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We’re talking job search, the role of professional associations, covering letters, C.V.s and interviews here [the ‘meal‘ you need to set before a hungry employer].

 

The name of the game boils down to one word:

differentiation.

• What recruiters are seeking to do:  to differentiate you (positively) from other candidates.  They do this by seeing how well you ‘match’ / ‘fit’ their requirements as stated in the Job Description and Person Specification.

THEREFORE:

• What you MUST do is: to differentiate yourself by applying by writing your covering letter and CV [and ‘sculpting’ your interview responses] – perhaps even video – in such a way as to make it easy [much easier than other candidates do] for the recruiter to ‘match’ / ‘fit’ you to the requirements of the post.  Make his/her job ‘easy‘ by making the ‘matches‘ that they require simply jump out at them – never leave it up to them to have to work too hard and go fishing for the important stuff buried somewhere on your CV or in your covering letter.

I will be concentrating significantly upon the role of the first impression you make [whether it be a covering letter or a video introduction], not merely the CV / résumé.

Believe me, as I have said above already, French employers operating at post-Master’s recruitment levels have all but totally ‘ditched‘ the old ‘one page cv rule’ in favour of a more ‘enlightened‘ approach which actually secures sufficient detail in order to be able to differentiate between candidates: 2 full pages for you at Master’s level [unless the recruiter directs you specifically to limit yourself to one page]. Let’s face it, why would an employer give you tons of detail of what he/she was asking for if he/she didn’t expect you to respond to it and to do so with considerable detail so that they could differentiate between the applicant candidates in order to select rationally for interview???  [If you are resistent to the idea of moving away from the ‘one page only’ idea, just think about the above point for a moment!]

We are also talking especially, as you would say of, ‘la lettre de motivation‘ (‘covering letter‘).  I prefer the French term to the English except for one thing: it misses the fact that the letter literally ‘covers‘ the C.V.  Why is this important?  Simple…. if the covering letter is no good then why would an employer ever bother to turn the page to look at a C.V.?  According to an article on the BBC I read about this recently, some 85% of C.Vs. are NEVER READ…. because the letter is not attractive enough to make the employer want to turn the page!  Let that sink in a moment….  Put another way, employers are actually reading less than one in seven CVs that arrive on their desk!!!    The question should be posing itself to you is surely: « How do I make sure they read (and are impressed by) mine?« 

I am fond of repeating the mantra that ‘People make Profits’ [not companies]: people with their abilities, their motivations, their creativity, their willingness to work together and their analytical, evaluative, communication and relational & soft skills.  You need to be able to find the right person for the right post or you can kiss goodbye to potential profits.

• They want the ‘best’ person (best fit with requirements)
• You believe you ARE that person… so how to get this across?

Perhaps the best way to do this would be to get you to produce your own covering letter and c.v. in English ‘tailored perfectly’ to a post of your choice….. but this does NOT mean translating from French into English your existing versions (for reasons I will explain… I don’t mind you using your old French version as an ‘aide-mémoire’, but nothing more, OK?!).  You will need to forget the idea of something ‘general’: a typical CV you could send in reply to any old job advert – you will need to ‘tailor’ your covering letter and almost certainly your CV to each and every job offer, based upon their respective ‘Job Descriptions’ and ‘Person Secifications‘.   Employers are giving more and more detail of what the position involves in terms of day-today tasks and responsibilities and are being clearer about the characteristics of the person they believe could best do the job/fill the post.   It is blatantly obvious that, in return, candidates need to supply sufficient information in response to demonstrate that they are capable of doing what is required… and that is never going to be done on 1 page crammed with academic & professional history, hobbies, sports and contact deails!  To an employer, on one page you all look the same: UNDIFFERENTIATED – the exact opposite of what they need!

You may also well find that you will be expected to do more than go to the classic  40 minute interview: there may well be tests of many different kinds so that the employer can be as sure as is possible that you really ARE the person they are looking for….  These may include numerical and verbal reasoning tests, IQ tests, personality tests and many others.  Before you think that these things will be for later in your career, I can tell you that your predecessors looking for an M2 placement sometimes had to face these which are often used pre-interview or between first and second interview. Do see my Selection Tests page for details and tests you can practice on.   Better to practice now than to be shocked later at interview.

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Framework:

We will be considering the following questions inter alia:

• How (and why) are recruitment and selection functions changing  so rapidly (what is going on from the employers’ side?)… especially: ‘
  • The sheer costs of ‘getting it wrong’: appointing the wrong person who does not perform well and finding yourself very much ‘stuck’ with this person. Our Code de Travail makes it difficult to simply fire someone for anything other than faute grave.  The organisation could find itself ‘stuck’ with an inefficient under-performer for his/her entire career.  That is desperately expensive.
  • The sheer costs of ‘getting it wrong’ when people (perhaps even the ‘right’ people) are recruited and then leave almost immediately (often after just 6 months) as the job isn’t what they thought it was going to be. This then happens repeatedly and the costs are not supportable.
  • The need to find the right person: to secure sufficient information to differentiate between candidates and effectively, efficiently and economically find the right person, recruit them and motivate them to perform well and develop within the enterprise.
  •  Here we will consider both direct and indirect quantifiable costs and also non-quantifiable, non-financial (but no less real) costs. If you can understand the employer’s position better, you will write a better letter and cv and will have a greater chance of sounding and looking convincing at interview.
• What does the above mean to you seeking employment on the job market?  Do you need to approach job-search differently?  Don’t wait for Friday or Saturday night newspapers: prepare your ground. Prepare to be found: be proactive – develop LinkdIn profiles…. sanitise and keep regularly updated your Facebook and social network presence: employers DO look before inviting you to interview.   Think about becoming a member of a Professional Association [and if you don’t know what that is – then you should and you will need to do some research]: it matters! it shows you are no longer a student looking for a job – you are already a Young Professional moving in Professional circles.  Such associations often allow you to become a student member very cheaply (sometimes for free) and that enables you to put your CV online for corporate members to see.  Look for an association at the cross-hairs of your personal interests in terms of function and sector. Target the companies you want to work for – don’t do bland speculative letters. Employers are also increasingly using this approach to recruitment as it gives them access to a small number of highly-motivated and professional new-entrants: better 20 great candidates than wading through 000’s of applications only to find a few average ones, no?
• The significance of the job offer and the Job Description and Person Specification.  READ, READ and RE-READ these documents that come with or are part of the job offer until they are well and truly under your skin.   Match who you are and what you have done to these and then consider how you are going to show this ‘match’ in both the covering letter and cv…and interview.
• What makes a great covering letter for the international, English-speaking market – and, incidentally, for the French marketplace [the answer is the same by the way!]? You will produce one for a particular post of your choice [imagine you are at the end of MICAI seeking your first post].  IMHO, students spend ages on their cv but comparatively little time on the covering letter… but it is this letter which (literally) covers the cv: it is what the employer sees FIRST..; and if he/she doesn’t like it why is he/she going to bother to turn the page to look at your cv?   As I have already said, a recent article on BBC news suggested that fully 85% of all cvs sent off are NEVER READ by the potential employer because the covering letter just is not convincing enough to interest the reader.  Hardly surprising: if the employer has hundreds of applicants, the quicker he/she can differentiate you positively or negatively, the sooner the job is done, another application is dealt with and the less it costs the company in time, money and effort.  Don’t give the recruiter any reason to give up on you.
• What makes a great CV / résumé? You will produce one for a particular post of your choice on the English-speaking market which you could do upon graduation or shortly thereafter.  There is an art to this and, strangely enough, the employer actually helps you with the task as a result of what they have taken the trouble to put in the Job Description and Person Specification.  Effectively they have given you the words to the ‘song’ they want to hear: all you have to do is ‘sing’ it!  Don’t just ‘plump’ for a typical ‘template version’ – it might not enable you to deliver what you need in reponse to what the employer says he/she requires…. such templates can prove more handcuff (menottes) than helpful.
• How to prepare for interview and to interview well. Interview.   The best way of reducing the ‘fear-factor’ of an interview is to be fully prepared so that you can walk into the interview confident that you have done all you can do.  That is liberating indeed.  OK, if they like someone else, so what? There will be an interview where they prefer you.  But at least you can walk in and out with your head held high: you couldn’t have prepared any harder and you did your best.  Interviews once used to be relatively ‘cosy’ 40 minute Q&A  discussions … but now you might also find yourself on the receiving end of a load of tests of various forms: see the  Selection Tests article I wrote for you  (and make sure you have tried these tests out from the links provided and you understand how to tackle them – you don’t want to be facing them for the first time at interview!)

You will discover that this is NOT something you have done before and that even here in France the hallowed French 1x page CV is dying and dying fast (if it isn’t dead already for career posts) because it simply doesn’t help to differentiate candidates (and cost-effective differentiation is THE name of the game today)…. it is set to become very much more like the international English-speaking and international corporate approach.   Remember: HRM is often viewed as a cost centre and reducing costs by becoming more efficient, effective and economic is the name of the game: why bother wasting time and money reading a useless CV if the poor covering letter has already indicated there is no point!!

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Assessment (inter alia) may involve…

• analysis and evaluation of the real costs of recruitment, selection and retention from the emplyer’s perspective.
• Setting yourself up for job search and recruitment: the role of the Professional Association.
• finding a job offer which would interest you for a first post-MICAI position.
• designing and producing a covering letter that will interest & impress the employer and respond to his/her requirements, thus persuading him/her to turn the page and read your CV.
• designing and producing a CV which sets one apart professionally (and positively!) from the competitors for the position
• preparation for interview and (if time allows) interview analysis and evaluation.

In support of the above, I will offer you a series of  ’10 Tips’ (also linked above) for:

• Job Search
• Covering letter
• CV / résumé
• Interview

These will probably NOT be things you will have heard of before.  No one of these alone will guarantee you selection for interview or for appointment, but, taken together, each of these will reinforce the other and will ‘say’:

• this is something different, better, out of the ordinary
• this person has been to considerable trouble (more than others)
• this individual has a sense of design and presentation
• this person weighs every word in the balance and proof-reads effectively
  
• this person is very clear about what we want and is at pains to show us why and how he/she fits the bill
  
• this individual is worth a closer look: put him/her on the potential interview pile!

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Other pages on and off my site which may be of use:

• The job search process
• Applications CVs etc
• Role of Job Descriptions and Person Specifications
• Selection Tests page
• Exemplar Job Description and Person Specification from the East Midlands Development Association

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• proactive tools like LinkdIn and other social networks
• membership of and active participation in Professional Associations
• new approach to the covering letter,  CV and interview preparation structured upon the requirements of the employer as identified in the Job Description and Person Specification.
• Need to engage, pre-interview, with online tests and rehearse them until confident. Tests of  personality, non-verbal reasoning etc etc.

To cut things short … this is all about helping you to maximise your chances of differentiating yourselves (positively) from the competition with a view to landing the post/position to which you aspire.  I’m not going to ‘kid‘ you – it is NOT as easy as it once was… BUT employers are now giving you more help to work out what it is that they want…. but you have to be able to read it, understand it and respond to it.  But if you REALLY want the post, then you will read, you will take the trouble to respond (yes, even with a longish covering letter and 2 page CV!) … and others won’t.   Think about it: this is ideal for the employer: it is a form of ‘screen’ – « If you want the post – you’ll work at it…. if you don’t, then you won’t!….. And we will get only those who really could do the job well… »

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In the Olympics there are Gold, Silver and Bronze medals.  Imagine: you get the silver. You are on the podium.  You are recognised. You are in the history books: after momentary disappointment at missing out on the Gold by a hairsbreadth, you are basking in glory!

In the job-market olympics, there is NO SILVER MEDAL – only the irritation that you were so near and yet so far from your dream: 100% frustration.

There is only ONE choice. Go For GOLD!

You must go all-out 100% for each job application. Don’t even bother with a half-hearted application.  Even 98% probably won’t be enough: if there are two applicants per hundred (and one has, say 200 applications) who are going 100% then, logically, there are FOUR people who will probably present themselves far better than you and the employer WILL find them!  Even if this perhaps means being more selective and spending more time on each application, it is almost certainly going to be a more productive strategy than not trying as hard as you know you can.

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let’s consider things from the employer’s point of view……..

 What ARE the REAL costs of labour turnover?  I have dressed this up as a role play I invented for an organisation I have called ColmarCo, but the figs in the table are real – drawn from an Australian case example.

Colmarco Internal Memo

From:  Chief Executive’s Office

To:      Task Teams working on reducing Labour Turnover

I thought it would help were I to let you have the key internal statistics on this matter: they do NOT make very happy reading at all and demonstrate the scale of the staff retention problem facing us: we are haemorrhaging employees at an unsustainable rate at all levels from ground floor to the top – the loss at managerial level being particularly disastrous to my mind after we have invested so heavily in them in terms of initial recruitment and selection plus subsequent training and professional development.

One might think we’d be grateful for this in the current financial crisis, but this is not the case: we are now beginning to suffer a distinct loss of managerial and operational capability – and I fear for our reputation too.

This is doubtless costing us a fortune (a pit into which we are effectively directly  ‘throwing’ our hard-won operational profits) and I want comprehensive, workable solutions, as they say: ‘yesterday’.   We need to cut these costs and to re-design and develop a recruitment, selection and retention system which is imbued with the three Graces of:

• Efficiency
• Economy
• Effectiveness

The figures:

Overall Group Labour Turnover is 48.64%

This in return reflects:

• Turnover at Managerial level : 39.19%
• Turnover at Operational level : 50.74%

Reasons for Leaving are as follows:–

 

NB. If not all the above image shows: click on it.  Then to get back to this page using the ‘back’ button.

Timing of Leaving.

• 55% of the Managerial Level leavers resign in their first 6 months
• 70% of Operational Level leavers resign in their first 6 months

Direct, quantifiable costs* of replacing lost staff (our current, crude, best guesses are as follows, but they may well be massively out of synch with reality – which is why I want you to explore ALL the costs: quantifyable & non-quantifiable … financial & non-financial!).  Direct, quantifyable costs may be the tip of a vey big costs ‘iceberg‘ and I do not want to ‘play Titannic!‘.  Our crude, best-guesses then:

• At Senior Management level 10,000  Euros per person
• At Management level 6,000 Euros per person
• At Operational level  2,000 Euros per person

INSTRUCTION 1. ‘Do the Math‘ for me (and yourselves!) : IF the above figs are right – how much is this costing the company per year???

*    We are also worried about no-yet-quantifiable but nonetheless REAL costs such as impaired performance, lowering morale etc…

INSTRUCTION 2.  Do your own calculations to ‘correct‘ my best-guess figures.  I want you to think of the direct financial costs per year AND identify the non-quantifiable costs (which will eventually make themselves felt nevertheless).

In broadly equally-sized teams (we are probably set to be 14 or 15 in March 2023 – so probably 3 teams of 5) I want you to look at three key phases (one team for each phase):

1. imagine this involves the need to replace a mid-level manager)
2. imagine costs as follows:
   • One hour of a manager’s time required = 100 Euros
   • One hour of an administrator’s (or secretary’s) time = 50 Euros
   • NB. This is not what these people are paid, but what it costs the company to employ them.

• Phase One: Operational costs (quantifiable and non-quantifiable) flowing from the employee’s decision to leave (a decision which he/she may take a good time before actually communicating it, resigning, working the notice period and leaving)  right through until the new recruit has arrived (BUT do NOT include recruitment and selection costs – that is for Team 2).
• Phase Two: Recruitment costs from the day the employee resigns (‘hands in his notice‘)  until the creation of a shortlist (approved by both HRM and the divisional manager concerned) of the 10 best candidates for interview. (Assume 250 applicants)
• Phase Three:  Selection and appointment costs. (Assume a panel of three interviewers at management level over two full days: 5 candidates per day is about the norm).  This runs from organising interviews, tests etc, inviting the candidates, interviewing, deliberating through to a signed contract and any pre-arrival costs.

• Group Brainstorm based on above: How to redesign an efficient, effective and economical system for recruitment, selection AND retention.
  • This must be accompanied by a cost comparison with our present system: I want to get a sense of the degree of cost-saving involved in the strategy you are proposing.

Go to it!  We need the solution in place asap!  The company’s  future – and needless to say your jobs – are on the line!

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