Tips for Getting Your Through the CV Selection and Succeeding at Interview

Copyright (c) 2010 Alison Withers

Getting a job is a tough and competitive business especially if your skills are in a field where there is a lot of competition, such as administrative and secretarial work, or if you are looking to progress your secretarial and PA career to executive level in a city like London.

It is surprising how many fairly obvious blunders people make that get them rejected even before they manage to reach interview stage. It is especially important for a PA to demnstrate word processing, spelling and grammar competence from the outset and you can use your CV submission to do this.

Recruiters with a pile of CVs from which to select maybe a half dozen candidates for interview will quickly discard any showing any failings in these areas. But they also reject any that are loaded with the hackneyed phrases that are their pet hates, including trustworthy, team player, flexible, good communicator, problem solver and works well under pressure.

Well of course you do or are all of those things, but they would be expected for most jobs and listing them as key skills without any supporting evidence is asking them to take your statement on trust and making you indistinguishable from the rest of the pile. It would be much better to come up with short examples of actual situations that demonstrate all these abilities, each as bullet points in no more than two lines and relevant to the post you're applying for.

Nobody has time to read a CV of more than two pages maximum and probably the decision will have been made well before reaching the supporting evidence of previous jobs and qualifications. Another useful idea is to put a list of your key career objectives at the top of the CV below your name and contact details - showing you have done some resarch and have some knowledge of the organisation to which you are applying, and again keeping it short.

Of course, once you have secured the interview, you know you should dress appropriately for business and for the post and your appearance should not be in any way extreme, that you should arrive promptly and should have with you a couple of intelligent questions to ask at the inverview. It is extraordinary, however, how many people turn up at interviews ill-prepared and almost sabotaging their chances before it even starts. These are the top ten disasters that prompted immediate rejection identified in a recent survey of more than 100 employers and recruiters:

1. Poor personal hygiene (68%) 2. Negative body language (64%) 3. Poor speech and grammar (59%) 4. Dress sense (56%) 5. Bad attitude (52%) 6. Excessive body piercing or tattoos (49%) 7. Inappropriate sense of humour (47%) 8. Accent (44%) 9. Unattractive (41%) 10. Poor employment history (38%)

One or two of them are admittedly subjective and perhaps unfair - as in "unattractive" for example - but the majority should be obvious to anyone who is serious about succeeding at interview.

To finish off, here are a couple more incredible examples of interviewee gaffes, including asking for a light or permission to smoke - even though by law smoking is banned in all workplaces, answering their mobile phones or texting during the interview, criticising previous or current employers and giving too much personal information.

While you can't be expected to anticipate an interviewer's personal foibles as in one case we read about where an obviously suitable candidate was rejected for wearing a small brooch in the shape of a turtle which unfortunately was this particular chap's pet hate, there is no excuse for not making every effort to show yourself in the best possible light and with the requirements of a particular type of job firmly in mind

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