In reply to Hans:
Hiring for an outdoors centre (instructors, admin, cooks, cleaners etc.) CVs are standard and I guess the first point of culling. It's an easy way to seperate those that have made an effort and those that haven't and you can (or should be able to) see at a glance if they have the experience you're looking for for the role. It depends a lot on the role for how important the actual CV is but not getting one isn't a good first impression. Most CVs I see underestimate the importance of giving you a list of their previous employment and evidence of their suitability for the role and overestimate the importance of utter bull s**t statements about working well in a team but also working well alone.
Covering letters are usually of quite a poor standard and often they don't answer questions thrown up from reading their CV which is a missed opportunity for a lot of people. You want to be a cook but you've never worked in a kitchen...might want to use your covering letter to highlight why you should still be considered. I'm not sure if it's a stiff upper lip British thing but very few people make it sound like they actually want a job and seem to think enthusiasm might count against them.
Only a small percentage of people seem to individualise their application which always surprises me. I had a covering letter last week from someone looking for an admin role, our company name and a few other unique references to the application were in a different font to the rest of the letter (i.e. they'd written or copied a standard template and filled in the blanks). Attention to detail was mentioned in their CV as a skill!
For instructional staff we have an application form which is easily downloaded from our website. If they can find it, download it, fill it in and then email it to us then they're already standing out from the crowd. We're not particualrly brutal with short listing instructors and try to speak to as many on skype as possible. Social skills are obviously more important than writing/computing skills for that kind of role but if you can't fill in a form it's not a good start.
We do talks at a few outdoor colleges and universities as well which we usually get an email list of interested people and then contact them for a skype interview. It would be unusual for a candidate to send us a CV if we hired them from that kind of avenue. Most employers within the outdoors industry will probably facebook you these days, every candidate will say they love the outdoors but half of them will have a news feed full of drunken nights out and not a hill in sight.
Post edited at 12:42