Well, this is someone who wishes that the Tower of London had offered a post/position to someone who could provide much more interpretative material in French (our erstwhile neighbour, Dany, struggling to make sense of a brochure in English).

Q. But just what do you have to do nowdays to get a post/position (not a ‘job’ – ‘job’ is for people who don’t have your qualifications and aren’t really looking for a career)?

A. NOT what you have been told to do so far in your academic career!

• the short, pretty standard, lettre de motivation / ‘covering letter’ is DEAD!
• the standard 1 x page  résumé / CV is also very DEAD!

Q. But WHY?  Why is what I have been taught to do no longer appropriate….?

A. For a number of reasons:

1. Up to now, you have largely been looking for relatively short-term ‘jobs‘ rather than posts you hope to develop into careers.  Selling yourself for a ‘job‘ is easy … for a position you intend to hold for a while and from which you are set to develop a well-paid career is is by no means so easy: it takes time, effort and explanation of the sort that short, standard approaches cannot contain.  You now have a lot more to say about your skills, capabilities and relevant experience after Bac+3 too!  Make it work for you!
2. Employers are tired of recruiting the ‘wrong‘ people.  They either get stuck with poor quality, weak performing staff they can’t get rid of (especially in France)….OR…. the recruit someone who could possibly fill the pot well, but they fail to keep him/her.
3. Employers have been changing their approaches to recruitment and selection (becoming more sophisticated) to reduce the chances of getting the ‘wrong‘ people, so they now provide detailed Job Descriptions (JD) and Person Specifications (PS) and they use them as criteria to apply to your covering letter, CV and interview performance.  You have to respond to these not inconsiderable efforts by the employer to recruit the right person and give the company sufficient and highly-focused detail to prove that you can do the job (JD) and you are the right person (PS).  You simply cannot do this with anything general or under-developed (too short – like a 1 x page CV).  It stands to reason that if they are giving you perhaps 2 pages of detail of what they are looking for, they will be wanting you to produce something of sufficient length and detail in return.

So… in this ‘Block’  I am going to get you to effectively throw away pretty much all of that which you have been told and learned up to now about recruitment and selection: what awaits you post-GEPSAC is not perhaps what you have been anticipating….

I hope to give you an understanding of these changes which will help you when it comes to searching and applying for internships and positions post-GEPSAC.

As we only have FOUR x 2-hour sessions remaining before the Christmas/New Year holidays,  I clearly can’t cover everything in class, so I have made quite a number of video mini-lecture recordings for you backed up by further written material in the form of Tonyversity web pages.

In fact, although the interview and preparing for it are of critical performance, I am going to concentrate primarily in our time together on the covering letter and the CV (you will have to follow up the interview-related material exclusively on my video lectures/ Tonyversity web pages.

In particular, I want to focus upon the covering letter, for the following reasons:

• it bears this title because it ‘covers‘ the CV – it is the first impression the potential employer gets…. and as the old saying goes: « You never get a second chance to make a first impression!« .  It is a good quote and it is worth bearing in mind when you are writing covering letters!
• if the covering letter is not:
  • perfectly expressed,
  • well set-out and visually attractive
  • properly proof-read with no spelling, punctuation or grammar mistakes, 
  • directly relevant to the employers requirements as expressed in the JD and PS
  • arranged professionally and according to the level of expectations that a company would have for one of its employees (if you wrote like that to one of their clients – would it be acceptable to the employer?) …. NB. They are right to think like this: presenting yourself is your most important task – if you can’t do it well for you … will you be prepared to do it well for the company?   It is not a bad ‘acid test’ to use… I’m sure you would use ths test yourself were you the employer!!
    

….Then ask yourself (yes, honestly): if you were the reader, why would you bother to turn the page and read a CV which is likely to be suffering from the same faults – especially if you have maybe hundreds of letters and CVs to look at: the applicant has already given you every reason NOT to bother to turn the page and read the cv – it would just be an unnecessary waste of time: it is heading for the bin.

According to a BBC News article I read almost exactly two years ago today as I write this, employers never even turn over the page from the covering letter to go on to read a CV 85% of the time!!!  Think about that for a moment… only 15% of CVs are ever read: just one out of every 6 or 7!  That is tragic.  You HAVE to make sure you are in the 15% pile.

I have the impression that students about to graduate spend ages on making their CV look great with a sexy template (and often these don’t work at all – I’ll explain why later!), then ‘dash off‘ (rush) the covering letter to attach it to without nearly as much thought … they are heading for the 85% pile not the 15%….  What I am trying to do is to persuade you to really focus on impressing the employer with your covering letter in order that thay will want to turn the page to read your CVs… that puts you in the top 15% … If there were only, say 60 applicants, then you are in a pile of just 9 or 10 applicants: already you are on the potential interview shortlist…..just 8/9 competitors between you and the job!

SO, what are we going to be doing?

1. Go to my Recruitment and Selection Video Mini-Lectures page and (obviously!) view and listen closely to the first 8 videos (Stop when you come to the heading ‘Interviews and How to Prepare for Them’). Pay particular attention to the following videos (but please don’t ignore the others – they are designed to help you and give you the ‘edge’ in the competition for posts!):

• Job Description and Person Specification  (because this effectively tells you exactly what the employer wants to see leaping off the page of your covering letter and CV.
• Applications Digital and Traditional
• How to write covering letters
• Covering letter checklist
• ….Then the three videos related to CVs – even if I won’t be assessing them, they WILL help you enormously, trust me.

2.  Also look at these witten documents in association with the above video mini-letures: a series of 10 Tips:

• 10 Tips: Job Search.
• 10 Tips: Covering Letter  (I will be covering this one in class though)
• 10 Tips: the CV / Résumé
• …. and if you want to think ahead to interview: 10 Tips Interview

Your Assignment

I am NOT going to ask you to do the covering letter AND CV….. you will only be asked to produce the covering letter for a specific post you have chosen (for the reasons I explained above: there is not much point on wasting time on the CV if noone will read it because the covering letter just isn’t good enough at meeting the employer’s expectations).

So, more specifically, these are the things you need to be doing:

• Research oline and select a position you would like to apply for post-GEPSAC in the English-speaking world.  It must be:
  • realistic: something you can actually envisage doing – please don’t try to apply to become Director of the CIA in the new adinistration!!
  • something where there is not just the basic, short job offer, but significant details (perhaps 10 bullet points or more) of both the Job Description and Person Specification.  NB. Quite often recruitment agencies don’t offer this type of detail – sometimes they don’t even mention the name of the company offering the post: they keep important information back so that you have to apply via their service rather than going direct to the company. It would be possible, perhaps, but very unlikely, that such an agency would furnish you with the full details of the post.
  • Downloaded.  I need you to make a local copy of the offer, JD and PS on your computer as I will need it to evaluate how good your covering letter is. You will submit this with your coverng letter (don’t forget!!)

• Read the offer and the JD and PS provided by the employer … then read it again and again until you have really understood what the organisation is after.  Highlight what you feel appear to be the most important things they are looking for (usually you can discern this from the order in which the company lists its requirements: it is very unlikely the most important things will be toward the end of the list – they are more likely to be towards or at the top).

• Take both the JD and PS and sytematically (and honestly!) apply their requirements to yourself:
  • identify where you are strong against their criteria: what evidence do you have to prove this... what good evidence and examples can you bring out in order to demonstrate just how strong you are…
  • Identify where you may not be spectacularly strong against the criteria, but you at least have something positive you can say: something perhaps transferable from another domain which could be successfully applied in the new context
  • identify where you are weak / lacking against the JD and PS criteria – clearly you are not going to say anything about this in the covering letter (you can, after all not cover absolutely everything in such a letter even within up to 2 pages)…. BUT bear this in mind if you are called for interview – they will test you on the two points above AND this one and you’ll need to prepare strategies for how to respond!

• In the light of the above, select what you think are the most important criteria the employer is looking for as cited in the JD and PS and then match them with the best evidence and examples that you have.  There you have the perfect raw material for your covering letter for THIS particular post.

• Think about the structure of your letter.  Something like this might be appealing:
  • an introduction – suggesting that you are very interested in the post and believe that you possess the experience and qualifications that are being sought by the employer and that you are therefore attaching your CV as you would like to be considered for the post.
  • a section which takes the elements you have defined as being the most important from the Job Description and ‘match‘ yourself with them offering evidence/examples as appropriate.
  • a section which takes the elements you have defined as being the most important from the Person Specification and ‘match‘ yourself with them offering evidence/examples as appropriate.
  • an ‘outro’ with which to gently and politely pass the responsibility over to the employer suggesting that you would be only too pleased to provide any further infomation which might be required or to attend interview should the company so require and that you are grateful for their consideration and look forward to hearing from them….

• Produce your covering letter for this post in your best English, respecting the conventions and layout of a business letter in English … it is NOT the same as in French!   I WILL take you through this, never fear!  Also:-
  • do NOT use any photographs of yourself  – I will explain why.
    
  • do feel free to use up to a page and a half (even two pages) at 12pt script and normal letter spacing.  Do not under any circumstances do less than one FULL page – you just cannot possibly supply the level of detail the company will need
  • Do NOT just think about the content: you should consider how it looks: it needs to have a WOW factor – stylish setting and use of space.… (I give you some leads on this in my series of 10 Tips Tonyversity webpage materials cited above on this page).
  • DO please, PLEASE install and use GRAMMARLY with which to help you with your precision English expression and mistakes correction. Word Reference would also be a good help for synonyms if you feel in danger of repeating yourself.
  • Do NOT simply and uncritically adopt a LinkdIn – style letter and content or indeed a standard template as this more often than not restricts and restrains you:
    • most of it is very poor and standardised (your letter MUST be excellent and  ‘tailored‘ and anything but ‘standard‘)
    • most of LinkdIn is full of American-ese which simply does NOT work at an international level: the vocabulary and expressions are often populated by little more than useless and ridiculous ‘management-speak‘.
  • DO proof-read it out loud – and NOT just with your eyes on screen – you will find you will be able to identify and correct far more errors – especially punctuation .
  • Do NOT even think about using DeepL or Google Translate or similar: their translations are not that good and they will stand out starkly from your own English…. it is also plagiarism and that has, shall we say, very unpleasant consequences as you will have seen from the ‘principles’ area under the ‘About’ tab on Tonyversity. Please don’t be tempted!
  • DO also attach a copy of the details of the post for which you are applying – I need this to evaluate the  quality of your covering letter.

• Submission deadline: at the very latest: by the end of our class on 6th December 2021

I intend to mark your work the following week and and prepare feedback and marks for you for our last class (Dec 13th) before the Christmas break.

• Submission Format of covering letter:

• Produced in WORD OR PDF  12pt for normal text. Normal line spacing and margins.  Must be at least ONE FULL page and NO MORE THAN TWO pages.
• To be printed and handed to me in class on 6th Dec.
  
• REMEMBER You MUST also attach a printed copy of the details of the post (offer, JD & PS – don’t send me a link thereto – it may have been taken down before I get to look at it!!) for which you are applying.

You now have all you need to start preparing this assignment.

Go to it!