The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - Top Application Form Mistakes (& How to Fix Them) Assistant Psychologist

Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi there, it's Marianne here. Before we dive into today's episode, I want to quickly let you know about something exciting that's happening right now. If you've ever wondered how to create income that works for you, rather than constantly trading your time for money, then you'll love the Race to Recurring Revenue Challenge with my business mentor, Lisa Johnson. This challenge is designed to help you build sustainable income streams. And whether you're an aspiring psychologist, a mental health professional, or in a completely different field,

Starting point is 00:00:32 the principles can work for you. There are also wonderful prizes to be won directly by Lisa herself. And if you join the challenge by my link, you can be in with a chance of winning a one-to-one hours coaching with me, Dr. Marianne Trent. Do you want to know more? Of course you do. Head to my link tree, Dr. Marianne Trent, or check out my social media channels, or send me a quick DM and I'll get you all the details. Right, let's get on with today's episode. What if you could learn how to supercharge your application to become an assistant psychologist?

Starting point is 00:01:07 What if you could make every word count and every buzz phrase sing out and earn you shortlisting points? What can we learn from applications which have not been shortlisted to help optimize 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 psychologists, 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,

Starting point is 00:02:06 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, I just want to welcome along Dr. 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 role 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.

Starting point is 00:02:54 Yeah, 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're 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're 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 because 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

Starting point is 00:03:29 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 2002 but I immediately sort of 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 kind of 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 worker actually, in local government for about two and a half years, really, that I was then able to really bring my A-game to the application form, which ultimately got me an assistant psychologist job.

Starting point is 00:04:22 Yeah. 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 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, who else is applying. But I mean, I guess what you would have seen is sometimes you might get someone that's freshly graduated, maybe even that summer, and who's maybe even had two paid full-time equivalent or more

Starting point is 00:05:14 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 practice. 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 shortlisting criteria was that they 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

Starting point is 00:06:02 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. 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. Yeah. 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

Starting point is 00:07:01 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 you know 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 because they're 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 those placement experiences aren't perhaps legitimate assistant psychologists experience but it's still 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

Starting point is 00:07:50 help in terms of getting onto other roles such as those support worker roles that are 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 in a tuned, compassionate, supportive one. They've made all the difference, don't they? Yeah, I completely agree. And I probably would have similar if there was the opportunities. I don't know how popular it was when I did my undergraduate degree,

Starting point is 00:08:29 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 always 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 kind of no tailoring? Could you see that? Yeah, I mean, it was really, really obvious. The first big, or I guess red flag is a copy and paste application was there would be no explanation

Starting point is 00:09:03 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 shortlisters that you've done a bit of thinking about this role and I know how hard it is with these assistant psychologist 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 state a sentence or two where you're saying why you're applying

Starting point is 00:09:40 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. Yeah, I definitely, you know, have the sympathy for the stopwatch, you know, 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 have 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

Starting point is 00:10:27 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 field 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 psychologists

Starting point is 00:11:15 and the other was looking at his time working in Ukraine trying to help kind of think about trauma-informed work there but his service have done really great kind of consultation model, really, for thinking about how to make this more equitable. So if anybody watching or listening to this kind of wants to hear more about the kind of steps that Dr. Clare has explained there, please do check out the episode as well. But yeah, it's just not making a surprise, is it? Like it's, this thing is coming. You may want to get ready. You may want to kind of mark some time in your diary. Perhaps discuss this with your supervisor because it doesn't always need to come as a surprise when

Starting point is 00:11:50 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. Yeah and just more generally in the NHS things for things like support worker roles and assistant psychologist roles they do have a relatively high turnover. So we're not offended when people move on because they want to get experience working in a different team or hopefully the wonderful news they've got on the doctorate.

Starting point is 00:12:34 And that's why they're going to be leaving. Yeah. 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 because 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. Like 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.

Starting point is 00:13:08 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,

Starting point is 00:13:53 I have research skills from doing my undergraduate psychology degree and I've used SPSS. And that was kind of it. There wasn't much there in terms of, well, talk me through the process of what that was like. Obviously, you're limited with the number of the talk me through the process of what that was like obviously you're limited with the 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're going to use organizing your time so the different stages of the project,

Starting point is 00:14:27 the write-up 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

Starting point is 00:14:51 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? You know, a bit of reflecting, a bit of linking the theory and the practice 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 reference that you've used SPSS as well, because those are sometimes the shortlisting criteria.

Starting point is 00:15:28 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 have 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

Starting point is 00:16:07 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 behavioral therapy because other variations of CBT are available you know compulsory basic training that is you know 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 um the qualification to ride a motorcycle is also called CBT did you do cognitive behavior therapy or can you road a motorbike? Or can you do both maybe? Brilliant. So another really important aspect of certainly assistant psychologist roles in clinical practice 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

Starting point is 00:17:06 research in a way and 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 applicants that had done had loads and loads of experience in different types of specialist services and like 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. So for example,

Starting point is 00:17:51 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

Starting point is 00:18:17 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, or so 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 statement, 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.

Starting point is 00:18:50 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 know, 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, you know, assisting with rather than assisted with. Because if I plunged you back into that service, you'd still be really good at it. You can still do that. So I really like to see just a personal preference. I really like to see an active tense for an

Starting point is 00:19:29 application. Yeah. And 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 like a huge block of text when you're shortlisting. And it is as a shortlister, 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 sort of 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,

Starting point is 00:20:08 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, because 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. Yeah, and there were definitely some that I was reading and I was like, oh, this person has put a lot into this.

Starting point is 00:20:41 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. Yeah, because it's about respect, isn't it? At the end of the day, you want to have respectful 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're also then trusting them with your clients that you deeply care about. And so this shouldn't be done lightly. You know, this is, this really matters, doesn't it, Claire? Yeah, absolutely. And the service I work with, we're working with women and birthing people

Starting point is 00:21:24 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.

Starting point is 00:22:02 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 know, you may go to leaving dues. There's, you know, some of my assistants have been to my house, you know, to have a cup of tea. Like, you know, our colleagues become part of our lives. You know, I've been to colleagues' weddings. You know, I've been to colleagues' retirement dues. This isn't just about work. And of course, you know, it can just be about work. If someone doesn't want to be social, that is OK. But we begin to text each other whilst we're watching X Factor or it's not a very current reference, is it? But, you know, we begin to text each other when we're watching like Married at First Sight or whatever. Like we are part of each other's lives and we we enjoy having them there and sometimes I've had feedback you know I did really well 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 and you know that really matters yeah yeah absolutely

Starting point is 00:22:57 I think that's sort of 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 your into the service both with the the client group but also the team some of the personal statements that we had and i don't know if this 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 practice a lot. But you still need to proofread it because they can still sound quite robotic. So I don't know

Starting point is 00:23:36 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 point. In these time pressured times as we've described already sometimes we don't 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

Starting point is 00:24:33 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 like, 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, but they hadn't put that 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 their,

Starting point is 00:25:19 the first ever job they'd had, and then their most recent was at the bottom. And I think it's just good practice when you're doing similar to a CV, you would put their most recent was at the bottom and I think it's just good practice 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 like sometimes people sound more experienced than me and I'm like crikey I'm quite daunted by this like oh they sound really good and then I do a bit of that detective digging work and I realized that they've got an undergraduate degree and they haven't actually had any formal qualifications in what they are

Starting point is 00:25:57 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 background. So they also know about things like a 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 in these types of roles but the 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.

Starting point is 00:26:47 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 core possession. 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

Starting point is 00:27:16 doing it, like co-facilitated a group, I led the group. Be careful in terms of what you're 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 bank for 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 I no longer I would never begin to even accept work

Starting point is 00:28:02 in psychosis anymore. Yeah. Because I'm just not, you know, I've worked in that area in the past, but it's not something that I'm up to date with or practiced with. And it made me think about when I was working in forensic services, but in a clinical assistant role, been supporting the forensic psychologist or the clinical psychologist with sort of HCR 20s, 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. You know, it wouldn't

Starting point is 00:28:38 have been safe, robust, ethical, valid, legal. And so it's just you know under supervision is a term that can go so far and just can just make a an assessor just take a breath and a relax okay that feels a lot safer yeah yeah absolutely those two little words under supervision can make a big difference yeah and you know 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, like the line above. But the exception to that, I think, is under supervision. Or if you want to switch that around under, you know, supported by a qualified clinical psychologist. You're mixing it around, but just making sure multiple times

Starting point is 00:29:25 that you're making it clear that you're 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 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. That's probably about a year ago now. But people have said they found it so useful to be able to kind of think about how to speak respectfully to people if you are not that sure about what they're talking about, or even if you

Starting point is 00:30:19 are, you know, 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, yeah. And again, this was a very small proportion of our applications, but there was some where 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're thinking of them as a

Starting point is 00:31:10 disorder rather than an individual. Absolutely. So important. I interviewed G, they were talking about, you know, 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,

Starting point is 00:31:48 my research with schizophrenics, and it was just made me go, oh, yeah. Sometimes I talk to myself, Claire. I don't know if you do. Sometimes I may talk to myself in the middle of a job application. I may say something like, 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. Yeah. So that's really important for shortlisting and to ensure that everyone has a level playing field,

Starting point is 00:32:25 that we can't look up people that are applying for the roles. And there was quite a surprising number of applications, actually, where people had signed off their personal statements as if it was a letter. So they'd sort of signed off as yours sincerely and then included their name. So I think, again, just 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 shortlisters 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 no let's just have a little thing before we finish how long is this taking and

Starting point is 00:33:09 what sort of process is this for a form assessor are you having to clear a whole day have you got biscuits like 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 weak time period it opens up the playing field for people to know they can get their application in at that point. But realistically, as a clinician on the ground, I don't know how realistic that is for services in terms of shortlisting. So to shortlist, it was me and my service manager.

Starting point is 00:34:01 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 a cap of 50 is enough. I feel like if we did leave these things open for longer and had, I don't know, 100, 150, that would be a whole week.

Starting point is 00:34:44 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 that does have to when we're thinking about recruitment and leveling 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

Starting point is 00:35:25 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 fan for role. And the role in my service is also part time, two days a week. That's all the money we have in the pot 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 shortlisters when we're having to screen these. If people can make these considerations when they're doing these applications, it does help us. 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 we didn't, when we were shortlisting, we didn't set a maximum number.

Starting point is 00:36:23 What we did say was that we would only invite the highest scoring applicants and for us that was everybody 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 around 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 sort of 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. But for these assistant psychologist roles, because it is a much wider pool of applicants that we're 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

Starting point is 00:37:26 applicant, maybe on paper, but you need to be the best applicant in the interview as well. And, you know, there's much more room for margin for error or humanness in kind of, 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, you know, 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 would really encourage applicants to think about is why do you want to be a clinical psychologist. And that's the other thing I would 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

Starting point is 00:38:13 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 sort of 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 doctorate. Absolutely. I don't know if you're familiar with the BBC2 radio competition called 500 Words, but they're stories 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

Starting point is 00:39:00 how they, you know, what phrases they're using and kind of how they speak and it reminded me if there was kind of one most commonly used word in 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're willing to exploit yourself or you know willing to exploit yourself or, you know, 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

Starting point is 00:39:40 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 of the 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.

Starting point is 00:40:04 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 are helpful for people that have are aspiring to for a career in clinical psychology yes indeed they will. 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

Starting point is 00:40:43 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

Starting point is 00:41:16 and you're 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. My name's Jana and I'm a trainee psychological well-being practitioner.

Starting point is 00:42:20 I read the Clinical Psychologist Collective book. I found it really interesting about all the different stories and how people got to become a clinical psychologist. It just amazed me how many different routes there are to get there and there's no perfect way to become one and this kind of filled me of confidence that no I'm not doing it wrong and put less pressure on myself. So if you're feeling a bit uneasy about becoming a clinical psychologist I'd definitely recommend this just to put yourself at ease and everything will be okay but trust me you will not put the book down once you start.

The Aspiring Psychologist Podcast - Top Application Form Mistakes (& How to Fix Them) Assistant Psychologist

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