T4. Position post 3-Nat

Job Search, Recruitment and Selection

Why this image …? 

Because recruitment is a ‘casse tête’ on both sides: for you to find and get a post …. and for employers to find the right person!

As tri-lingual engineering specialists you may well find yourself working in an international marketplace for your services where English may well be the ‘Lingua-Franca’.  As such you may also find yourself not just needing to translate your French CV, but to transpose it into a format which will be attractive outside the Francophone world.  Although the French recruitment system is changing and changing fast (and becoming very much more like the Anglophone recruitment systems), it is not quite there yet (but it will be in the next couple of years), so you will need to know how international recruitment in English works.  This is the purpose of this block.

Be aware, however, that the vast majority of the things I will be saying and the advice I will be giving relates equally to getting a job in France.

So what is your task?

1. to search online on the global, English-speaking market for a post that you would like to do shortly after your graduation (a post that you could realistically do with a year or two’s experience).  Download it (because sometimes it disappears a day or two later).  The job offer MUST have significant details of the Job Description (sometimes called ‘Responsibilities’) AND of the Person Specification (sometimes called ‘Profile’).
2. Watch the video mini-lectures I am about to link below and the materials on my website which are associated with it… THEN
3. Set about writing and producing the perfect covering letter (lettre de motivation) – between ONE and TWO pages of A4 (in WORD, please) in your best English for the particular post you have chosen which embodies all the advice you have been given.  You MUST use Grammarly and WordReference as aids – failure to do so will be heavily penalised!. DO NOT use DeepL or Google Translate: that is cheating.
4. Submit your covering letter (in WORD format so that I can comment on the page – impossible if it is in PDF) together with the job offer to me at tjolley@gmail.com  – submission date to be advised.
5. While I am marking your covering letter, think about what I have said as regards your CV/résumé: how would you go about doing a great CV for this post? [I am not going to actually ask you for the moment to produce the CV – the fact is that most CVs are never, ever read … simply because the covering letter is so unattractive and poor that no recruiter wants to turn the page to the CV…… so I am focusing on the covering letter as being the best way you can enhance your chances of being selected for interview.]

The video mini-lectures which I want you to watch/listen to (and watch/listen to a second time if necessary) in order to do this assignment are the following:

A1. Covering letter advice.

A2. Covering letter checklist.

To be viewed alongside the 10 Tips Covering Letter advice page on my website.

According to the BBC (2018), some 85% of CVs are never looked at.  NOTE: I didn’t say ‘read’…. But never even viewed.  Q. Why?  A. Because the covering letter just wasn’t good enough to inspire someone to turn the page and read the CV.  When you have hundreds of applications in front of you, clearly you need to get through them as quickly as possible…. So any reason a  good enough reason to throw the thing away:

• Doesn’t look good on the page
• Poor use of space
• Setting not according to conventions
• Wrong salutations
• Poor paragraphing
• Too short – far FAR too long
• Poor punctuation
• Poor expression
• Little relevance to the job
• No attempt to address the company’s requirements

I could go on at length about this …. So how do you write an excellent letter designed to get someone to turn the page and read your cv?

Here’s a cut and paste link to the video if the above hyperlink doesn’t work:

https://youtu.be/ueWCjVS9BaY 

B. Using Job Descriptions and Person Specifications to your advantage.

The job market is becoming more and more competitive…and as I write we are in the ‘clutches of CoVid’ so when we actually escape the chances are that unemployment will be much, much higher and the competition higher still. That means that an applicant for a post will have to go further than ever before to have a chance of winning the job ‘prize’. On the other side of this, companies can’t afford to recruit the ‘wrong’ person and either be stuck with them or have to replace them every six months or so: they have to get it right first time. So when you see a ‘Job Description and ‘Person Specification’ attached to / as part of a job offfer, how can you use them to increase your chances of being interviewed and getting a job? Well, here’s your answer….

Here’s a cut and paste link to the video if the above hyperlink doesn’t work:

https://youtu.be/QCeapqCFoiY

C. CV Forms and choices

There are essentially three options:

• select a template and be condemned and constrained to its limitations (and to the reality that many others competing for the post my use it.)
• take a ‘classical’ approach (Personal details, education, employment & voluntary work, technical and language skills, soft skills, sports, hobbies & interests and finally ‘references’).  OK, but is that still what will impress the recruiter?
• A new approach that constructs a different cv for each post you apply for according to the specific requirements of the employer as cited in the Job Description and Person Specification.

In this video I run you through the three.  If you know me, it will come as no surprise that I favour the third one!  See my Ten tips CV web page.  I am not asking you to do a CV and submit it for assessment – I just thought this sort of advice would help you when you do!

Here’s a cut and paste link to the video if the above hyperlink doesn’t work:

https://youtu.be/38hN3SN8nyU

If you want more on this subject and the entire process of recruitment and selection, then here is the page with all my video advice on the subject (six or seven Vids in addition to the ones above!).

Hope all this helps you,

Tony