4 Ways to Impress A Prospective Employer

Just because you have some experience at whatever you do doesn’t mean that your employer is necessarily going to hire you. In fact, a sense of overconfidence might overwhelmingly work against your favour, and leave you struggling to understand why your stellar CV isn’t connecting you to the career you’ve always wanted. 

Here are four tried-and-tested tips to make sure that your new prospective employer doesn’t drop your CV to the bottom of the application pile.

(1) Research the job before you apply for it. 

It’s true: you still need to do some research before you apply to a role in any company, no matter how much experience you have. If you’re sure that this job is made for you, and that you’d be the perfect fit for the role, you need to understand that you’re not the only one who thinks this way. Whether that’s true or not remains to be seen in how you communicate your desire to work there for the employer – and you can never go wrong with understanding the company, the position it has in its industry, and what the vacancy they’ve posted entails. Going in showing that you’ve already done the research and found the information you need will express to your employer that you’re serious about the job, and that you especially understand what you’re getting into.

(2) Write a covering letter that talks about you. 

This might seem obvious, but you really need to stop rephrasing what you have in your CV into longer sentences. No matter how much experience you have, if you can’t elaborate on that experience beyond what’s just listed in bullet points on your CV, you might need to do a little bit of extra work and figure out why that is.

Employers don’t want to know about your experience as it’s written on your CV. They want to know about you – what your personality is like, how you approach addressing someone you’re unfamiliar with, if you’ve understood the brand you’re working with. A light-hearted company isn’t going to want to see a heavy-handed covering letter full of formalities, and a company that prides itself on formality doesn’t want to have the first line of your covering letter be something like ‘Hey’. 

Instead, adapt the style of your covering letter to the position and the brand, and bring a little of your personality into it.  Here’s a few points to mention: 

• Why did you apply to this company, to this vacancy? Is it because of their brand values, their team events, their products? Don’t hesitate to explore what that is in your covering letter, but don’t go on for too long!
• When you can go for an interview. 
• Introduce yourself and your skills briefly. Don’t let the only idea the company gets from you come from your CV.

(3) Restructure and reorganise your CV. 

If you’ve had the same position for a while, your CV is probably out of date – that’s a good thing! It’s a fresh opportunity for you to go into your CV and really update it, following current guidelines and not whatever was done when you applied to your last job. 

Make sure your CV is short, sweet, and to the point. Draw attention to the stuff that’s the most relevant, use spell-check until you’re satisfied, and most importantly, make sure that you haven’t misspelled something important like the name of your former company or your degree!

(4) Connect with the hiring manager. 

We don’t mean in person. LinkedIn is great for making yourself memorable, and we encourage you to start using it properly and professionally. Use LinkedIn to connect with the Hiring Manager and show your enthusiasm, then sit back, and rest assured that you’ve done all you can!

If you’re struggling to make your dream career a reality, and even recruitment seems like a struggle, we’ll be happy to help you figure it out – just drop us a line, and we’ll see how we can work together!