On my luas journey home today from meeting a client, I started mulling over another theme which keeps popping up in my consultations – linking or packaging up experience. Recently, I’ve noticed clients are encountering difficulties with linking previous experience to job vacancy requirements when making job applications and when answering interview questions.
Many people assume that an employer will ‘just know’ by looking through their CV which parts of their career history and experience are relevant to the role they are applying for. However, this is not the case, as more often than not CV’s are given a 20 second scan by a recruiter and that’s if they are even screened by a real person in the first place!
So how do we address this? I find the simplest way to go about it is to thinking of it as a matching exercise. Go through the job advert line by line, matching up what the employer is looking for with your own example of when you’ve previously demonstrated that particular requirement in your own career history. This exercise is extremely important as it will help you when writing your targeted cover letter, tailoring your CV and preparing for your interview.
In the cover letter, I would recommend picking out about 3-4 of the most desirable requirements and providing an example of how you’ve done these in your past roles. In the CV, as always I would tailor it so that relevant experience is listed towards to the top of each role.
This “packaging up” is also relevant when answering interview questions. It involves picking out the relevant experience you have from previous roles/experiences and linking this to the reasons you give as to why you want to do the job you are interviewing for.
Essentially, you are making the recruiters hiring decision as easy as you possibly can. The recruiter will have a list of requirements they are looking for and you are helping them out by pin-pointing when you have demonstrated these requirements in your previous roles. Be as specific as possible. Outline the specific reasons why you meet all the requirements listed in the advert and emphasise what you have to offer.
Most of us find it difficult to talk about ourselves and gloss over our achievements. It is easy to assume that an interviewer will ‘just know’ what a role entailed and how it links up to what they are looking for based on reading the employment and education history within your CV. In order to showcase your suitability, it’s important spell out and to package up your experience so that it highlights all your strong points and is presented in a way that makes it easy for the recruiter to see how you are the ideal candidate for their role.