What Do Employers Want

Few organizations can succeed without a skilled and committed workforce. This is why many organizations will go to enormous lengths during recruitment to ensure that they select people with the knowledge, expertise and attitudes to perform their jobs to the required standard.

In the main, employers are looking for candidates who:

- Have appropriate job skills

- Are enthusiastic and willing to help

- Inspire confidence

- Can communicate effectively

- Can work with others

- Can organize themselves to achieve their objectives

If you can develop and demonstrate these skills and behaviours, you will secure your place at the top of any recruiter’s selection list.

Job skills

Job skills are the specific professional and technical skills and knowledge required for a particular job. These skills vary widely, from basic word-processing skills or van driving to knowledge of the law or carrying out surgery. People have to develop their job skills to different levels depending on the type or grade of job that they are doing.

Confidence

Confidence is a vital ingredient of a successful career. If you are confident you will inspire confidence in others and you will be able to fight your corner when it comes to getting what you want. Everything that you do and say will give the impression that you have (or lack) confidence.

Effective communication

The ability to communicate well is a vital element of success in any job. Communication is about understanding other people and enabling them to understand us. It is a two-way process and it is as much about listening and reading as it is about talking and writing.

Working with others

It does not matter if your colleagues are in the same room or scattered all over the world – you still need to be able to build positive working relationships with them. The quality of your working relationships directly affects your commitment and your ability to achieve the task in hand.

Organizing yourself

To add value to any business organization you have to be prepared to take personal responsibility for achieving your objectives. You must be able to identify your personal priorities, organize yourself and manage your time effectively.

Once you have established what prospective employers are looking for, it is time to determine what you have already so that you can work out how to fill the gaps.

Ideal Job

We were all born with unique gifts and talents, but the trouble is that few of us know how to find out what they are and to make the most of them. The result is that too many of us drift into unsuitable careers and end up feeling dissatisfied and unfulfilled. The good news is that it is never too late to go back to the drawing board and identify the right kind of work.

Select your employer
It is easy to forget that finding a job is actually a two-way transaction and that you do not have to accept the first offer which comes along. To put yourself in the most powerful position you need to analyse:

- Yourself: what are your values and your interests? What experience do you have? What skills and personal qualities can you offer an employer?

- Your job requirements: what industries do you want to work in? What role do you want to perform? What working conditions are you looking for? How much money do you want to earn?

Once you have this information, you will be able to evaluate the suitability of various options or opportunities. It may be that your ideal work is not a job at all but a business enterprise or a ‘portfolio’ of part-time positions. It is not rocket science, but the more information you have the better your decision will be.

Your values
These people are all talking about their work values:

Your personal work values are the beliefs and feelings that are important to you; they are central to the quality of your life. The more you are able to pursue a career which allows you to live out your values, the more satisfying your life will be.

By clarifying our values, we may be able to find better ways of realising them both in our jobs and in our lives outside work. There are no rights or wrongs here because everyone has different values.

Your values could be things like:

• Job security
• Good working conditions
• Opportunities for learning new skills
• The expectation of promotion and advancement
• Earning enough to live well
• Achieving something worthwhile
• Having personal power and influence
• Fulfilling my potential
• A sense of belonging
• Doing work that involves a physical effort

Use this list to trigger your thoughts and to help you decide what your personal values are. Make lists of the values that are the most important and the ones that are least important to you.

Then look at your job:

• Are there any values which you have identified as being important to you which do not find expression in the work you do now?
• Do any of your ‘least important’ values feature in what you do now?
• Can you think of any job or career that would satisfy the values you have identified?

Your interests
The more interested you are in something, the easier it is to work at it. It can be something very specific like gardening or using the computer. Or it could be a general interest like ‘working with children’. Making a life change demands determination and hard work, but you can do that if you really love what you are involved in. It therefore makes sense to look for work which satisfies your deepest interests, what you really like doing and what you want to do.

- Make a list of the ten things you most like to do.
- If you could choose to do anything today, what would it be?
- Is there anything you would work at for no wage?
- What would you do if you had a guarantee that whatever you did, it would succeed?

Once again the answers to these questions will provide you with clues that may highlight the decisions you need to make. Leave no stone unturned in your quest for your dream job. Often the answers to your questions and problems are closer than you think.

curriculam vitae

Your CV is your marketing leaflet and its purpose is to show that you are right for the job. It is vital to be able to demonstrate that you understand exactly what the employer is looking for and how you match the criteria they have set. Always think about what you are writing from the point of view of the reader. Do not be tempted to describe all of your skills and qualities in great detail in the CV, only include the most relevant information.

To create a brilliant CV:
- Keep it short: the rule of thumb is that your CV should never be longer than two sides of A4. You are not trying to describe your entire life history in minute detail. The aim is to show the employer that you have what they are looking for and to leave them wanting to ask you more.

Stand out from the crowd: it is important to show that you are interesting and different enough to be worth interviewing. You can achieve this by developing your own style, applying colour in a subtle, elegant way and paying attention to fonts, headings and layout.

Choose the right format: create a ‘chronological’ CV (starting with the most recent jobs and working backwards) if you want to emphasise the way that your career has developed logically and progressively over a number of years. Create a ‘functional’ CV if you want to present the transferable skills that you have picked up in different roles – including work, home and leisure pursuits. Use the functional approach if you have had any career breaks or if you want to make a career change.

Select the right words: it is important to work hard at presenting information in a positive, direct and personal way. Get straight to the point and do not be afraid of writing T statements which bring home what your skills are and what you are capable of doing. Always choose strong, active phrases like’ I achieved’,’ I created’ and ‘I organised’.

Include brief details: write brief paragraphs on personal details, education (names of schools and colleges, dates attended and qualifications gained), tiaining courses (and certificates gained), employment (job roles, names of employers, start and finish dates, main duties, achievements and skills), interests and references (names, job roles and contact details).

Do not include things like: your age, marital status, children, weight, place of birth, state of health and national insurance number. You do not need to include GCSE grades if you went on to do A levels or a degree. Do not mention any exams you failed.

Make sure it looks professional: use clear bold headings, arrange the text in neat blocks, leave wide margins and plenty of white space. Keep it simple – use bullet points to separate your ideas clearly. Avoid using lots of different fonts, italics or underlining.

Business Coaching

One reason for poor time management is that managers are often so busy they simply cannot stop and think about whether or not what they are doing is actually getting them anywhere. It is like trying to think about draining the swamp when you are being attacked by alligators. You know it is important to get time management sorted out and you resolve to do something about it, but only when you have the time.

The problem is that if you let things drift, you can fall into the activity trap. This means that your activities – the way you spend your time day in and day out – may actually be standing in the way of getting where you really want to go.

If you are in the activity trap, you may be one of the following kinds of people.

A fire-fighter
You are a fire-fighter if you never have a minute to spare and are always in a panic, dealing with matters which are ‘top priority’, ‘urgent’ or ‘vital’. The trouble with ‘crisis management’ is that it is usually very stressful for everyone involved and it makes people cut corners or make mistakes.

A soft touch
You are a soft touch if you are always at everyone else’s beck and call, even though you know that you are already under pressure. Unfortunately, taking other people’s problems on board means that you have little time to devote to your own priorities. You are also depriving others of opportunities to take responsibility or to make their own decisions.

A donkey
You are like a donkey on a treadmill if you are trapped into a dull pattern of doing the same things day after day or week after week. Your life may be easy but your activities are unchallenging. You may well feel frustrated because you are in a rut, never getting anywhere.

A dabbler
You are a dabbler if you move from one activity to the next, always looking for satisfaction but never actually finding it. The problem with dabbling is that you never focus your efforts on mastering a single area of your life.

A tornado
Do you travel through life at 90 miles an hour, packing every day with wall-to-wall activities, never pausing to catch your breath? The difficulty here is that you are probably putting both yourself and anyone around you under great stress even though you do not realise it. You may be afraid to stop for a moment because, if you do, you will have to consider where it is all taking you in the end.

Avoiding the activity trap
The only way out of the activity trap is to focus on what you really want to achieve, to identify your priorities and only then to decide on how to use your time to best advantage.