LEARNING FROM LEVEL 1 CONVERSATIONS

In your easy-access meetings at level 1 you discover what it feels like talking to people about the world of work that they know. You begin to learn how to make open-ended enquiries that sound like just that – enquiries, not veiled requests for job interviews. You are learning how to seek help without asking for something difficult or embarrassing. Level 1 conversations get you used to talking about yourself and your ‘offer’. Your offer is communicated in your CV, in cover letters, in application forms, during level 2 conversations and at interview. And you learn to shape it in such a way that it will be remembered, and passed on.

THE PROBLEMS OF SELLING YOURSELF

When a friend with similar work experience shows you her CV it tends to look good to you. Someone else’s experience can easily feel more impressive, more valuable than your own.

While some people are happy making outrageous – if not exaggerated – claims about their abilities, most find this uncomfortable. Candidates often say that they intellectually know that they need to sell themselves, but anything that feels like selling feels wrong. This means that many candidates under-communicate their strengths and experience. Describing your strengths feels self-centred or plain wrong to many. Even confident interview candidates and public speakers will tell you that they have a little voice in their head saying ‘Does any of this make sense?’ at least half the time, accompanied by ‘Do I look stupid?’, ‘Do I sound pushy?’, ‘Am I bragging?’, ‘Am I faking it?’

These self-checking mechanisms are often very helpful. When they work well they will tell you the right moments to keep silent, or to dial things back if you are being too forthright. However, excessive self-checking can prevent you spotting suitable evidence from your past, and disable you from talking about what you do best.

SELECTIVE USE OF INFORMATION

Think of all the hundreds of photographs you have on disc of family and friends. Most will never get printed, but if you decided to set out a framed collection of pictures which say something important about people you’re close to, how many would you choose? Perhaps 10, 20, 30? You’d make a small, representative selection. You probably know already which pictures they would be. How many of them would you grab if your house was on fire?

Your life contains many moments, many pieces of evidence. Some are purely personal, some make good stories, some are very special to you. A small proportion of those moments will become evidence you use in a job hunt. Imagine all those pieces of evidence piled up like a pyramid made of small stones – a pyramid of information. The base of the pyramid contains the largest quantity of material. This is your unfiltered experience, years of it, one day after another. By using the Experience Databank (see Chapter 6) you use active memory to catalogue that experience into something which is accessible and starts to make sense. Then you began to filter, to draw out the biggest and brightest pieces of evidence. As the pyramid narrows, you become selective. You will extract enough for a CV, so it contains no more and no less than you need. Later at interview you will filter again, because you will probably only have a chance to talk about 30–50% of the items in your CV.

You will, however, win the interview with a very small amount of information taken from the very tip of the pyramid. This is transmitted in:

• your CV profile;
• CV key skills and achievements;
• summary messages you communicate by email;
• quick summaries you present verbally in conversation.

You might leave this messaging to chance. Five-star job seekers know that’s a dangerous game. Composing, testing, refining and perfecting these messages is one of the key steps you can take to shorten your job hunt time.

WHERE THE READER’S EYE RESTS

Research published by www.theladders.com used an eye tracking technique to analyse how online CVs are read, suggesting that recruiters spend just six seconds on their initial ‘fit/no fit’ decision. The research claims that recruiters spent almost 80% of their review time on the following data points:

1. Name
2. Current job title and company
3. Previous job title and company
4. Previous position start and end dates
5. Current position start and end dates
6. Education

Beyond these six data points, recruiters did little more than scan for keywords to match positions. This research is perhaps not extensive enough to be conclusive, but is a good reminder that if the above key information is not readily visible your CV is probably not going to grab attention quickly.

GAPS AND PROBLEMS

Remember that a CV reader also notices what is not there, so be very careful of gaps and problems in your CV that will be obvious during a quick read. Some advice from experienced recruiter Pauline Godley:

Always be truthful and fill in the gaps in your CV. The human mind is predisposed to thinking negative thoughts before positive ones, so to avert this fill in the gaps! Travelling and exploring the world is viewed positively these days especially if it was self funded. Learning how new cultures operate, finding your way around a strange country and getting back in one piece is not just admirable but many people wish they had the guts to do it themselves. We are now, as a species, more global in our outlook and this is a positive thing.

LISTING KEY ACHIEVEMENTS IN YOUR CV

Go back to your Experience Databank (Chapter 6) where you should have several dozen experiences listed, if not more. Now you are going to decide on the key points you are going to get across early in page 1. You may potentially have hundreds of pieces of evidence which might qualify as achievements, but now you are looking for headline items – pitching between seven and nine great examples in the hope that a decision maker will find two or three which are strong matches. The great thing about this section of your CV is that you can feed in evidence from any part of your history, including study or life outside paid work. You can also change the order of these examples quickly to match a role, or swap in new items without affecting the overall CV structure.

So, for example, after a profile your CV might include a list of skills and strong achievements, such as:

Or, for a more senior role:

This section of your CV is read with great attention. The reader’s eye is attracted to the left-hand side, so begin bullet points with strong verbs, adding concrete evidence of achievement. Remember other factors known to attract positive attention such as the names of major organisations or reference to products, brands, equipment or processes. Increase the chance of your bullet points being read by varying the length of each line and keeping sentences short.

WRITING YOUR CV PROFILE

Don’t try to write your profile until you have composed the rest of the CV. This is the moment where you will decide on the information that sits right at the top point of your pyramid – a profile composed of three or four sentences captures your most important statements.

A profile can steer readers away from the wrong assumptions and lead them towards the evidence you want to highlight: experience of different roles, sectors and working environments, for example. Emphasise transferable skills by describing them in the kind of terms that an employer not only recognises but welcomes. Avoid using limiting job titles too early on – write about what you did, not what it was called. In the first 20 lines or so of your CV make sure you provide evidence which strongly matches the employers’ wish list.

Employers dislike profiles if they are full of self-praise, but appreciate ones which say who you are, what you have done, and where you’d like your career to go next, which is one simple structure that works well. Here are examples of CV profiles that have worked pretty well:

1. An experienced IT programme and portfolio manager with a successful history of core system replacements and organisational mergers in the financial sector; underpinned by a proven track record of leading large IT delivery functions.
2. Values-driven public relations and internal communications director qualified to Master’s level. An industry reputation for being strategic and creative with a real delivery focus. Proven track record in transformational change and stakeholder engagement and delivery of national and local media, public affairs, colleague engagement and community programmes.
3. A client focused research manager experienced in developing and managing research teams that deliver bespoke information across a wide variety of sectors. Ten years’ experience of delivering quality information services which consistently perform on client satisfaction KPIs. With well developed management and influencing skills and a history of leading effective teams.
4. A design graduate with a wide range of customer service experience acquired from a range of roles including hospitality, tourism, market research, sales and promotions, archiving, and previous volunteer experience working in a specialist wildlife centre.

Whilst none of the above profiles are the last word in phrasing, they have all worked to move four candidates forward, quickly, into interviews and job offers. Why? They have a number of features:

• They begin with a positive form of pigeon-holing often set at a tangent to each person’s most recent job. Readers like to get a quick handle on the question ‘what are you?’
• They reveal sector and skill coverage quickly.
• They don’t waste time with too many adjectives.
• They focus on evidence which differentiates them from other applicants.
• Each profile points to hard evidence which will appear later in the CV.
• By the end of the two to three sentence profile you already have a strong sense of what someone does, their strengths and career highlights, and what they might bring to a new employer.

WHY A CV CAN BE A CONVERSATION STOPPER

Imagine yourself in the shoes of Michael, a decision maker working in a busy organisation. You had a really useful meeting with Michael this morning and you did well, communicating useful skills and knowledge. You get home and decide to follow up the conversation with a short, friendly email. You attach your CV. This is the last contact you have with Michael.

Many clients seek as many opportunities as they can to send out CVs to senior people in their network, often after good conversations. They are therefore often puzzled by the way their CV can sometimes bring the conversation to a sudden halt. A CV is a complex document requiring a relatively complex response. If someone specifically asks to see your CV, send them a good one, but don’t assume that this will move things forward. ‘Send me a CV’ is often simply a courtesy, another variation on ‘thank you for coming to see me’. Sending a CV when it wasn’t asked for has an even more uncertain effect.

When a CV arrives you’re asking somebody to do something which is demanding and problematic. You’re giving somebody a task they are not comfortable with. Is your contact supposed to comment on your CV, give you tips to improve it? That means reading it in detail, which takes a good 10 minutes, plus the same amount of time again writing out comments. The second assumption quietly hiding within your request is that your contact will pass your CV on, with favourable comments, to another decision maker. This might happen after a Level 3 conversation (see Chapter 14). Otherwise it’s unlikely on the strength of your CV alone. If someone is going to recommend you or pass you on to another contact, they will probably do so on the basis of a conversation alone.

All of the above scenarios mean that there are plenty of reasons why your CV will gets put into ‘pending’ which, in a busy world, means ‘will never be read’. If any action is taken, the most likely thing is that your CV gets passed on to another decision maker who is just as busy and even less inclined to read it. Or it gets passed along to HR, which means that you now become a candidate in a detailed and possibly extended process.

SO, WHAT SHOULD I SEND TO FOLLOW UP AFTER A MEETING?

The first thing to send in response to any face-to-face meeting is a warm note of thanks. Somebody has given some time to talk to you. Send a proper handwritten thank-you card, ideally giving some indication of what happened as a result of a very good conversation. This action is considered an absolute must by What Color Is Your Parachute author Dick Bolles, who has advocated it in every workshop. It works. People remember a thank you card for months, if not years. If a conversation leads to something significant further down the line, including a job offer, write again. Keeping people informed of your progress and thanking them for helping you along is one of the things that turns functional networking into genuine and long-term relationships.

WHY YOU MIGHT NEVER USE A CV

It’s interesting to see how many people manage to change jobs without ever producing or sending out a CV. These are usually people who prefer verbal communication rather than documents. They make relationships and build on them through conversations, either on the telephone or face to face, and always speak to someone rather than writing to them. As a result of being known, they find themselves invited to interviews and get offered jobs, without any documents being exchanged apart from a job offer letter.

While this experience is exceptional, you may well need your CV far less frequently than you think. The danger, in fact, is that you rely on it rather than having level 2 conversations.