RAV Penalty solutions?

Got a two days penalty from RAv for uploading my job application 1 day late due to IT system maintenance on RAV website, it was showing the system was not available before 6th of May.And it was even mentioned in the website people should proceed after the system available on 6th May. But my supervisor reported me and gave me the penalties. After explaining her the screenshot she complained I should have saved all the applications much earlier than 5th May. But this is not mandatory, correct me if I am wrong. What should I do? Appealing seem does help much as nobody really cares.

RAV expects you to continuously apply, every day some application effort. They further thinknthat uploading your applications in their system was part of this application routine. Meaning that you ideally on a daily basis update their system,if there was any change (aka new application submitted). Essentially, you have another full time job now. Whether it makes sense or not and if you like it or not, its just how this RAV thing works


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I did applied jobs within the month. but usually I recorded them in the last 5 days and submitted before 5th each next month, but this time the system was down. It is not my fault that I couldn’t submit before 5th. How should be be penalized?

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This is not my view, I am fully with you. From a RAV point of view however, they will state that you had a full-time job of both i) applying and ii) tracking your application status in the system. In their view, you at least failed on the second. So you didn’t propperely “work” and they give you a penalty. Is it fair? No, but its just how they operate
 nothing much you can do.

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On their website they publish their maintenance period so you know when the website will be down.
My partner does it once a week to avoid this kind of issues .

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Try applying for more jobs and submitting them immediately.

See the problem, understand your role in it, come up with a solution and take accountability instead of making excuses. These will also be useful skills/attitudes to develop both for getting a job and doing well in it.

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You could make opposition to the penalty decision, explaining what made you impossible to upload your job application. It’s free so you aren’t taking any risk. If they change the decision, you win, if not, you are in the same situation as now.

The opposition is to make to the same authority, but not to the same person who wrote the decision so this person might have an other perception of the situation and rule over the penalty. You’ll now only if you try.

Or 
 you could focus your energy on the future by following @PhilMongoose 's suggestion and chalk this up to “lessons learned”?

No judgment passed, but that’s how I would approach this.

Oh, and welcome to the forum!

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The mistake has already been done. I assumed that ppmao doesn’t need any piece of advice to avoid a penalty for the next time. I’m sure he is an adult able to change the way he uploads his job applications and doesn’t need some paternalistic comments about it.

He also asked a specific question for a specific problem which is how to deal with this 2 days penalty. Your answer misses the point and doesn’t help him.

Oh, and nice to meet you!

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Technically you could. In my view, you then just miss the cultural side of things. The „traditional“ Swiss way was to settle such things before they even become a Problem and once it was ruled that the penalty applied - to accept it, as it was ones own fault.

Clearly, that traditional way (if you ask me: with reason) in the „modern“ parts of society no longer applies that much and you could proceds in other ways as well. However: people working at RAV to my understanding, at least in Rural, regions stick a bit to that traditional way of operating. Meaning: the decision will be covered by the supervisor (unless it was clearly wrong; which is not given here) and you would (given you raised the trouble) lose relationship points and can expect a zero tolerance policy if you somewhen later ask for a favor.

If You ask me: its not nice but I would just swallow it, accept it as a learning and move on.

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Thanks for the advice.
I am not saying to swallow the penalty is not acceptable. But I would like to understand what is the penalty for? For submitting one day later or for not recording the job application before the 1st of next month.
If for point one, the IT maintenance started midnight 1st May, while logging in already not possible to do any operations. Why not given people some warning in advance? Plus it was clearly ststed in the website : all applicants should continue uploading right after the website available on 6th June, no wording regarding consequences at all.I was just following the instructions given by the website which is part of RAV, if it’s wrong why did they put such misleading information? Should I been penalized by doing what it was instructed on their website?

If for point two,that is even worse as nowhere stated, not recording the applications within the same month will cause penalties.

The penalty is due given, in the RAV‘s understanding, your one and only job was to i) apply X times per month and ii) document these applications in the system. The fact is that you failed to document these applications in time - hence you didn’t do your job propperely.

The logic behind is that you had the entire month to do it, that they have a meaningful process with pre-announced outages and that even if there was no announcement of the outage - you were supposed to regularely update your status before month end. If you fail to do so, they apply the same assumption that they applied of you e.g. sent all your application in one day only. The assumption was that you didn’t wake up every single morning and put all your energy into finding a new job
 but that you simply didn’t bother and at month end tried to do the Minimum required to (on paper) satisfy the requirement.

Or in other words. The requirement is not X applications in the system
 it is that you:

  • proactively apply
  • diligently and professionally perform on the application process (including managing/tracking applocations on the system)
  • and that you evidence your performance on these points by continuously and timely putting applications in the system

If you in contrast had put lets say 3 applications in the system every week and missed the last 3 applications as the system was down (aka add them one day late), you would have likely gotten a tiny reminder that this was non-proactive, non-professional work on your end that must be remediated - but you would have probably gotten away without a penalty. But as you didn’t submit any application at all, I am to be honest surprised you only got away with two days of penalty.

Turn it around: what happens when you owe your manager a report and deliver it one day right? No matter what excuses if a system was unavailable - you delivered late and the manager will potentially lower his view on your performance. Probably no immediate consequences but this piles up over time and can cost you promotions, salary increases, boni and worst case even your job if he needs to think about who to fire in case of restructuring.

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So the maintenance window only started AFTER the deadline for submission? Seriously, what do you complain about? 5 mins post midnight is May but no longer April, so you were late. The deadline was End of April and the System was up and running until 30 April 23:59:59 then


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In your first meeting with the RAV supervisor, you should have clarified what is expected of you and any relevant deadlines.

I’m surprised you still don’t know this after the meeting when the penalty was given (or maybe you do know and just don’t like the answer).

I suggest you speak to your supervisor to clarify directly the requirements, deadlines and penalties for failure to meet the requirements/deadlines.

AFAI understand, the deadline for April’s “proof of job applications” is May 5th.
Shutting the system down from May 1st to May 6th is daft & unprofessional. Shut it down from the 6th till 20th or something.

OP is being treated harshly here, but ja, I would also say “let it go”. It’s 2 days penalty, don’t sour your relationship to the RAV person about it!

Next time call him/her and ask what you can do, since the system is not allowing you to keep the deadline. Or fill out the paper form, scan it and email to RAV (before the 5th).

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I find I can divide people into 2 groups: those who take accountability, and those who have victim-mentality.

The first would say “yes. my bad, the deadlines were clear. the downtime was posted. i’m unemployed and so have around 40 hours a week to get this done. i could have uploaded immediately and will do so in the future and take this as a learning to do better.”

Those with victim mentality will say “it’s so unfair, the penalty is harsh. the supervisor hates me. they shouldn’t have scheduled maintenance during this time. they should make an exception because of the downtime. it’s more efficient if i wait until the last minute and upload all at once.”

Everyone can choose which camp they want to be in. Though I would say if you want to be in control of your life, you need to be in the first camp. You only can control yourself. If you expect the world to change for you, you might find that the world is not as accommodating as you would like.

Is this harsh? Maybe. Is it reality? I think so. Reality can be harsh.

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I think this topic is getting very patronizing of OP. They did not ask about life lessons. And indirectly accusing them of having victim mentality is definitely one step too far.

I agree with the points being made as a general guideline, but this is going way beyond what was asked and what we know about OP.

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For the OPs situation, given that it is only a 2 day penalty, I’d say forget about it to avoid creating problem with the RAV supervisor.

Heck, for the time investment, you might as well clean somebody’s house for 4 hours and make more than the 2 day penalty. It’s not worth it.

Such things have to be expected from a monopoly.

I’m almost certain they are not a user-driven company.

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To be clear(er), I meant OP is being treated harshly by some responses here, not by RAV. But yes, reality-check can include both extremes.
OP, 2 days is a “small penalty”, it could’ve easily been the whole month (22 days), as the rules “are clear”, even if the system is down. Who knows, if you object they might re-evaluate and decline the whole month.

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