Why the prepared applicant gets sponsored and the better candidate does not

We spend every morning checking job adverts against the Home Office register so that the list you see is real. And the honest thing to say is that for a lot of people, the list is not what is stopping them.

The people who write to us are not short of adverts. They have applied to thirty, forty, sixty places and heard almost nothing. They assume the problem is that there are not enough sponsored jobs. Usually it is not. Usually they were never the easiest person to say yes to.

What a manager is actually doing with forty applications

Picture the other side of it. A care home manager has one vacancy, forty applications, a rota to fill by Friday and no time. They are not searching for the best person in the country. They are removing every application that creates work for them, and offering the job to whoever is left.

Work for them looks like this. A CV that does not say which NVQ you hold, so they have to ask. A gap with no explanation, so they have to ask. No mention of your right to work, so they have to guess and then ask. A referee who does not answer the phone for a fortnight. A start date that cannot be pinned down.

None of that is about whether you would be good at the job. All of it decides whether you get the chance to prove it.

The five things, and why each one matters

• An up to date CV that says what you did, not what the job was. Supported fourteen residents on a twenty eight bed dementia unit beats duties included personal care, every time, because one of them is yours and the other could be anybody's.
• Your qualification level written down, with dates. NVQ or RQF Level 2 moves you from maybe to interview for most care assistant posts. Level 3 changes your pay and makes a senior role credible. If you are still studying, say so with the start date: working towards Level 3 counts and silence does not.
• A driving licence on the top line if you hold one. In home care it roughly doubles the jobs you can apply for, because the whole model runs on people who can get between calls. It is often worth more than a qualification and it costs one line to mention.
• Two referees who already know the call is coming. The most common reason a start date slips is a referee who is surprised. Ring them before you apply, not after you are offered.
• Then apply to a lot of them. Ten real applications a week, every week, beats forty in one Sunday and nothing for a fortnight. Even a strong, prepared applicant hears nothing from most employers, for reasons that have nothing to do with them.

The bit that sounds like a cliche and is not

Volume only works when everything above is already done. If each application means rewriting your CV, hunting for a certificate scan and inventing an explanation for a gap, ten a week is impossible and you will not do it. If the CV is a finished PDF, the certificates are in one folder and the referees are warned, an application costs you ten minutes and ten a week is easy.

That is the whole reason to prepare. Not because a manager is impressed by tidiness, but because being prepared is what makes the volume possible, and the volume is what gets the job.

And then the interview

In care, almost every interview question is one question wearing different clothes: are you safe to leave alone in a room with somebody who cannot protect themselves. What would you do if you saw a colleague being rough with a resident. What does dignity mean to you. What would you do if you found someone on the floor.

Those have right answers, and they are learnable in an evening. We have written all of them out, with what the interviewer is actually listening for, and given them away free.

Take the packs, they cost nothing

All three are at sponsorjobuk.com/prepare, as web pages and as PDFs you can keep or forward to a friend. No sign in, no email, nothing to buy at the end. Checking whether a company holds a sponsor licence is free there too.

The one thing we charge for stays what it has always been: the employer's name and the apply link on an advert we have checked, twenty pounds once, forever. Everything that makes you better at getting the job is free, because charging for that would be charging people for the thing they cannot afford to go without.

And the rule that never changes: nobody may charge you for a certificate of sponsorship. Selling one is a criminal offence in the UK. If anybody asks you for money for a job or a certificate, that is the scam, and it is the most common one there is.

We are a job alert service, not immigration advisers, and this is not legal advice. For your own case speak to a regulated adviser or a support organisation.

• The health and social care interview, question by question, with what they are listening for behind each one.
• The sponsorship conversation: what a licensed employer has to satisfy themselves about, and how to answer without losing the job or telling a lie.
• Get ready before you apply: the CV, the NVQ levels, the licence, the paperwork that delays a start date, and how many to send.