Mitigating circumstances are serious, often unforeseen reasons or events that prevented you from achieving your expected academic results, which graduate recruiters may take into account when processing job applications. Common reasons include bereavement, illness (both physical and mental) and your parents getting a divorce. Other reasons might include being a carer while studying or suffering a real financial crisis. However, recruiters tell us that, while sad, being dumped by your boyfriend or girlfriend or the demise of a pet probably don’t cut it. Part-time working for the hours recommended by your university is also unlikely to count.
Should you disclose your mitigating circumstances?
‘Many students feel uncomfortable about disclosing their mitigating circumstances, especially if they involve mental health issues,’ says Mark Armitage, a careers consultant in the Employability and Graduate Development team at the University of Exeter. He would never advise students to disclose if they do not want to; as with disclosing a disability, it is a personal choice. However, if the employers you want to apply to insist on a 2.1 and you have a lower grade, you can still be considered if you inform them of your mitigating circumstances. If you don’t, you will find yourself being filtered out.
How do you inform recruiters that you have mitigating circumstances, if you choose to?
You can usually find out which organisations welcome applicants with mitigating circumstances by looking at their graduate recruitment webpages – information can usually be found in the FAQ sections. If the employer doesn’t mention it, do email or phone the recruitment team (or go up to them at a careers fair) and ask whether they’d still consider you if you applied, given your mitigating circumstances.
Most recruiters will have space on their application forms for details of mitigating circumstances. Some will require you to upload corroboration from your university. For example, financial and management consultancy Towers Watson requires proof from your university/examining body and checks that your situation wasn’t already taken into account during the marking process.
What do you say?
You don’t need to go into painful detail about the extenuating circumstances. Mark suggests that someone who had suffered illness (physical or mental) could just state something like: ‘I was ill during my second year, which affected my ability to carry out my work, and I received a 55% average instead of the 65% average of my first year.’ This level of detail should do for any mitigating circumstance but, if you feel the need to add more, concentrate on the strategies you used to overcome your difficulties and continue studying.
Karen Poulton, graduate recruitment and diversity manager at property firm Cushman & Wakefield, agrees with this approach. ‘Applicants can tick a box on the application form to flag the fact that they have been affected by mitigating circumstances. We will always call the student so that we can understand what the extenuating circumstances were and anything that is disclosed is done so in confidence and handled as sensitively as possible. We understand that graduates might not want to discuss this in detail and we don’t expect them to.’
Tell your university
Both Karen and Mark agree that you should talk to your personal tutor, or another lecturer to whom you feel close, about your mitigating circumstances at the time. They can help ensure that your university takes them into account while marking and/or extending deadlines. 'I always ask for the applicant’s permission to talk to their tutor to verify whether the candidate is of genuine 2.1 calibre,’ says Karen. ‘The tutor may be able to give you a verbal reference,’ adds Mark.
What if your university doesn't know? ‘It's still worth contacting the employer to see whether they would consider you regardless,’ says Mark. After all, they can only say no.
Resilience is attractive
Resilience is a highly sought after quality by graduate recruiters and they appreciate when students have managed to continue studying when life gets in the way, even if the grades are a little less than they would have been. As Karen puts it: ‘We understand that individuals sometimes face adversity. What makes a student stand out is how they've dealt with it to become a stronger person.’
Source: Targetjobs.co.uk, Thursday 15th December 2011
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