What's the key to a good job application?

I was recently asked "What's the key to a good job application?" and it made me think about the problems with the underlying assumptions of this question.  

When one asks what is key to a good “job application” I am going to assume that one means the whole process of securing a particular job.

In my experience, the most competitive candidates have a demonstrable track record of solving business problems in prior roles that are similar to the challenges facing the company in the role they are hiring for. This makes sense. When you hire a lawyer to represent you, you want to hire a lawyer that has done that work many times before, and done it well. When you hire a doctor to perform surgery on you, you likely want to know that they have done the procedure many times before and that they have been a success at it.

Unfortunately, this is not the neutral criteria it might first appear to be. Rather, it tends to perpetuate structural inequality. People who have had the opportunity to be a success in the past are more likely to have those opportunities in the future and it becomes a self fulfilling prophesy. This opportunities are not distributed in an even manner but follow from a history of particular people from particular circumstances having more “luck” than other people. One example of this is structural racism. But there are many more, which often manifest themselves as xenophobia, though in business terms these are often called factors of “cultural fit.”

So it is very useful to hail from the same social, political, cultural, racial, and economic group as the people in charge of doing the hiring — both due to the inherent, unconscious bias that decision makers bring to the process and due to the fact that one is also more likely to have had the same historical opportunities (and successes) as the “successful” people doing the hiring. So an underlying key to a “good job application” is having been fortunate enough to not have been born and raised in a manner significantly different from the people who are making hiring decisions.

What does that mean? Well, maybe the more important question isn’t “Did I have the good fortune to be born into a situation in which luck, privilege and history enabled me to be more likely to be a good candidate?” Maybe the more important question is actually to be directed at those who select people for employment: How can I avoid perpetuating unequal opportunity while also selecting people who can make my business successful?

Lots of factors are outside the control of a candidate. But back to what a candidate can more readily control: I find I am most successful when I am able to be the solution sought by an employer, and that the best way to demonstrate that is by having and sharing a history of being a similar solution in the past.