Organised, committed, self motivated – give me a break!
January 28, 2008
I’ve been doing a lot of recruitment lately, and having read what feels like a million CVs and sat through endless interviews, asking the same questions and listening to the same answers, I’ve been reflecting on what I think makes people stand out in the recruitment and selection process.
The CV or application form is the applicant’s one and only chance to get noticed by the company they wish to work for, but considering this, there is surprisingly little careful consideration put into this stage by so many people. If I see “I work well individually and in a team” or some variant of this sentence one more time I’m actually going to lose the will to live. It’s not that these attributes aren’t what I’m looking for; it’s just that most people who apply seem to have them, so how am I supposed to pick out the best person?
I’ve just been chatting to a colleague whilst we were screening a CV, and he seemed to think the applicant had over-sold his CV to the point where my colleague was wondering why the applicant was even looking for a new job. I thought there was promise in the CV as the applicant had at least tried to show something different to the norm by listing specific achievements and properly selling himself, rather than just saying “I am very organised, self motivated and committed”. I guess it’s a matter of truth. Expressing your skills and experience in a way which makes them sound impressive and attractive to employers is fine; telling lies to make your CV sound better is not. This is where effective interviewing should come in.
Some people are naturally confident in interviews and don’t have to try to hard to sell themselves. For everyone else it can be a nightmare. For me, the main thing to remember is to exemplify your answers. Interviewers want to know that you can do what they’re asking, and they want proof! If I’m asking someone how they will cope with the pressure of telesales, I don’t want to just hear that they are very resilient; I probably won’t believe them. If they tell me about a situation they dealt with that required resilience, and the outcome of their actions, I am more inclined to warm to the abilities of the candidate. Even candidates who are fairly inexperienced can do this, by drawing on situations from other areas of their lives. And I’m more impressed when the candidate does this without prompting. Basically, I don’t want to sit through an interview repeatedly asking “and can you give me an example of that?”
In the recruitment and selection process, candidates need to use only the experience they have had to sell themselves to the prospective employer, i.e. they must not fabricate events that didn’t take place. The skill is in presenting this experience in a way that stands out from the rest – a way which covers all the necessary attributes the employer is looking for without them thinking “I’ve heard it all before”.
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