Posts Tagged ‘skills’

There are a number of things for job seekers to consider when looking for work. However, it is important to be aware of what employers look for in each candidate. The following is a list of the most important elements that employers consider when hiring a new employee.

• Attention To Detail: This starts with your application and flows through to the work your will do. Having a keen eye for detail puts you ahead of the competition.
• Ability: If you can’t do the job, you won’t get hired. Know yourself before you apply.
• Education/Experience: These two elements are often used as qualifying factors to trim down the applicant list. This doesn’t mean you can’t get hired without the right mix, but you may face an uphill battle convincing the employer.
• Initiative: Managers love employees with initiative. If you can anticipate what needs to be done (and start before being asked), it will going a long way towards a successful career.
• Communication Skills: This is often overlooked by candidates, but it appears on almost every job posting. Discovering that a candidate’s written and verbal communications skills are lacking will often derail their application.
• Fit: This is one of the intangible elements that can make all the difference. Hiring employees who fit with the corporate culture makes the entire team more productive.
• Confidence: Confident people are more persuasive, more likely to take calculated risks, and can command the respect of those around them. These types of candidates make employers swoon.

While this isn’t an exclusive list, ensuring that you “match” as many of these elements as possible should increase your success rate in the short term.

Once you have found a job that you are interested in, it’s time to start marketing yourself. For 99% of all of the jobs you will apply for, you will be expected to submit a resume and cover letter. This is the fourth step in the process of finding your first “real” job after school.

So what is a cover letter? A cover letter is an introduction to you as an applicant. It is designed to give a brief overview of who are are and what you can bring to the table. It rarely goes into detail about your actual experience or education, but will showcase some of your skills (particularly if they match the job description). This cover letter is often used to screen candidates before the employer even looks at the resume.

That leaves us with the resume itself. Your resume (or CV in some situations) is a list of your education, experience, references, extra curricular activities, skills and abilities, and so on. By this point, your resume is likely to be more heavily weighted towards the “education” side of things instead of “experience”, but employers will expect that.

One of the main focuses of this site will be to help new graduates craft effective resumes and cover letters which will stand out from the crowd. If you are interested in having either one of yours publicly reviewed on Gradversity.com, please drop us a line on our contact page and we will provide more details from there.

Once you have your cover letter and resume ready to go, the next step in is to go through the interview process. This will be covered in the next post.

Please feel free to drop us a line with any questions or comments that you may have!