All About Jobs

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Very soon now, George Bush will hit the ranks of the unemployed. Rumour has it that he’s looking for a new gig and needs your help to write a cover letter.

Do you think you can help?

Drop in to MyCareer here and help George complete his cover letter. You never know what it might do for YOUR career.

Enjoy!

Robin
“Think success - Achieve success”

PS: Free yourself from the need for an eight to five job. Read what others have achieved with this business opportunity.

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When you send your job application by email, make sure you turn on your “Return Receipt” or “Read Receipt” feature of your email client.

If you don’t seek a return receipt, or some acknowledgement that your email has arrived, you will never know whether it has been knocked out by spam filters, been misdelivered or remained unread.

In Mozilla Firefox, click on Options after you have begun writing your email and select the option Return Receipt. As soon as your email is received, you will get an automatic reply to that effect.

If you aren’t familiar with this feature of the email client you use, try the help page or just look around. It’s a feature well worth knowing about.

Robin
“Think success - Achieve success”

When you submit a job application these days, it’s common for employers/recruiters not to acknowledge receipt of your application. It’s a mistake not to follow up.

Job applications take time and effort … your time and effort. They have a cost. When you submit them, you really need to follow up that they have been received by the right person because they do occasionally get misplaced, misdirected or plain lost.

I recall a job candidate telephoning me to ask if his application had arrived. It was three or four days after the deadline. Unfortunately, the guy had emailed it to me, but got my address wrong and no, I hadn’t received it. Although policy dictated that late applications were not to be received, processing of the applications hadn’t yet begun, so I told him to send it in and I’d include it in the applications to be assessed for shortlisting. I had it stamped as having arrived by the deadline (sometimes common sense has to prevail, even in government jobs!).

The moral to the story is: if you go to the trouble of submitting an application and it’s receipt isn’t acknowledged, spend a few minutes making a phone call (preferably before the closing date) to check that it has arrived.

Robin
“Think success - Achieve success”

PS: Efficient organisations should administer their email using a program like Group Mail Pro that will send an autoresponse advising receipt of applications.

Have you heard the phrase, “It’s not what you say, it’s how you say it that matters”? Well, the truth is, you need to learn to use the power of language when applying for jobs.

If you can create word pictures and deliver information in ways that make it understandable to recruitment staff, you’ll be ahead in the jobs competition.

If for example, you are a network engineer, don’t just state, “I have five years experience in networking with a bank.” Although you might expect everyone to know what a network engineer is and does, it’s not a foregone conclusion.

Instead say something like, “When I apply my networking skills to your network, it will positively hum with maximum up-time and optimised emailing and printer facilities … outages will be recovered within minutes.”

This provides a mental picture with which we are all accustomed. Everyone who accesses a LAN or WAN is aware of what happens when they go off line or email backs up. Of course, you should be able to prove what you claim you can do.

That shouldn’t be very hard. With experience competence grows, we learn secrets and ways to do things that are superior. They are the skills we take to our new employer.

Action

Once again, list the range of skills you have and the related experience and next to each skill write a word picture that describes what you can do for your employer. Keep these stock descriptions somewhere where you can access them any time you apply for a job. It will make your life much easier and increase your chances of winning the competition.

Robin
“Think success - Achieve success”

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Studies in advertising suggest that people spend 4 seconds scanning a newspaper page. Recruiters probably spend a similar amount of time viewing your application.

This means you have to attract their attention fast.

People tend to read the ads that they can see have some benefit for themselves … the old “What’s in it for me?” principal. This means that your key benefit to an employer could be well placed as the opening sentence in your cover letter, or at least close to it.

Remember, your cover letter is a sales letter. An acronym for how to write sales letters is - AIDA:

1. Get attention
2. Develop interest
3. Increase the reader’s desire
4. Get action

When you write your opening sentence, choose something that will get attention. Then develop the reader’s interest, desire to know more about you, and ask for action … an interview.

Action

Practise writing some catchy opening sentences like, “You need a secretary who thinks on her feet and goes the extra mile … that’s me to a “t”.”

Or, perhaps, “You’re looking for a problem solver with a track record in customer service. I’m looking for a job where I can solve problems.”

I’m sure you can think of a few more.

Robin
“Think success - Achieve success”

If you are submitting a lot of job applications, which you should be if you are serious, you need to have some kind of tracking system so you know who you have applied to, what the status is of your application, and when activities have been concluded. That way, nothing gets forgotten and you don’t inadvertently double up applications.

You can also follow up if you have had an interview and don’t hear anything for a long time.

I’ve prepared an example copy of a Job Application Record for you that you can download by right clicking here and saving target as ….

It doesn’t matter if it’s done by longhand in a note book, on separate scraps of paper or on an Excel spreadsheet like my example, but to run an efficient job seeking campaign, you really do need to track what is happening.

Good luck with your job search.

Robin
“Think success - Achieve success”

Here’s a couple of tips about submitting your application by post or email:

Post

Don’t fold your application when you post it. Rather, send it flat in a larger envelope. For example, if you print on A4 paper (the standard in most countries except the USA), instead of folding it twice to fit a DL size envelope, you’d buy a C4 envelope so you could send it flat. (See here for paper and envelope sizes following the International Standards Organization sizing.)

It will cost you a little extra, but your application will arrive looking crisp and fresh.

Email

When you send your application by email, if possible and allowable (sometimes advertisers ask you to send in particular formats), convert it to a single Adobe PDF file. If you send it as a PDF the integrity of the formatting will be retained, unlike MS Word documents, the formatting of which often changes when loaded into a different software version.

This means that whoever prints your document won’t print a badly formatted document that reflects poorly on you. Given that the person printing could receive 20 or more applications, she or he won’t take the time to make sure your formatting is retained, they’ll just press the print button and you document could look like a dog’s breakfast (If you know what I mean).

Also, if they have to print only one PDF file, there is less chance that they will miss printing all of your application.

You can find free PDF converters on the Internet and the latest version of MS Word has a plug-in that will allow you to save as PDF files.

These couple of hints could save you missing out on an interview for reasons over which you have little control.

Robin
“Think success - Achieve success”