Clients

With a 2019 just around the corner, you may feel motivated to look for a new job or even a complete career change. The mantra of ‘New Year, New You’ applies to your professional life too.  The weeks leading up to the New Year are the perfect time to audit your candidate profile and make sure you’re in perfect shape for the job hunt. Your CV First impressions are key, and the first thing a potential employer will see is your CV. Ensure that it is tidy and properly formatted. Overly stylised CVs can be off putting, so remember simplicity and readability are key. Always include a personal profile which highlights your career highlights to date. Avoid clichés like “good team player” and words like “passionate” Perhaps most importantly, always tell the truth on your CV.  Potential employers will do their research and pre-screen candidates before offering employment. What may seem like a white lie, could be the difference between being starting your dream job so put your best, most honest, foot forward! Social Media In this modern age, employers will often screen candidates’social media accounts.  Ensure that any personal profiles have the correct privacy settings, keeping those holiday snaps and boozy party pictures for friends and family alone. Remember that your profile picture will still be visible, so have something that you feel will represent you well to potential employers and recruiters. LinkedIn is an important social media platform when job seeking, and ensuring that your profile reflects your correct work experience i paramount. Ensure that your CV and your LinkedIn details are the same.  Almost all employers will use Linked in as their second port of call after looking at your CV, so don’t neglect your LI profile. Use recruiters Having a recruiter onside who can best showcase you can be the difference between a job you can do and a job you can love. Do your research to ensure that the agencies that you register with are best suited to your needs, that have an understanding of the roles that you are seeking and are specialised to your field. Personal and Professional Ensuring that you present yourself professionally across the board will increase your chances when seeking new employment.  Make sure your email address is personal and professional, we recommend variations on first name/last name addresses – avoid nicknames or joke names: yes “friskykitten@gmail.com” I do mean you! There’s an old adage saying that getting a new job is a full-time job in itself. Treat your New Year job hunt with the same level of professionalism as you would your first day at work.

We all know that miscommunications and misunderstanding are a constant struggle professionally and in daily life, there’s a whole literary cannon based on it (looking at you Shakespeare)! Often in life we get the opportunity to rectify the miscommunication and there’s no harm done, but interviews are not one of these opportunities. First impressions in interviews are ridiculously important and, fairly or not, all the explanations in the world won’t take back that gut feeling you’ve given an interviewer that you’re not a great fit. Here’s an example; a candidate of ours recently had an interview. He was (like all our candidates!) a very strong candidate and we were pretty confident. Even the best of us sometime eat our words. The candidate told the interviewer that he likes to do more difficult work, a pretty innocuous statement to most people, and a statement which was clearly intended to demonstrate that the candidate enjoys a challenge and doesn’t shy away from hard work. Unfortunately the interviewer rejected this candidate because he interpreted that statement as meaning that the candidate would only undertake work that he considered interesting and would ignore the day-to-day essentials, which would make him a difficult employee and a poor team player. One take away from this example is the importance of well-rounded individuals. This doesn’t mean you don’t have a specific strength or area of expertise, but that you are willing to do all aspects of the job with enthusiasm. But my larger point is that it’s frustratingly easy to be misinterpreted. A good way to avoid this for candidates is to anticipate the questions you will be asked and have set answers. You can then look for various ways in which your statement can be interpreted, or even ask a friend (or reddit!) to take a look. This is more difficult on the fly and you can’t prepare for every potential question, but just practicing this will change the y you think about your use of language. The best way to avoid this as a candidate is to use work based examples. Something like ‘I was excited to be included in X project which had extremely complex aspects including XYZ. The challenging work pushed me to achieve my best and the team environment was mutually supportive which taught me a lot about supporting others and accepting help from teammates, I also learnt a lot about time management by undertaking this project on top of my everyday tasks.’ See what I did there? You’ve got passion, you’ve got ambition, you’ve got time management skills, you’ve got a can do attitude, you play well with others, you’re eager to learn, but you still finish your dinner before you have dessert.    However, the onus should also be in hiring managers. A great hiring manager does not take things on face value and understands that candidates are nervous and might misspeak. Always be probing; the simple version of that would be asking the candidate if they can explain in more detail or give an example. It might be a bit radical, but that hiring manager could have said ‘what about doing (insert mundane task here)’ and used their intuition to divine whether or not the candidate was lying when they professed their love of said mundane task. A more subtle approach would be asking something along the lines of ‘what do you believe you achieve by volunteering for the more challenging work?’, this would have given the candidate the opportunity to explain that they like to push themselves are rise to a challenge. So, it’s the responsibility of both candidates and hiring managers to prevent the interview turning into a misunderstanding of Shakespearean proportions. The candidate needs to be aware of how they can be misinterpreted, and the hiring manager needs to be more lenient with candidates and take the time to ask questions.