THE SELLING PROCESS

(the job seeker’s point of view)

THE BUYING PROCESS

(employer’s point of view)

Recruitment company, Robert Half, asked 300 major UK employers for examples of their more unusual job candidates at interview:

• Candidate fell asleep during interview.
• Candidate tried to take his domes off.
• Candidate confessed to being a convicted murderer.
• Candidate challenged interviewer to an arm-wrestling contest.
• Bald candidate asked to leave the room mind-interview and returned a few minutes later wearing a wig.
• Candidate phones her therapist during the interview to ask the correct response to a question.
• Candidate demanded to see interviewer’s CV to check they were properly qualified.

READING THE JOB ADVERTISEMENT

When applying via an advertisement for vacancies, you need to read the job description carefully for both the stated and hidden requirements. Take the ad on the opposite page based on a real vacancy:

When you apply for a job by telephone or letter and in your interview, you should be armed with the qualities they want to buy from you. So by discovering the stated and hidden agenda in a job description, you are ready to supply your prospective employers with what they need.

CREATING YOUR CV

A CV is a sales document, not a life history and has the main purpose of getting you interviews, not to get you a job – you can do that in person later at the interview stage. Your CV is a multipurpose tool:

• when replying to advertisements
• when making speculative approaches to employers
• when dealing with recruitment agencies
• when preparing for interviews
• as a checklist during any telephone interview.

The purpose of a CV layout is to catch the reader’s eye:

• Use bullet points.
• Use UPPER CASE LETTERS for headings or titles.
• Underlining or italics can be used to highlight dramatic parts of your CV.
• The CV should not be longer than two pages in length.
• Use indenting to separate different types of information.
• Create white space on your CV through wide margins (1 inch minimum on all sides), double spacing between major paragraphs, careful positioning of your name and address.
• Use the best quality paper, ivory, buff or off-white are better than white paper.
• Check your grammar and spelling.
• Make sure your name, address, telephone number and email address is centered at the top of the first sheet.
• If you are mailing your CV, don’t fold it, use a large envelope instead.
• Always send a covering letter with a CV.
• Start each sentence with action verbs to communicate results e.g. designed, researched.
• Don’t use more than two font types. Times Roman is good for the body, while Ariel is good for headings.
• Avoid repetitive information.
• Letter size —12 point minimum.

Your CV format

Chronological CVs

These emphasise work experience and personal history and communicate that you are experienced and established in one area. Layout includes:

• Personal details: Your name, address, telephone number and email address come first.
• Education/qualifications and training: you may wish to separate the information for education and training or put them together, depending whether your background is in practical skills rather than academic ones. Set down the dates of attendance or study in date order with the earliest date first. Identify exams or other assessments taken and subjects passed. If you are applying for a specific job, list exam passes in order of relevance. List only names and school and colleges, not addresses. If you are over 25, leave out education and focus on Vocational Training (include degrees).
• Employment/relevant experience/career: Start with your most recent position, devoting the most space to recent employment. Detail only the last four or five positions of employment. Summarise early positions unless exceptionally relevant to the present. For dates of employment, state the year (not month). Within each position listed, stress the main responsibilities and major accomplishments that demonstrate your full competency to do the job. Relate your experience to the job description and person.
• Interests and additional information: Add anything, which may stress your additional skills, qualities and achievements.
• Referees: Names, titles and addresses of two people to whom references can be made, one usually a work reference.

Functional CVs

These highlight major areas of accomplishments and allow you to organise areas of capability in order that most supports the job you are applying for. Good for an erratic work history. By doing this, you will be able to point toward selected career directions and play down inconsistencies in past work. If you are changing careers or re-entering the job market, this approach will allow you to talk about non-paying work experience and community activities:

• Start with name, address, telephone number and email address.
• Education may be at the top (if recent) or bottom. Put any qualification course completed within the past five years at the top. If you are over 25, omit education and focus on Vocational Training (include degrees).
• Use four or five separate paragraphs, each one headlining a particular areas of expertise.
• List functional paragraphs in order of importance, with the area most related to your present job target at the top and containing slightly more information.
• Within each functional area stress the most directly related accomplishments you have produced or the most significant abilities.
• Know that you can include relevant accomplishments without necessarily identifying which employment or non-employment situation it was connected to.
• If in your interest, list a brief synopsis of your actual work experience at the bottom giving dates, employer and title.

Targeted CVs

These focus on a specific job target, listing appropriate capabilities and supporting accomplishment. Each job target requires a different CV and you must be clear and specific about your job target and the jargon used. Your capabilities and accomplishments must be stated briefly, each in one or two lines and can be directly related to your job target. Your list of capabilities should answer what can you do and your list of accomplishments should answer what have you done. Your experience and education are included but not stressed. Layout includes:

• Put name, address, telephone number and email adddress centered at top.
• List your specific job target next in all capital letters.
• Use the heading ‘Capabilities’ or ‘Abilities’ to describe what you can do for this target. You could follow this with a sentence such as ‘In my target job area, I am able to achieve the following —’. List eight to ten brief capabilities statements.
• Follow this with the heading ‘Accomplishments and Achievements’. Include a lead in statement such as ‘Listed below are some of the accomplishments related to my job target’.
• Follow this with the heading ‘Experience’ and use no more than five lines to summarise your work history (dates, employer, title). If you have more positions to list than five lines will allow, combine earlier jobs in a statement such as ‘1980-1985: held other commercial positions’.
• The final heading is ‘Education’ or training. You should use only two or three lines to detail your most recent education: school, degree etc. If you are over 25, leave out education and focus on Vocational Training (including degrees).

ELECTRONIC APPLICATIONS

This section applies to any sort of e-mail application, either a straightforward e-mail message directly to the company or sending your CV by e-mail to a company or a database. You need to send your application in a format which can be read by any computer and this means using ASCII code – the American Standard Code for Information Interchange. If you were to send it as an e-mail attachment in for example, Word for Windows, the receiving company’s computer might translate it automatically into a garbled mess. You can type it into your word processor, if you want, rather than use the text message part of your e-mail tool, but if you do, you need to remember certain rules:

• Use a monospaced font such as Courier. Other proportionally spaced fonts change accordingly when you convert them and alter any tab settings you have used, creating a mess.
• You cannot use bold or italic type in ASCII.
• Similarly, you cannot use special indents or margin adjustments, although you can use ordinary tabs and spacing —and should do so, to create white space and interest. Keep individual lines to less than 70 characters wide —the receiving computer may have different screen widths and e-mail tools, which will create a garbled mess out of anything wider than 70 characters. Work out what this represents at the start of typing your document and stick to it.
• You can create some interest in the document by using hyphens, asterisks and the letter o for bullet points.
• You then save your file in ASCII by opening the File menu and using the Save As option, name your file and save it as a Text Only file if you are using Word for Windows. (DOS text means the same thing in other word processing packages.) You can send it as an attachment in your e-mail tool by specifying the directory it is in on the hard drive. Or you can paste it into the text message area and send it as you would a normal e-mail message.
• If sending a CV by e-mail, don’t forget to send a covering letter, just as you would in print, unless you are instructed not to do so by the receiving organisation.
• Note that not all CV bank sites offer confidentiality for your personal information such as your address and telephone number. You could consider offering only your e-mail address.

Putting your CV on the web

There are several ways of doing this. One is to put up your own home page on the internet, using your service provider’s system. Another way to put your CV on the web is to use an agency or resume bank that allows you to add your CV to their database. They will often require you to use the format they suggest on-screen. The computer language used to put anything on to the web is called Hypertext Mark-Up Language, or HTML. It uses the principle of tagging to format the document and the end product seen by the viewer depends entirely on the tags and the browser he or she uses. You can see exactly how any web page looks in HTML in your Netscape browser by selecting the View menu and then Document Source.

There are also programming tools available such as Internet Assistant for Word for Windows, which translates the documents you write in Word into HTML. The golden rules seem to be to keep it simple and concise. Don’t use lots of graphics, different fonts and links to everything you can think of. Remember that people looking at your CV with a slower machine will get bored waiting for your site to download and may move on without waiting for it. For a job seeker, this is the worst thing that could happen to you.

The home page should clearly convey exactly what is available at your site. In depth information can be provided on links to further pages. Pages should be predominantly text and if you use images, do not make them essential for conveying your message in case people get annoyed waiting for them to download (unless you are applying for a job in graphic web design!). Be wary of using frames – they are often fiddly and may obscure your message. Don’t forget to date your pages and keep checking them to update them.

You can also post your CV to one of the jobs.wanted newsgroups or the misc.jobs.resumes newsgroups. The former tend to be related to an area of work and the latter cover any work and any country.

Scanned CVs

A recent ‘tomorrow’s World’ on the BBC suggested that around 15 major companies are using this method in the UK. It is far more common in the USA and observers believe that it will grow in popularity here. The software is programmed not only to input the CV into the company’s database, but also to select for interview. The programme showed that the computer selected the same three people for interview as were selected by the personnel officer, but the computer took several seconds to do so against the human’s 20 minutes! OCR software may be unable to distinguish between certain letters in some fonts so don’t use unusual or stylised fonts in paper CVs that may potentially be scanned. You should always use a font size of 10 or greater for the same reason. Always use white or very light paper because scanners do not pick up well from coloured paper. Finally, don’t fold your CV. Send it in a full-sized A4 envelope because folded paper sometimes does not scan well.

USING THE TELEPHONE

When you telephone a company, either in response to an advert or on spec, your chances of selling yourself will depend on your character and enthusiasm coming across in your voice. Some proven tips include:

• having a clear idea of what you want from the call before dialling
• knowing the name and title of the person you want to speak to
• speaking in a lively and enthusiastic manner (smiling helps)
• speaking firmly and clearly
• don’t suppress your body language (try standing up while on the phone if you want to feel more authoritative)
• listen with your right ear to absorb facts and your left ear for extra intuition
• listen to the tone and pitch of voice for hidden meaning.

EFFECTIVE LETTER WRITING

Covering letters

A covering letter is used when sending off your CV or an application form for a specifically advertised vacancy.

Pointers to bear in mind:

• put your full address, telephone number and email address in the letter
• ideally address your letter to a named person if stated in the advert, if there is no name put ‘Dear Sir/Madam’
• if you address the letter to a named person, sign off ‘Yours sincerely’, if you address the letter Dear Sir/Madam, sign off ‘Yours faithfully’
• the first paragraph of the letters should state what you are replying to and where and when seen
• the second paragraph is your sales pitch containing relevant skills, strengths and experience
• the third paragraph is where you indicate your availability for interview and say you have enclosed your CV
• whenever you put something else in an envelope other than the letter always put ENC. at the bottom left hand corner of your letter.

Spec letters

Speculative letters (see Figure 13) are a form of cold calling. They are written to companies with the intention of finding work – only not directly asking for a job. There are four good reasons for writing speculative letters.

• 1.When replying to an advertised vacancy, you may be one of fifty applicants, when you write a spec letters, you may be one of two or three people doing the same thing.
• 2.Your spec letter may arrive when a vacancy needs filling but is not yet advertised (only a very small percentage of vacancies are filled through advertisements).
• 3.Your spec letter is likely to show initiative and could be placed on file for the next suitable vacancy to arise.
• 4.You are so good at selling yourself that you create a need for your services.

Some pointers to bear in mind when sending spec letters:

• tailor-make the letters
• the letter is a business proposition – make it professional
• research the organisation
• target the letter at a named individual
• identify in the letter where you fit in
• the first paragraph of the letters should state who you are, what you do and why you are writing
• the second paragraph is your sales pitch containing relevant skills, strengths and experience
• the third paragraph is where you request a meeting and indicate the enclosed resume
• get a meeting
• don’t ask for a job, ask for information.

INTERVIEW TECHNIQUES

Well done! You have hooked a prospective employer’s interest through your CV, the application form, over the phone or by letter. Now is your chance to sell yourself in person via the interview. The purpose of an interview is to collect information not on the CV or application form, to see what the candidate is like as a person and to give the candidate more information about the job. Interviews tend to follow one of two basic formats:

Criterion questioning: Interview questions are directly linked to the requirements of the job. Used in both private and public sector. The interviewer may concentrate on: leadership, communication skills, planning ability, motivation and commercial awareness. Each area will be examined by a series of related questions e.g. tell me about a presentation you have given – what were you trying to achieve – how did you plan your presentation – how did the audience react – what did you learn from the experience.

Storyboard interview: Looks at recent work history, education and training, circumstances, aspirations and interests.

Preparation is the key to a successful interview and you need to prepare by:

• researching the company
• knowing where you are going and whom you are seeing
• re-reading the job spec and relating your skills, strengths, experience and achievements to the hidden and stated requirements
• reminding yourself of your CV, application form or letter
• preparing for their questions
• preparing your questions.

Did you know:

• 55% of your success depends upon visual factors
• 38% of your success depends upon your voice
• 7% of your success depends upon your spoken word
• YOUR SUCCESS WILL HAPPEN WITHIN THE FIRST THREE MINUTES OF ENTERING THE ROOM

Communication skills

If you want to impress others, use the following body language and speech patterns:

If you want to give someone a bad impression of yourself, use the following:

Questions you could be asked:

• Why do you want this job?
• What your personal aims and goals?
• What are your strengths?
• What are your weaknesses?
• What is your greatest personal achievement to date?
• What do you know about our company?
• Do you have any particular expertise outside your business life?
• Where do you see yourself going in the next five years?
• What were the major problems in your last job?
• Why were you out of work so long?
• What action would you take if you disagreed with a decision of a superior?
• What have you been doing during the time you have been unemployed?
• Would you be applying for this job if you had not been made redundant?
• What sort of tasks do you find difficult?

The following aren’t direct questions, but you may still get them thrown at you:

Questions you could ask them:

• 1.When will you be making your hiring decision for this position?
• 2.How would you describe this organisation’s corporate culture?
• 3.What types of training programmes do you have for the staff?
• 4.What office automation is there?
• 5.Can I see round the office/factory?
• 6.What specific objectives would you expect me to achieve?

HOW TO FLUFF AN INTERVIEW

• 1.have narrow interests
• 2.condemn past employers
• 3.show a lack of interest and enthusiasm
• 4.show little or no interest in the history of the company
• 5.show intolerance or strong prejudices
• 6.be overbearing or conceited
• 7.give vague responses to questions
• 8.show an over-emphasis on money
• 9.expect advancement at an unreasonable rate
• 10.demonstrate poor personal appearance
• 11.be cynical
• 12.show a lack of maturity
• 13.be indecisive
• 14.indicate you are merely shopping around
• 15.show an inability to take criticism
• 16.avoid eye contact with the interviewer
• 17.demonstrate a lack of manner and courtesy.

After the interview, shake the interviewer(s) hand, thank them and indicate your interest. You might like to write a

follow-up letter. The most important thing now is to learn from the interview, praise yourself for what you have done well and prepare for your next one.

No one can sell you better than you can yourself. Your CV, spec letters, application forms, the telephone call and the interview are tools of your trade as a job-seeker. As well as your tools, having pride in your achievements and experience will help to motivate you in your sales pitch. You do have a work history, you have life experience, you may have a family – you are someone. Remember, if you are not successful this time

IT’s YOUR SKILLS THAT ARE BEING
                    REJECTED —
            NOT YOU PERSONALLY
YOU ONLY NEED ONE JOB —MAYBE IT’s THE
              NEXT ONE —KEEP GOING