RTE: As we said at the top of the programme, it’s January the third – apparently the most terrifying day of the year. The day when people go back to work, trudging glumly back. I’m sure you didn’t, I’m sure you’re delighted to get back to work, actually, after all that excess. I’m joined in studio by Rowan Manahan, MD of Fortify Services and author of Where’s My Oasis (the essential handbook for everyone wanting that perfect job). Rowan, where did you get such a disgusting title?
Fortify: (laughing) Well, what can I say, I have to lay the blame squarely at the feet of the publisher Tom.

RTE: (laughing) So it wasn’t your fault …
Fortify: I wanted to call it: You Scratch My Back and I’ll Stab Yours but they balked at letting me run with that title …

RTE: OK, So talk to those thousands out there, those listeners who’ve arrived back to work, the 3rd of January, who’ve put their feet up and thought, “Oh God! Not another year of this.” Is that a common feeling?
Fortify: It really is, it’s extraordinary. I popped into the office this morning and there are two days in the year – September the first and January the second (or in this instance, the third) – on which our phones just light up like a Christmas tree and jump off the hook because people en masse are thinking, “Oh my God, another year in this place, I don’t know if I can stand it …” And it is at that stage that they decide “I need help. I need to look at the market; change tack, change company” or “Oh dear, my CV is 20 years out of date, I need to upgrade it.”

RTE: And it’s important to recognise that jobs-for-life don’t exist any more.
Fortify: Indeed, I don’t think there are too many people picking up a gold watch after 45 years of service in the one company any more.

RTE: Unless you are lucky enough to be in the public services of course. But out in the big world people are wandering around from job to job aren’t they?
Fortify: Yes, and in many instances, not by choice. In the United States now the research shows that you will have to pursue three entirely different careers in your working life between leaving formal education and retiring.

RTE: Three different careers? Times really have changed. Now, potential employers, they go through the big pile of CVs and they look for the ones to go through to the second round. Give us some dos and don’ts.
Fortify: OK. I read massive numbers of CVs, whether I’m hiring on behalf of a company or helping someone put their CV together and there are a number of big (and generally simple) mistakes that people make. If I could categorise CVs very briefly; at one end of the spectrum you have the shining golden candidates (a very small percentage) and at the other end are the no-hopers, the ones who just don’t have a chance (these account for a little over half of every pile) and there are a bunch of CVs in there which are perfectly adequate, but which don’t quite make it …

RTE: Before you go any further, is there a house style as to how a CV should look?
Fortify: No, no because it will depend on the kind of job you are going for, it’ll depend on your age, on the kind of company you are applying to. So taking template out of MS Word or down off the internet is not really to your advantage. It is in that it helps you ensure that you include everything – all the section headings and the salient data – but it is not in that your CV ends up looking like a generic document. Looking like everyone else’s.

RTE: So you do this all the time. What are you looking for in a CV?
Fortify: Well, I’m looking for a CV that has enough “Tell” in it – it tells me who you are and what you are – but there’s also a bit of “Sell” in there.

RTE: Tell & Sell? – I’m not sure I like the sound of that approach …
Fortify: Unfortunately, that’s what it’s all about. Very few people like selling, but on your CV, you simply have to. You’ve probably experienced this yourself Tom, if you’ve ever had to plough through a pile of 120 CVs looking for someone to fill a job. Put bluntly, you are looking for a reason to strip that pile down.

RTE: Yes, makes sense.
Fortify: So you’re not really selecting candidates at that stage, rather you are eliminating; you’re looking to take the big pile down to a small and manageable pile. And if there is someone in there who is making your life easier – tired, stressed-out, reading 120 CVs on a Friday evening – if they’re making my life easier, they get onto my shortlist.

RTE: So what sort of things leap out at you and make your life easier then Rowan?
Fortify: What makes my life easier is that you understand what the job that you are applying for really entails and that you have done your research before putting pen to paper and that is indicated by the way you express yourself in at this written stage.

RTE: Hang on a second; you pick up the paper, there’s a job there and you apply for it ... how do you research that job?
Fortify: Very easily now. The magic of Google, to start with. Look for a job description that is comparable to the one you are applying for: Product Manager, HR Executive, QA Analyst, Sales Manager, whatever it might be. What are the key elements of responsibility in that role and what are the key factors that you will be measured on; that will entail whether you are successful or not in that job.

RTE: But there’s a risk there isn’t there? I mean the job you are applying for may be specific and not to be found on Google search.
Fortify: Certainly, and that is why that is only the first stage. The second level of research goes much deeper, getting into the details of that company - what’s that company doing in the market at the moment? You can go to the Companies Office online and look at their annual returns for the last few years and see how they have been performing. You can look at them on Google from the perspective of what’s been said about them in the press, what are they saying about themselves – the Investor Relations section on their website. What are they focusing on there? What are the critical factors that the company is talking about now?

RTE: So you’re walking in the door and you know: (1) What the job is …
Fortify: Yep.

RTE: (2) What the company is like …
Fortify: Yep.

RTE: (3) Where it is headed …
Fortify: Absolutely.

RTE: And you put all of that in the CV?
Fortify: No, but what you have done is engineered your CV around that knowledge. So you are not including irrelevancies and waffle and your CV doesn’t stretch to 5 pages unnecessarily. You’ve trimmed it down based on an understanding that company X is particularly profit-focused and company Y is more market share-focused …

RTE: But who isn’t profit-focused or market share-focused these days?
Fortify: Again, it depends on the company. A company that is number one is a certain sector may be more concerned about holding on to market share in the short term than about increasing profitability – there may be a plan in place that is all about growing share rather than the bottom line and they may have gained approval for that from the shareholders. Good research will inform you of that kind of activity and focus. If you can find this sort of thing out before you put pen to paper, it is enormously to your advantage.

RTE: Right. You put in a section, and I’m looking here at your prescription for finding happiness-ever-after in your job, you have a section called “Accomplishments or Contributions.” Explain that to us.
Fortify: That’s where we were talking about selling yourself. If you are looking at a pile of 50, 100 or whatever number of CVs and they are all from people who share the same, or similar, job titles; what’s distinguishing an individual from that pile is not the responsibilities that they held, because all of the applicants coming from that background will have had broadly similar responsibilities. What distinguishes the prime candidates is what they made of those responsibilities – what difference they made, the contributions they made to their previous employers. Hard stuff – top line, bottom line, whatever they were measured on (and these days we are all measured in this way) – that they stood out from their peer group. Now that is something that you can sell and that is something that most people don’t spend enough time (space) on in their CVs. Most CVs read like either a life history or a series of job descriptions. They should be all about what difference you have made.

RTE: I understand you’re very tough on grammar and spelling …
Fortify: Personally, I am; and that is not at all unusual in the market either.

RTE: You mean to say if you get a CV in and there are a few grammatical errors on it, you’ll throw it in the bin?
Fortify: Almost certainly. Look, this is indicative of the level of professionalism and care that this individual is going to bring to this job …

RTE: This is grown-up stuff, isn’t it?
Fortify: Yes! If you are not willing to be careful and accurate on your own behalf – and we make the generous assumption that, as an applicant, you are concerned about your own well-being – what possibility is there that you are going to be careful and accurate on behalf of the company if we hire you? So if you have formatting errors, grammatical errors, spelling errors, I would find it very hard to keep you out of the bin.

RTE: Proof, proof and proof again.
Fortify: And proof once more after that. And talking about proof, it is imperative that you provide proof, or at least evidence, of your past success; that you be accurate in that evidence and that it make you attractive as a candidate for the job. Hard numbers – we are all measured in the job that we do. Tell them about it. People love numbers.

RTE: On that grammar issue, the only problem I see is that the number of people who really know their grammar is very small …
Fortify: Well, that’s why there are books out there on the subject. Didn’t Lynne Truss make a small fortune out of Eats, Shoots and Leaves?

RTE: (laughing) I’m stuck here – should this be a semi-colon or a full colon? Where do I go to find that out?
Fortify: Strunk’s Elements of Style – a wonderful little book.

RTE: Strunk?
Fortify: William Strunk Jr. – the best grammar book I ever read.

RTE: (laughing) You’ve been reading grammar books?
Fortify: (laughing) I’m afraid I have. Not yesterday or the day before, but way back when …

RTE: Say no more! Now, the presentation of the CV. Give us a few pointers.
Fortify: The presentation has to be very easy on the eye. If you look at anything that has been professionally designed and produced – a newspaper or magazine for example. Someone has spent an immense amount of time determining the ‘house style’ to use your phrase. You must reflect that kind of thinking in your CV and if you are not gifted in that way – either in terms of the strong visual sense or in terms of using the software to produce it – you need to get help. Talk to friends, talk to family, a trusted colleague and ask them to cast their eye over it and make recommendations. Your CV is never a finished, a dead, cast-in-stone document until the moment you lick the envelope and post it off. Up until that juncture, your CV is a living, breathing, evolving DRAFT and you should consider it as such.

RTE: The problem is see here Rowan is that you want the CV to be very specific and just about that one job, but …
Fortify: Yes, because job-hunting is not about you the job-seeker; it’s about the employer …

RTE: So it’s no good keeping that, because you will have to start the process all over again when you apply for another job?
Fortify: Yes, you will. What you keep is what we call a ‘Core CV.’ Maybe the Core CV is a long old document that sits somewhere in the dusty recesses of your computer. It could be 3 or 4 pages, a couple of thousand words. And as individual opportunities arise, you start editing, tailoring, trimming. And you rename the file each time because you are applying to CocaCola this week and McDonalds next week and RTE the week after that …

RTE: How dare you put us in such company! (laughing)
Fortify: Sorry about that! But each document has a large degree of crossover. It could be that 75% of the information is going to be the same, because it is, after all, the same person with the same history applying for the different jobs. Your challenge is to cherry-pick the elements from your past that are going to be of interest to each potential employer.

RTE: And why has job-hunting become so complicated? It there intensity of numbers, is it that there are a small amount of quality people, are people underscoring themselves in their efforts?
Fortify: I think there is a small percentage of quality people in any given facet of human endeavour. I certainly believe that the world is ruled by the Bell Curve, if you remember from your schoolboy mathematics. There’s a big bulgy bit in the middle with a bunch of people who are just above or just below average in the endeavour. And there’s a skinny tail at each end – the one’s at the left are very poor at it and the one’s on the right are very very skilled. In the world of work, the same thing holds true – there are a very small number of ‘plum’ jobs in plum organisations that everyone get very excited by and when they advertise a vacancy, there tends to be a very high level of subscription to those jobs. So, to stand out from that enormous herd of applicants – that’s the challenge in 2006 and forwards.

Example bell curve showing the distribution of height in women in the western world.

RTE: All right, our unfortunate listeners have taken all this in and have no doubt taken notes along the way. What, for you, is the defining moment – not just Monday morning blues or New Year ennui – but a real sense that this is the right time for me to change job?
Fortify: No, you’re right, because that’s an artificial date. I think if you are getting out of bed on a Monday morning and you are not looking forward to at least half of whatever it is that you do. Don’t get me wrong here, I HATE doing monthly accounts or VAT returns, but I get a great deal of satisfaction from the bulk of what I do for a living. Lucky me – I was able to find my niche, my oasis in the desert.

RTE: But you’re a strange fellow, you read grammar books.
Fortify: I cannot tell a lie, I have, on occasion … But if you are thinking it might be time to move, consider this: (1) am I getting enjoyment out of this (2) am I getting to use my talents and skills to the full and am I developing those skills and (3) do I feel that I am being adequately recognised and rewarded for what I do? If those three circles overlap and you can answer “Yes, Yes and Yes” in answer to those three questions you can switch off your radio and go about your day because this piece is of no relevance or interest to you.

RTE: But that’s a very subjective process isn’t it? And you could use that kind of thinking for a number of other aspects of your life as well, couldn’t you?
Fortify: Yes, it’s like a pain threshold – absolutely – it is different for everybody. Your “Ah, it’s grand” job could be damaging to the next person’s health because people are that different in their wants and needs. The reasons why people move on from their jobs, they are so manifold. There was a piece of research conducted by the Small Firms Association last year and over three quarters of people who had moved job did so for reasons other than money. That says it’s “Corporate culture”; that says it’s “I’ve got a horrible, micromanaging boss”; that says “My job has evolved into something I never thought it was going to be and I am now bored to tears.” Overall that means that those people were not getting out of bed on a Monday morning with a smile on their face – and that’s not good enough.

RTE: And look at this world we live in where people are murdered by work. They are out there at 6 o’clock in the morning driving through the darkness and they are coming home at 7 o’clock in the evening.
Fortify: I have clients who spend 4 hours a day commuting …

RTE: And you suggest that they do more of it?
Fortify: I’m suggesting that if you have to spend that amount of time in your car to get to a desk job, you REALLY need to think about moving!

RTE: Now that’s a bigger crisis than just where you work isn’t it …?
Fortify: Yes! If you are commuting 4 hours a day to the perfect job, you need to re-evaluate – a home move, flexitime, telecommuting. But if you are commuting 4 hours a day to a job that you now HATE, you really have troubles …

RTE: Rowan, thank you very much and well done. That was Rowan Manahan, MD of Fortify Services and author of Where’s My Oasis.
Fortify: A pleasure talking to you Tom.