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Tips and stories to add value to you and your organisation

Job Hunting Tips #3 …Practise

3 October 2010

Can you ride a bicycle? And if you can, did you jump on it and pedal off in to the sunset at your first attempt? Or did you, like me, have stabilisers and a patient father, who worked together to enable me to stay upright and out of the gravel?
The point of course is this; I didn’t learn how to ride a bike, the actual learning bit was easy (keep the pedals going round). What I did was practised riding a bike. Practised until I could ride no-handed all the way to the shops and back and feel smug. Well, smug up to the point my little sister shopped me to the parents and I received a ticking off for dangerous riding. But am I bitter? ….I hardly ever mention it these days…

…But silliness aside it’s worth noting all the things that we can now do to a good standard because we worked hard and practised at them. This would include reading and writing and talking, to name three. Job hunting skills are just a subset of these and the difference that makes the difference is how much you practise.

Job hunting skills are there to be practised and if we want to get ahead of the competition then it’s up to us to put in the effort. Interviews can be predicted, networking conversations can be predicted, social greetings can be predicted…it’s surprising how much the patterns are there to be spotted, which makes rehearsal much easier.

Pause for a moment and imagine you’re sitting in a waiting room with a smattering of other candidates. You’re the last in line to be interviewed and suddenly you realise that the other people are calm because they’ve all practised their interview answers, know how to keep eye contact and have great stories to sell their talents. You don’t, however, because you followed the other nine out of ten people I’ve worked with:

You read your CV once the night before and decided to trust to luck. What more could you have done?

…What more indeed? It’s up to you. My suggestion is that you make a choice:

You can practise and increase your chances of success, or you can do nothing and risk falling off your bicycle. What do you decide?

It could be a decision that determines how long you will be waiting to start your next job.

 

More Opportunities To Practise

There are more tips and worked examples in the book Job Hunting 3.0, which provides people with plenty of questions and answers to practise, in order to sharpen them up for their next interview. If you know someone who is looking for work then please point them at Amazon.

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Next Week

We’ll be looking at some statistics, to get people thinking. The numbers tell the real story.