What Employers Want : Stop Making the Same Mistakes

This isn’t so much what employers want, as some observations about mistakes I see people make all the time. Think of it as ways to avoid wasting time and making yourself look stupid!

Do your research. Know what you are applying for and who you are applying too.
Apply to a company in the appropriate way, typically described on their website. If you don’t use their preferred channels, you’ve probably wasted your time.
As an example of the previous point, many companies in the UK only employ via agencies, often having exclusive deals with those agencies. They will typically make this clear on their websites.
Tailor your resume and covering letter for each specific application, emphasising the relevant and de-emphasising the irrelevant for that role. One size fits all is not your best approach.
Your LinkedIn profile can be useful, but by it’s nature it is general. Don’t send a CV only to have it contradicted by what you say on LinkedIn.
Don’t bullshit! It’s so obvious.
Don’t send an email saying things like, “Got any jobs? Check out my LinkedIn profile!” You’ve just made a bad impression by clearly not doing your research, and probably deselected yourself!
Don’t contact people (like me) that clearly don’t employ people and ask for a job. Your lack of research makes you look stupid.
Companies will often Google you to find out more about you. If your social media is full of pictures and videos of you drunk and mooning at the camera, or you publish controversial material and opinions you are probably not going to get the job. Definitely don’t trash previous companies or colleagues. Clean up your public presence as best you can.

Check out the rest of this series here.

Cheers

Tim…

What Employers Want : Make Yourself Stand Out

If a job is worth applying for, lots of other people will be applying for it as well. What makes you stand out?

If you’ve taken on board some of the previous posts you already know about qualifications, enthusiasm, self-sufficiency, communication skills, confidence etc. If you’ve got those things down, you are on the right path, but what else can you do? Here are some of my opinions…

Blog : Over the course of your career you should keep writing about your subject. It will improve you as an individual and it’s public evidence that you take an interest in your subject. Over time it will improve your confidence when it comes to written work. If you do it for long enough you may even be able to build a profile for yourself, which may open doors for you. Just remember that not every company is populated by people who follow what’s happening in the community. There are no guarantees.

Present : Similar to blogging, this will improve you are a person and make you more confident in group situations, like job interviews and meetings. This could be something you do for colleagues as part of knowledge spreading, or you could venture out into the wider Oracle community, which can be helpful from a networking perspective.

User Groups and Local Meetups : Whether you are a student or already in work, try getting involved with a user group or local meetup in your area. You will learn a lot and you will meet people. Make the effort to interact. Especially at the local meetups, you will hear people speaking about their companies and vacancies etc. I’m not suggesting you turn up and ask for a job, but if you’ve built up a relationship with the people in your local meetup, you may find new opportunities. Networking is important!

Followers of the blog will know I’m rather biased where blogging and public speaking are concerned, but I can’t emphasise enough how this will change you as a person. Invest in yourself and the rest will fall into place!

Remember, if it is a good job you will be in competition with a lot of people for it. What makes you stand out from the crowd? If the answer is nothing, then you have some work to do before you will be able to get a job like that!

Check out the rest of this series here.

Cheers

Tim…

What Employers Want : Confidence

Confidence is an attractive quality. When you get as far as the interview stage, the way you present yourself will have a big influence on how you are perceived.

Outwardly, confidence is all about body language. You don’t have to be a confident person to act like you are confident. Confidence can be practiced/faked. Amy Cuddy does a great TED talk about this called “Your body language may shape who you are“. The idea being “fake it until you make it”, or better still, “fake it until you become it”. Take 20 minutes out of your day and watch this video. You will not regret it!

Questions have been raised over the science behind these claims, but I am a firm believer in this. I’m not naturally a confident person. I wasn’t born able to stand in front of hundreds of people and present. It is a skill I’ve worked on, and still do. Over time you adapt and it gets easier. Remember, “fake it until you become it”. 🙂

I have another series devoted to public speaking tips where I discuss this. Unless you’ve practiced speaking in public, how do you hope to present yourself properly in an important interview? If you’ve presented to a few hundred people, sitting in an interview panel will be simple.

Work on your verbal and written skills so you can present yourself in a confident manner, even if you are internally bricking it. 🙂

Check out the rest of this series here.

Cheers

Tim…

What Employers Want : Communication Skills

It’s important you can present yourself in a confident and professional manner when it comes to interviews, but this also carries over into a work environment.

Once you get a job you need to be able to communicate effectively with your colleagues and with your customers/users. I know you think your silent genius act makes you look special, but it doesn’t. The initial interaction between humans involves building rapport. It’s kind-of difficult to build rapport with someone who refuses to talk to you and can’t look you in the eye. You need to get your communication skills sorted before you try to enter the job market.

If you are working in IT your written skills will be really important. You will need to communicate with colleagues and customers/users in a concise, but accurate way. People won’t read waffle (TL;DR), but they will demand enough detail to make sense of what you are saying. A quick read through your typical IT forum will make you realise that most people have terrible written skills and are incapable of stringing together a logical argument. You don’t have to be a prize winning novelist, but you need to be able to make yourself understood.

Remember in a previous post I wrote about enthusiasm. It doesn’t matter how enthusiastic you are if you can’t express it!

I’ve written some post on writing tips and public speaking tips. I think this is important for you as someone who is trying to enter the job market, or someone who is trying to move up the ladder. Don’t lose out on an opportunity because you’ve neglected your soft skills!

Check out the rest of this series here.

Cheers

Tim…

What Employers Want : Self-Sufficiency

Of the people and companies I spoke to, self-sufficiency was a common thread. They were looking for traits like the following in prospective employees.

The ability to learn for themselves. Of course companies will be looking to train you, but they don’t want a wet lettuce that sits waiting for the next handout of knowledge. You have to take some personal responsibility.
Willing to make decisions. There are a lot of people who refuse to step up to the plate when someone has got to make decisions. Typically those people will be the first to start moaning when things don’t go as planned. When push comes to shove you have to be willing to get in there and make a decision.
Willing to take responsibility for their actions. Sometimes you will make the wrong decision, or make a mistake. It’s important you can recognise your mistake, admit it and move on. Some people will spend incredible amounts of energy trying to hide their mistakes, or prove they were somehow correct. If they just owned up and moved on things would be better for everyone.
Willing to ask for help when it is appropriate. As much as you need to be self-sufficient, you need to know when it is right to ask for help. Nobody likes to work with a leach that never takes responsibility for things, but by the same token you don’t want someone to spend weeks figuring out something you could have pointed out to them in a couple of minutes. Finding that balance is important.
Never bullshit! I can’t stress enough how important this point is. Saying I don’t know is a perfectly valid response. People can smell bullshit a mile off and it’s going to make you look stupid. Be honest and you won’t have a problem. It takes a surprising amount of confidence to say I don’t know. People will respect you for it! In an interview you can always redirect the question like, “I don’t know, but it sounds similar to X, which I have done…”, so the “I don’t know” becomes an opening into you speaking about something you are good at…

Check out the rest of this series here.

Cheers

Tim…

What Employers Want : Enthusiasm

When I looked through the feedback I received from a variety of people and companies I kept seeing the same words and phrases. I think when you read them you will understand why.

Enthusiasm
Passion
Energy
Intelligence
Fresh thinking
Diversity of talent/interest

Companies are not necessarily looking for the finished article. They are looking for people who can adapt, grow and bring something to the company. This is especially true of graduate employees. It’s going to be difficult for you to reach your potential unless you can tick some of these boxes.

When you are applying for a job you have to ask yourself what your application says about you in relation to these points. If your application doesn’t display these traits you’ve failed. If you are not able to display these traits in an interview you’ve failed. We’ll talk about how to show these traits in other posts in the series.

Ultimately, if you are not enthusiastic and passionate about what you do you are going to struggle, but if you are enthusiastic, don’t hide it!

Check out the rest of this series here.

Cheers

Tim…

What Employers Want : Qualifications

The companies and individuals I spoke to tended to split into 3 main groups regarding their attitudes to qualifications. Let’s call them yes, no, maybe. Remember, this question was mostly aimed at their attitudes towards graduate employees, so it doesn’t necessarily relate to their views on certifications. I’ve discussed that subject here.

Yes

Some companies care a lot about qualifications. This can be for several reasons.

They consider themselves the best, so they only employ the best.
If you don’t have the best grades it “proves” you don’t care about the subject.
They get so many applicants they throw away every application that doesn’t meet certain criteria, just to make their lives easier. It’s part of their HR process.

Don’t bother applying to companies like this unless your grades are top notch. You are wasting your time and theirs. No matter how outstanding you think you are, your application is going straight for the bin.

No

Some companies don’t worry so much about qualifications, but maybe for different reasons than you might expect.

Grades are irrelevant, it’s the person we care about.
Everyone has great grades, so we look for other things.
Grades mean nothing. We want experience.
What have you done? What apps you’ve built? What open source contributions have you made? Community participation?

This might sound like the easy option at first, but actually most of these companies that “don’t care about qualifications” are harder to get a job with than those that care about grades. They are looking for standout individuals. Chances are the people they are looking for happen to have amazing grades anyway, as well as being well rounded and self-motivated types. When several thousand people apply for that job, what makes you stand out?

Maybe

Most companies consider qualifications as part of the package, but it is not the deciding factor.

What Should You Do?

You should take the time to investigate the companies you are interested in. Contact their HR departments and find out their attitudes. It is incredibly lazy of you to just send an application without doing the research and expect to get an interview. Do some research to check they are the right company for you and you are the right person for them!

Check out the rest of this series here.

Cheers

Tim…

What Employers Want : A Series of Posts

A couple of years ago I was asked to give a talk about employability, with respect to graduates. I’m not an expert in that field, so I reached out to a few friends and companies to get some feedback about what they expect from new staff. I get questions about jobs all the time, so I figured I would write a short series of posts on the subject, just so I can refer people to them.

The posts in the series are as follows.

After doing the presentation I discussed it with the careers staff present, who confirmed this matched the feedback they were getting from their industrial contacts, so it seems the feedback I got from my contacts was on the money!

As I publish each post I will turn these bullet points into links.

Hope this helps.

Cheers

Tim…