might support them in a float.

So in terms of working with clients, getting an understanding of what's going on for them and their problem, thinking about how that might support the team in terms of assessments we might do within the service, it was just, again, it felt a bit tick boxy in that I've done this and I've done that rather than this is what I learned from this experience, this is what I'm going to take forward into my next role. So that would be something I'd encourage people to think about. So in your job bit also where it talks about your previous jobs, that's the point to have those bullet points of I did this, this, and this, but in your personal statements, that's your opportunity for reflecting on those things. And a lot of people were just repeating what they had put in their job history.

Yeah, I totally agree. And even though you may not have done that particular role that's being described, doesn't mean you don't have the capacity or the ability to do that because of the things that you've done. And it's okay to, like you say to it that you haven't done that yet, but you feel you'd be able to rise to that challenge. I actually really like a job application that's written in the present tense. So rather than saying, I did this and this was completed, you still have those skills, you're still active. So I actually quite like reading an active application even for a job you've done a few years ago assisting with rather than assisted with because if I plunged you back into that service, you'd still be really good at it. You could still do that. So I really liked to see just a personal preference. I really like to see an active tense for an application.

Thinking of personal preferences. One of the things I really like to see sometimes is where people use subheadings, particularly with that personal statement, it can read a huge block of text when you are shortlisting and it is as a shortlist, it's harder to read because you're having to go back, oh no, missed that sentence. You're going back a lot. But when people put things into really nice subheadings, that's for the job spec, those desirable criteria that we're looking for, it really helps us quickly go through say, yep, yep, yep. They've ticked that box, we can give them the mark for that criteria that we're looking for.

Absolutely. It's thinking, how is this going to look? And you can even print your application, can't you, or kind of print to PDF to see how that will look so that you can see what the person is going to be looking at. And sometimes when you do that, you print to PDF, you're like, oh, there's just random bits on different pages that don't seem to make sense. It's just trying to make sure when somebody does that, it's probably paperless in some services these days that it's going to look okay and that it feels like an engaging form to look at and it's a pleasure to read.

And there were definitely some that I was reading and I was like, oh, this person has put a lot into this. And that's not to say that everybody that applied hadn't put a lot of effort into their applications, but there was somewhere I felt there was that extra level of thought, again, in relation to my service that I'm recruiting for,

Because it's about respect, isn't it? At the end of the day, you want to have respect for colleagues who really do want to be there, but it's a deeply personal thing, isn't it really having someone in your team because they become part of your intimate world, but you are also then trusting them with your clients that you deeply care about. And so this shouldn't be done lightly. This is really matters, doesn't it, Claire?

Yeah, absolutely. And the service I work with, we're working with women and birthing people that are heavily traumatised by the experiences they've had within the maternity system. So that's something I'm thinking about when I'm recruiting, and this is why things like clinical experience matter. If somebody hasn't worked in a mental health setting and hasn't worked with high levels of distress before, they're not someone I'm going to feel comfortable putting in a room with someone that's coming in and needing to access my service. And yes, there's stuff around skill development, but I think sometimes there are those basic skills around being around people that are distressed that need to be developed beforehand and not developed on the job, if that makes sense.

Absolutely. And these people are going to become part of your team. You're probably going to go out for lunch together at some stage. You may go to leaving dues. Some of my assistants have been to my house to have a cup of tea. Our colleagues become part of our lives. I've been to colleagues weddings, I've been to colleagues, retirement dues. This isn't just about work. And of course it can just be about work. If someone doesn't want to be social, that is okay, but we begin to text each other whilst we're watching X factor or it's not a very current reference, is it? But we begin to text each other when we're watching married at first sight or whatever. We are part of each other's lives and we enjoy having them there. And sometimes I've had feedback, I did really well at interview and I've been offered the job and they really felt that I'd be a good fit for the team and they were excited to work with me. That really matters.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think that's one of the important things when it comes to things like applications, but also interviews, is making sure that your personality is coming through a little bit. So people think about how you're going to fit into the service, both with the client group but also the team. Some of the personal statements that we had, and I dunno if this is true or not, but some of them did read as if they had been written by ai, and I know things like AI and chat GPT are really taken off. They're things I've started using more and more of. They're helping my clinical practise a lot, but you still need to proofread it because they can still sound quite robotic. So I don't know if people were using ai, but if there is anyone listening to this podcast that is using AI to help with their personal statement, just make sure you do read it through and make sure that the language isn't reading as if it was written by AI and that your personality is still coming across within that.

Absolutely. It's totally got to sound like you. Otherwise there's just no important in these time pressured times as we've described already. Sometimes we might mean to come back to a bit and then don't do it. We haven't had a chance to come and read what we've written or just we haven't done justice to describing what it is that we've done before. Have you had applications that are kind of a work in progress?

Yeah, yeah. Particularly the thing we noticed the most was the job history section that seemed to be incomplete across several applications. People would say the name of the service that they'd worked in, but they hadn't put when they'd worked there in terms of start date or end date. There were some posts where it seemed pretty, it felt like I was having to do a bit of detective work when reading and trying to establish a timeline of this person's job history. And through that it'd be clear that it wasn't possible for them to be a one post anymore that they hadn't put that post had ended or the end date for that, or you'd read in their personal statement, they would talk about, oh, and from my experience working in this service, but then that's not mentioned in their job history. So really make sure that your job history is complete and also try and start most recent job first. That was the other thing that seemed to come up a lot where people had done it in reverse order where they'd gone with the first ever job they'd had and then their most recent was at the bottom. And I think it's just good practise when you're doing similar to a cv, you would put your most recent at the top because hopefully that's also going to be the most relevant.

Absolutely. Really important point there. And it's making me think that when I've seen forms sometimes, sometimes people sound more experienced than me and I'm like, crikey, I'm quite daunted by this. Oh, they sound really good. And then I do a bit of that detective digging work and I realised that they've got an undergraduate degree and they haven't actually had any formal qualifications in what they are claiming to be proficient in. And that's really unsafe and a bit renegade. And I know you saw some of that in the applications as well.

Yeah, it was a very small proportion, thankfully, but there were a couple of applications that did concern me and also the service manager that was shortlisting with me, and they're a psychotherapist by backgrounds. They also know about things like proper training accreditation, and there were people in their application not suggesting that they had shadowed these interventions or observed them, which would be appropriate in these types of roles. But what was implied was that they had been involved in the direct delivery of these interventions. And I'm not talking about things like CBT that we would expect low intensity CBT, we'd expect our assistant psychologists to be doing this was therapies that do require a core qualification. So you already need to be a clinical psychologist or a CBT therapist or a mental health nurse. You need to have that core profession and you also need to have undertaken specialist training to deliver that intervention.

So that came up a couple of times, and again, I know people exaggerate their experience in these applications. I did when I was doing it, co-facilitated a group. I led the group, be careful in terms of what you are saying because there are going to be things that we know you might not be honest about or you may be over exaggerating, but it reads in a way that raises red flags with us in terms of whether we think we would want you in our service and whether you would be acting within the competencies and the limits of a Band four role. And acting within our clinical competency is something that's ongoing throughout your career. As a clinical psychologist, there are certain presenting difficulties that I wouldn't see somebody for if they came to me wanting support because I'd say, that's not my specialist area. I'm not the right person to work with you.

Yeah, absolutely. No longer, I would never begin to even accept work in psychosis anymore, just not. I've worked in that area in the past, but it's not something that I'm up to date with or practised with. And it made me think about when I was working in a forensic services, but in a clinical assistant role, been supporting the forensic psychologist or the clinical psychologist with HCR twenties, which are a risk assessment for patients in forensic settings. And I was supporting with that under clinical supervision. I definitely wasn't doing that myself. It wouldn't have been safe, robust, ethical, valid, legal. And so it's just under, supervision is a term that can go so far and can just make an assessor just take a breath and a relax, and that feels a lot safer.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Those two little words under supervision can make a big difference.

And I know we want to not have too much repetition on forms, but I think, and I always say, oh, you've said that before, the line above. But the exception to that I think is under supervision or if you want to switch that around under supported by qualified clinical psychologist or mixing it around, but just making sure multiple times that you are making it clear that you are running the whole service because it may have felt like you were doing that, but that is a sign of an unsafe service. That's not something we want to continue to perpetuate.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

One of the things that people have told me and sound really useful about the Aspiring Psychologist podcast is the way I speak about people and terms, it's always respectful and using the currently appropriate terms. I'm kind of thinking about an episode I did on gender and pronouns with one of my guests who's called G, it's probably about a year ago now. But people have said they found it so useful to be able to think about how to speak respectfully to people if you are not that sure about what they're talking about or even if you are setting the tone and always being respectful when talking about clients and clinical groups. And I know that lack of that was around in some of your applications as well, wasn't it?

Yeah. And again, this was a very small proportion of our applications, but there was somewhere they were using disorder first language. So again, I won't use the specific examples in case people identify themselves, but one that stands to mind is things like depressed people rather than people diagnosed with depression. So you always put the person first, not the label, not the diagnosis. Because again, that makes me think about how are you going to work with the person, the people that I have in my service that need support if you are thinking of them as a disorder rather than an individual.

Absolutely. So important. I interviewed G, they were talking about pronouns and the importance of that and getting that right and thinking about gender, and I wasn't feeling that confident about that really, which is why I'd invited them on the podcast to talk about that. So we definitely don't need to be an expert in that area, but we always need to be respectful and client focused. And did that come up on your application sometimes, Claire?

Yeah, we'd had people, the one I'm thinking of was that they said my research with schizophrenics and it was just made me go,

Oh, yeah, sometimes I talk to myself, Claire, I dunno if you do. Sometimes I may talk to myself in the middle of a job application. I may say something like, oh, oh, my Mum said 'Marianne, what are you doing?' And I may put that in inverted commas or speech marks. That is not something we should be doing on a job application form. Is it because they should be anonymous? Yeah.

So that's really important for shortlisting and to ensure that everyone has a level playing field that we can't look up people that are applying for the roles. And there is quite a surprising number of applications actually, where people had signed off their personal statements as if it was a letter, so they'd signed off as your sincerely and then included their name. So I think again, that's not something that is needed. If your name is in your blank, your blanket personal statement that you put on all of these applications, take it out because shortlists don't want to see your name in that space.

Yeah. Nor should I be saying can't wait to meet you. Lots of love, Marianne. It's terrible. No, let's just have a little thing before we finish. How long is this taking and what sort of process is this for a form assessor? Are you having to clear a whole day? Have you got biscuits? Guide us through that from your perspective.

Yeah, so most people are probably aware that assistant psychologists posts tend to cap at 50. I know there's some work within other services or suggestions that we shouldn't have that cap and we should allow them to stay up for longer periods of time. And I can really see the rationale for that. Going back to what we were talking about earlier in terms of if we have maybe a week time period, it opens up the playing field for people to know they can get their application and at that point, but realistically, as a clinician on the ground, I don't know how realistic that is, full services in terms of shortlisting. So to shortlist, it was me and my service manager. I only work three days a week, so that already limits when we can do this. I also have obviously quite a big clinical caseload. I do a lot of supervision within the service, so my free time is really, really limited to do something like this.

I think it only panned out because my trainee clinical psychologist was on leave, so I was like, oh, I actually have a big block of time where we can sit down and do this together. And thankfully my service manager was also available, but it took us a whole afternoon to go through 57 applications. So for me, I feel that the cap at 50 is enough. I feel like if we did leave these things open for longer and had, I dunno a hundred, 150, that would be a whole week. And then that's a whole week that I'm not able to see the people that I'm working with that really need that ongoing support. So I think there does have to, when we're thinking about recruitment and levelling that playing field, we also do have to balance the service needs as well. So yeah, it took us a whole afternoon and then the interview day is also going to be a whole day, and that doesn't include all of the other time that we put into looking at the person spec, looking at the job advert, having to make sure it goes through those various processes before it listed on NHS jobs.

So it probably all in all, once we factor in the time, we also have to do after the interviews with calling candidates and letting them know the feedback and the outcome of the interview. It's probably around three days work for us as a service, which is a significant amount for andfor role. And the role in my service is also part-time, two days a week. That's all the money we have in the part at the moment. So a lot of resource does go into shortlisting. So that's why some of the things that I put in my LinkedIn post is to also help us as shortlists when we're having to screen these, if people can make these considerations when they're doing these applications, it does help us. And there were applications we were able to shortlist much quicker in terms of successful ones as well because of how clearly they had explained their experience versus those applications where it felt like we were having to dig a little bit to see if they met the criteria or not.

Absolutely, absolutely. Is there a maximum number of people you can invite to interview?

So when we were shortlisting, we didn't set a maximum number. What we did say was that we would only invite the highest scoring applicants. And for us, that was people that met every single criteria and scored a point. So we had the point around whether they had the degree and then there were points clinical and research experience. So the people that scored highest were the ones that got invited to interview and we shortlisted eight. There was several applicants that were on the next rung of I think scoring nine out of 10, which perhaps in any of a service where it's, for example, a qualified clinical psychologist role where you probably have a much smaller pool of applicants, you probably would get shortlisted for interview with a nine out of 10 before these assistant psychologist roles because it is a much wider pool of applicants that we are drawing from. We did have to go with the highest scoring only.

Absolutely. And I think really one of the most difficult things I've ever done is get a paid assistant psychologist post because there's only one job quite often. So you need to be the best applicant maybe on paper, but you need to be the best applicant in the interview as well. And there's much more room for margin for error or humanness in, for example, doctorate applications where there might be 15, 20, 30, 40 places being offered. You really are, it's a very, very competitive environment, isn't it? And it's, we've got to be able to narrow down those numbers somewhere.

Absolutely. I think it being so competitive in some ways it does help prepare you for the career path as a clinical psychologist. And that's the other thing I always really encourage applicants to think about is why do you want to be a clinical psychologist? Because if you just want to be a therapist, there are much easier career routes to go down. And the role of a clinical psychologist is much broader than just doing one-on-one therapy. So if it's more around doing therapy, look at other career options that might be available to you. If it really is clinical psychology, then it's going to be a grind and accepting that it's going to be a grind to get there. And I think that having to go through the multiple applications, multiple applications, not getting anywhere, that does help, I think build a bit of resilience for what you're going to need when it comes to applying for the doctor up.

Absolutely. I dunno if you're familiar with the BBC two radio competition called 500 Words, but their story is written by children and they have to be done in 500 words and every year it really helps inform the lexicon of the nation actually, of what children are talking about and what phrases they're using and kind of how they speak. And it reminded me if there was one most commonly used word in the Aspiring Psychologist collective book, it would be resilience. And that absolutely is something that is needed to get to be a professionally qualified psychologist, but that doesn't mean that you are willing to exploit yourself or willing to take loads and loads of rubbish from people. It just means, I think compassionate resilience really is so important.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much for your time, Claire. This has been such a fascinating chat with you. Could you tell us where people can find you and how to connect or follow you? The best way

To connect with me is on LinkedIn, so just search for Dr. Claire Pitt. I will be having some other socials in the future, and once I do, I'll be sharing them on LinkedIn.

Great. Thank you so much for your time. This is going to be so useful for so many people and I hope your cat is okay. We've heard them a few times today, but everyone's welcome.

Yeah, no, thank you for your patience with the cats. I've been trying my patience this morning. But no, thank you for having me, Marianne. It's been really good coming on here. And I do hope that the things that I've shared both here and on that LinkedIn post are helpful for people that are aspiring for a career in clinical psychology.

Yes, indeed, they will be. And they're useful for any application really for the NHS and any health psychology, occupational psychology, forensic psychology, all of this guidance can be extrapolated out whatever your psychological passion is. Yeah. Thank you so much. Thank you. What an absolute pleasure. Didn't we do everything we promised at the start of this episode? Has that supercharged your applications? Has that shown you how you can really make yourself stand out and make it more likely that you will get assistant psychologist interviews? I don't think it can have failed not to follow that guidance. And do let me know how you get on, connect with me on socials where I'm Dr. Marianne Trent everywhere and come and join the free Facebook group, the Aspiring Psychologist Community with Dr. Marianne Trent. Of course, if it's your time and you are ready for the next step, do consider the Aspiring Psychologist membership, which you can join from £30 a month with no minimum term. And also, it can be really helpful when thinking about reflections for psychology application forms and also when it comes to thinking about psychology application forms, the books, the Aspiring Psychologist Collective and the Clinical Psychologist Collective can feel like such a helpful, compassionate inspiration. So do check those out as well. If you're looking to become a psychologist,

Then let this be with this podcast. The psychologist.