THE ROUGH ART OF SHORT LISTING

It’s expensive to take senior staff away from other duties and put them in an interview room, so organisations need to reduce a long list of applicants down to a small number who will be called for interview – the short list.

Textbooks on recruitment and selection underline the importance of objective and fair pre-selection, or short listing. As soon as real people are involved this becomes a rather uncertain business. The aim is 100 per cent perfect prediction, but actual results are a long way off that, even using tests and structured interviews.

Some methods (such as references) give results much closer to pure chance. If you’re in an interview being asked bizarre questions, fired at you by someone who isn’t really listening to your answers, you might like to know that the predictive power of an unstructured interview is not significantly greater than random selection.

Occupational psychologists admit that there is no sure-fire way of predicting how someone will perform on the job in the long term just by examining the evidence candidates present on paper and in person. Some factors, particularly long-term motivation, are very hard to measure.

Thankfully, selectors are usually objective enough to focus with some clarity on the skills and attributes that will be a pretty good match to the job. However, the selection process is not a perfect way of assessing people, which is why you need to think carefully about how you listen to feedback (see Chapter 20).

Employers don’t need perfect candidates; a recruiter’s real goal is the best person in the best time at the best cost. Your job is to stand out enough from the short list to move to the interview stage, avoiding the classic mistakes made by those many job seekers who do everything they possibly can not to stand out from the crowd.

‘SIX FOR SIX’

Many recruiters say they spend less than 20 seconds assessing a CV. That means you have to make an impact FAST. The key here is to make it easy for the recruiter to spot your key messages so that your CV ends up in the right pile on the recruiter’s desk.

Your standard CV will probably start with a short profile highlighting what you want people to remember about you. Then hopefully you will have a list of skills, achievements and other factors which are likely to hit the high value items on the employer’s shopping list. So far so good.

But here’s where one of those small changes can make all the difference between an invitation to interview and a swift journey to the bin. The insider secret is that what your potential employer is really looking for as they sift through the big pile on their desk, are the ‘deal-breaker’ elements. These boil down to between 6 and 10 requirements – beyond that is the realm of ‘nice to have’.

If you just send your standard CV, you are leaving it to chance that your list of skills happens to include the recruiter’s wish list. That isn’t smart practice. It is crucial to tailor your CV and covering letter so that you stand out as the candidate who is delivering all of their six big ticket items.

Sounds too simple? You would be amazed how many applications fail to play the ‘six for six’ game. It’s also an excellent way of working on your primary messages at interview (see Chapter 12).

THE TOP 10 REASONS CVS ARE REJECTED

If an interview goes wrong, it could be for a thousand different reasons but the chances are it will be one of the factors identified in Chapter 2 and elsewhere in this book. The same is true for CVs – if you’re not getting short listed, the probability is that your CV is letting you down for one or more of the following reasons which regularly come up in surveys of what employers find off-putting:

1. Your CV is not tailored to the role – either in terms of content (right skills and knowledge) or style (the information is hard to find and not in language an employer finds easy to buy into). Avoid impenetrable acronyms or jargon.
2. The first 30 words of your CV send out the wrong summary message – for example, starting with a job title which limits your options. Younger applicants tend to write far too much about their qualifications and not enough about skills.
3. Many CVs over-sell, sometimes embarrassingly. Avoid empty adjectives, CV clichés (‘individualist but also a team player’); focus on what you have done rather than what you think you are like.
4. Over-delivery is a major problem. Two pages is ideal, three is acceptable, but make sure that your key messages are in the first two-thirds of page one. The best CVs get your five or six most suitable pieces of evidence across quickly; the worst are full of irrelevant data.
5. Over-fussy presentation – coloured paper, mixed fonts, fancy text effects. Use a simple layout with plenty of white space. Use bullet points, vary them in length, and start sentences with energetic verbs (e.g. ‘Led ...’ or ‘Initiated ...’).
6. Weaker CVs tend to be a rehash of past job descriptions. Stronger ones write about achievements and show what you added to each role.
7. However, employers quickly feel jaded if you over-egg skills and achievements – back up your claims with hard evidence.
8. Don’t waste space and ink listing skills which could be performed by someone much more junior than you.
9. Look again at your CV profile. Employers dislike profiles if they are full of self-praise, but appreciate ones which say who you are, what you have done, and where you’d like your career to go next.
10. Missing details (show what you got out of gap years, for example), presenting a career history as disjointed (if you had a series of short-term positions write about them as a joined-up career phase, emphasising learning and sector experience); stressing the wrong information (e.g. too much emphasis on your family commitments).

READING THE CLUES – SPOTTING DEAL-BREAKERS

Use all the information at your disposal to interpret what an employer is really looking for. Start with job documents, but learn to read between the lines (get someone experienced to help). The simple rule here is that employers always ask for more than they can assess. It’s vital you realise that, so you can focus your preparation time on those things which will make the biggest difference to success or failure.

How can you interrogate job information effectively? Look at the list of competencies, skills, experience and other factors required for the role.

Your next step is to work out weighting – in other words, what are the ‘must have’ factors that an employer believes are deal-breakers? If you are unsure, examine which points are given maximum attention in the job advertisement; since it’s a lot shorter than the job description, key elements are easier to spot.

Ask yourself how the job could have been described differently. When a job is advertised in print or on the Internet, conscious decisions have been made about what information is left in or out. Some terms are included to make the advertisement attractive, other items are clear indications of deal-breakers. What is given particular emphasis? What is missing? You need to decide whether you have enough material to match, and assuming you do, make sure you pitch your message accordingly, both in your cover letter and at interview.

Next there are the discretionary things that an employer would be pleased to have but can live without. Match them if you can, but not at the expense of good evidence linked to the ‘must have’ list. You might also think of things you can offer which are not on the employer’s wish list. Don’t go overboard here, but there may be strong ingredients in your mix that are not only relevant, but could mark you out as having something extra.

Supplement your review of job documents with any ‘live’ information you can pick up through contacts or by talking to the organisation. Who do you know who has worked at the same place or is a supplier, consultant, in the same sector? Remember you are not attempting to push yourself forward at this stage, just to find out enough about the job to have a more secure target to aim at. One of the best pieces of information you can fall across is to find out what kind of person held the job beforehand. For example, if the last person took a lot of risks and things didn’t work out, the chances are that this time the employer is seeking a safe pair of hands. If the last post holder was an internal candidate who didn’t shine, the chances are much higher that an external candidate will get the job.

Some job ads explicitly offer a contact person for questions. Use this conversation for exactly that – there is no point trying to sell yourself into an interview at this stage, but you will be remembered if you ask intelligent questions. Employers are irritated by candidates who try to push themselves onto a short list by asking for special consideration. Always remember, in their eyes it’s not about what you want, it’s about what they need. They aren’t going to care if you’ve been looking for a job for ages, or you have a holiday booked, or you have another pressing job offer (although the last one may make you seem more desirable).

If the job is being handled by a recruitment agency, ask a complicated or technical question about the job. This means you will probably get a chance to speak to the consultant handling the job rather than the first person to pick up the phone. When you speak to the consultant work hard at establishing a warm working relationship – try to drop one or two pieces of information into the conversation that will help you be remembered.

LANGUAGE

A point that relates as much to interviews as short listing is to find the right language. You will have heard a lot about transferable skills, and probably wonder if you have any. In fact your skills only become transferable if you describe them in a way that a busy employer finds attractive. Research conducted by the website Gumtree in August 2010 indicated that 52 per cent of employers found that applicants did not identify relevant skills when they were trying to change sectors.

It may surprise you to know that most people are not good at identifying their skills. They tend to undervalue what they do well, only describe the skills valued by their current employer, and ignore the skills used outside work. Learn to translate your skills – skills only become ‘transferable’ when an employer spots them, understands them, and then buys into them. Your job is to make that happen. Employers often complain that candidates use jargon or describe their skills in terms used in another sector. Look carefully at the language the employer uses on its website and elsewhere in describing roles and functions. Ask the advice of people with sector knowledge: ‘How do I describe my experience in a way that makes me sound like an inside track candidate?’

You get three main chances to communicate your skills: (1) in your CV, (2) in conversations with people who can help you, and (3) in a job interview. Remember, it’s not what you have done, but how you sell your experience – so use active language like ‘led’, ‘organised’, ‘built’. Avoid making hollow-sounding claims about your skills (‘I am a self-starter’) but give clear evidence – times you used your skills, and what happened as a result.

Research on social interaction points us to the importance of mirroring. Much of this is expressed in body language where we find ourselves adopting the same postures as someone we get on with. Mirroring also occurs in the words we speak – a conversation is often successful if we match the speaking style of the other person. At interview you’re given big clues about the language to use to describe your skills and experience. So, if someone is using technical language, use it in return. If someone is speaking formally, you need to be less casual.

FROM SHORT LIST TO THE BIG DAY

In an interview, you find yourself trusting in a number of things – your CV, your work history, your skills. Sadly some candidates forget an important truth: the reason that people don’t do well at interview is far more often about what happens in the interview room than your past experience.

So, first of all, give yourself a pat on the back for getting this far. Getting an interview means you already have evidence that you match at least three-quarters of the employer’s requirements. Having won through the short list by matching your experience to the job, you will have to repeat the process at interview. Careers specialist Malcolm Watt states that ‘Most people go into an interview nervous of the outcome and thinking they have a mountain to climb before they achieve a job offer’, adding that ‘getting an interview puts you more than half way up the mountain – you wouldn’t be in the interview if they didn’t think you could do the job.’

So now you can build on the well-presented evidence that has got you past stage one, and move into interview mode. When you get there, what you have to do is to relax just enough to reveal the rest, including the right degree of confidence and the ability to get on with people.

Now you also need to get your head in the right place ...