THE CAREER DOCTOR MAKE THEM SIT UP AND NOTICE THAT YOU ARE THE GOOD HIRE

To successfully promote yourself in today's marketplace, you must learn to step outside of your immediate viewpoint and think like the person who will be evaluating you.

The vast majority of job-hunters assemble some sort of written representation of themselves (Curriculum Vitae, letter, application form or a combination of the three), lick the stamp, pop it in the post box and really have little or no idea what happens next. I regularly meet clients who could wallpaper their entire house with rejection letters but don’t realise why they aren’t getting past this difficult first hurdle.

The most successful job-hunters, the ones who make the whole process seem enviably easy, have learnt one vital skill. They don’t think like job-hunters - they think like recruiters. They recognise the process of hiring people for what it is: a time-consuming, enormously expensive purchasing decision; and they go about the task of selling themselves with that thought constantly in mind.

Two adages from the advertising geniuses on Madison Avenue for you to consider as you approach the market:

To successfully promote yourself in today’s marketplace, you must learn to step outside of your immediate viewpoint and think like the person who will be evaluating you. OK, so what are that person’s primary concerns?

	Recruiters want to formulate effective recruitment strategies (that is what they get paid for) that attract top-drawer candidates to their organisation.
	Recruiters want to get through the initial screening process as quickly, efficiently and cheaply as possible and put forward a short list of candidates, any one of whom (on paper at least) could do the job.
	No recruiter wants to be associated with a bad hiring decision. Bad hiring decisions have a lingering odour and can stink up an otherwise healthy career …..
	In short, recruiters are all seeking the Holy Grail - A GOOD HIRE.

The attributes exhibited by these near-mythical Good Hires are actually fairly basic stuff. Good Hires:

	Are flexible, healthy and honest.
	Don’t make waves. (Good Hires always fit seamlessly into a new team or organisation.)
	Learn quickly (and inexpensively) or bring useful knowledge with them.
	Stay with the company for a meaningful length of time. (The duration varies by sector).
	Progress within the company and pass their experience onto the next generation of Good Hires.
	Contribute a lot more than they cost the organisation.

It doesn’t sound like a lot to ask, does it? But Good Hires are very elusive and tricky beasts, as any interviewer will tell you. Before applying for any job, you need to look at yourself in the cold light of day and ask, “Am I a Good Hire for this position?”

If you are not, don’t apply. Full stop. Save yourself time, effort and heartache and DON’T APPLY. Clients frequently take exception to my saying this and ask, “Oh come on! What’s the worst thing that could happen?”

Well, the worst thing that could happen is that they could HIRE YOU! They could hire you to do a job that you won’t enjoy, aren’t suited to and won’t be any good at. You could be looking over your shoulder for the (probably short) duration of your stay with this organisation wondering when they are going to realise their mistake …

If however, you believe that you are a Good Hire for a job that genuinely excites you, you need to enter the Twilight Zone and put yourself in the recruiter’s shoes for a moment and understand what they are thinking when they see your CV for the first time. (Cue cheesy special effects …)

A position needs to be filled in your organisation. Whether the position is newly-created or filling a vacancy due to promotion, retirement or departure, it is your task to find the best person for the job. You assemble a job description and discuss specific experiential or educational requirements with the line manager. You then compose a recruitment advertisement, place it in an august publication such as this and wait to see what sort of response comes back.

Typically, the response consists of a big (sometimes huge) pile of Curricula Vitae, most of which assure you that the applicant is the perfect person for the job. This pile can be ten, fifty, a hundred or five hundred résumés high and it is your job to find the golden needle in this haystack of paper.

Recruiters use a filtering process to beat the pile of paper down to more manageable proportions and sift through all of the applications once. Very quickly. Skilful recruiters will give each application a maximum of thirty seconds of their time on this first pass.

As they whiz through the pile, they are comparing each document against the check-list of requirements for the ideal candidate - education, training, personal attributes and professional experience. Applicants who do not score highly against this check-list are immediately binned, the rest are divided into the 'Possible' pile and the 'Likely' pile. The Likely pile consists of the applications which are a very close match to the requirement list and this pile usually forms the basis of the all-important 'Short List.'

On the second pass, the recruiter will whittle down the Possible pile, critically evaluating each applicant against the standards set by the Likely pile and their own mental check-list. What is left is the Short List, which may or may not require further trimming. (Special effects abruptly end.)

“Thirty seconds for the first pass?” I hear you sputtering. “That’s outrageous! How can you possibly evaluate someone’s entire professional existence in thirty seconds?”

Harsh, isn’t it? But excellent candidates can and do make their pitch on paper in that sort of time-frame. Advertisers do it with products ranging from ice cream to cars every day. All of those clever little vignettes that clutter up our television screens four times an hour are thirty seconds long. We are living in the era of the sound bite and faced with the information overload, we have all developed these filtering processes.

A media study traced the average length of airtime assigned to presidential candidates on American television news. In 1960, when Kennedy went up against Nixon, each candidate was given a little over two minutes to make their point. By the time Clinton was up against Bush in 1992, the candidates averaged just six seconds on screen during the main evening news bulletin. Six seconds! About enough time for one juicy sound bite. Just look at the minuscule amount of television news time granted to Bush and Gore to discuss issues last time around.

If the most powerful nation on Earth thinks it can choose its leader on the basis of that sort of brevity, count yourself lucky that you are getting thirty seconds and think very carefully about every word you decide to include or omit in your CV. The best guideline on this is to read each sentence in your CV from a potential employer’s perspective and apply the rule of, “SO WHAT?” If you cannot adequately answer the “so what?” for any item that appears on your CV, delete it.

Rowan Manahan is Managing Director of Fortify Services, a Dublin-based outplacement and career management firm.

Original article here.