Keep your nerve - risk factors in job applications

responding to the risk factors in job applications

When applying for jobs, most people unconsciously drift towards caution. They fall back on legacy designs and barren concepts, stale, formal and pompous writing. Ask yourself: is my style of application motivated by the desire NOT to be rejected and NOT to look foolish?

In reaction to the utterly dull, people sometimes go carelessly "different" in several excruciating forms: grandiose layouts culled from American WP software; lashings of unconnected superlatives in bullet form; long lists of objectives, skills, achievements, results and technologies. These devices do not on their own build a picture of who you are, any more than a technical specification looks like a washing machine that gets clothes whiter. It's the "gets clothes whiter" you need to be communicating, not the operating voltage or even the spin speed.

no rules/no guarantees

Jobhunting is a risk and it is in the nature of successful risk taking that you have to be able to let go of the outcome. Real gamblers play the odds and take loss in their stride; they don't wait until their shirt is on one last desperate hand.

There are no rules. There is no right way to apply. The process could take hours, weeks or months. Your CV could be making contact with an office junior or a seasoned recruiter. It could be scanned onto a computer or carefully screened by a real sophisticate who can read between whatever tricks you try. They could be rigid in fitting the job definition or they could be no clearer than you are about what they really want. There is no fool-proof method and there are no secret back doors.

The good news that I can bring you, based on making thousands of applications over many years, is that recruiters are also human. They respond to humanity. They admire innovative attempts to communicate. They appreciate it when you try to explain what you really have to offer. They are, in general, open to quite daring forms of application.

the really good news

Recruiters fall over themselves to be friendly and to come up with stimulating job descriptions. Their careers depend on finding good candidates, not rejecting bad ones, and the detail they need to go into in terms of your character and likely performance becomes more subtle every year. Who you really are is what they really want to know; they are not chasing images or tricks of presentation.

In a world where business style matters more than ever, employers need to anticipate how you will perform in their real-life scenarios. Characteristics such as leadership, courage, imagination and vision are in such high demand that they are almost the dividing line between the high-flier and the also-ran.

Promoting yourself at this level is not a five minute fix to your CV. I advise my clients to come clean to themselves about their attitudes so far and take a realistic look at their strategies, before beginning the process of re-presenting themselves.

Every day I speak to people with solid and even outstanding careers whose existing CVs rather lamely promote a few facts, figures and results and rather tamely list their jobs, qualifications, school results and other trivia. Often it takes me hours to dig out of them some idea of the context in which they have worked, the way they have developed their roles, the contributions they have made to shaping change, the partnerships they have built, the knowledge they have acquired and the ideas and expertise they can contribute towards a future business model that will be constantly changing. This is what recruiters are really wanting to know about.

Done properly, this process is even capable of gaining interviews for appointments for which candidates have already been turned down. Done properly, creating context in a professional sounding way, you can easily stand out from the lemmings and bring a sparkle to the eyes of recruiters who are sick to death of totally safe applications that leave them guessing.

The CV Sage guide has been specially created to help with these issues in detail.

These topics are covered in greater depth in CV Sage with examples and exercises. Take a look!