Do you have a success rate of ‘0’ when it comes to getting an interview? Wondering why you’re still trawling the jobs boards for another opportunity? Here are some of the possible reasons why (excluding your ability to do the job), including some which might give you a little comfort that you’re possibly not personally at fault:
1. Firstly, The Competition
Most candidates will have no idea who they are up against when they are applying for a job, so you should take some comfort from the fact that while you firmly believe you’re the ideal match, there could be reasons why others are even more ideal, such as:
- They’ve done the identical job (or had very similar responsibilities) before, so can hit the ground running. This is no slight on your prowess, the other person just seems like a better fit.
- The recruiter had to advertise the role (for reasons relating to their own internal ‘fair and open competition’ rules) even though they knew who they wanted to appoint already, and that was someone else! This is more common than we would like to think and unfortunately has a real impact on people applying for positions.
2. A Suboptimal CV
There are lots of reasons recruiters will reject you, but it’s a shame to say that these will include the way your CV looks. Remember your CV gives recruiters their first impression of you, so make it a good one. Any / all of the following could apply:
- Your CV runs to 25 pages, and goes into the nth degree of detail about everything you’ve ever done, in your whole life. Whilst some of it will of course be useful, presenting a recruiter with so much detail probably won’t have the result you really want. Nobody is interested enough to read that and it will hit the circular file in seconds. Keep it brief: they’ll have lots of others to look through, and will probably decide within the first 30 seconds of seeing your CV if they want to see you for an interview.
- Have you used non-standard fonts / colourful text and pretty logos and art to make your CV stand out? If so, quickly stop! CVs should stand out because of their content, not flamboyant design. Rather than focus on the content of your CV, recruiters will probably be questioning your judgement.
- Layout: have you crammed so much into your CV but also remembered the golden 3-page rule? A CV which has no white-space is just as off-putting as a lengthy tome. Think again about how much it is really necessary to say in your CV.
- Have you handwritten your CV? And does the job require excellent IT literacy / word processing skills? If both apply, you’ve made a terrible mistake. Go back and type up your CV anyway as a matter of courtesy. No recruiter wants to try to decipher handwriting and take twice as long as they need to in order to read a CV.
3. Your Social Media Footprint
Yes, many of us are big fans of Instagram / Twitter / Facebook / Linkedin and we use them to the max. Don’t we just love looking at those funny / sad / shocking stories and pictures our friends share on there? Well, so do recruiters (they are people too you know!)
More and more frequently, recruiters are looking at their candidates across a number of social media platforms. And when they find you, what can they see? This is something that new generations of job seekers are increasingly having to be wary of, and it is why so many use pseudonyms on some of their public facing social media accounts.
Once you’ve worked that out what they may be able to link to you, then put yourself in their shoes and wonder whether they might have any issues with:
- Your public put-downs about pop stars / politicians / soap stars / ex-colleagues / your manager. Nobody likes a bully and saying nasty things to strangers on the internet for the amusement of yourself and your friends can be seen in that negative light. They are also averse to people who talk negatively about former bosses and colleagues, because that is probably how you will speak about them at some point in the future as well. Disrespectful comments about work are a huge social media no-no.
- Graphic detail about your love life and latest conquests. Nobody outside your immediate circle really needs to be able to see this and if you are telling the whole world in great and lurid detail, they may be worried about the reputation of the company, should they employ you. This is a legitimate concern in the internet age, as many of the UK media websites and newspapers generate their content by trawling social media since it is a lot cheaper than actual journalism. No company wants to see one of their employees headlined negatively in the Daily Mail or the Sun.
- Those pictures of you dancing half naked on a table in Kos… There is nothing wrong with enjoying yourself on holiday or even having some drunken fun, but there is no need to have it publicly available and splashed all over every social media profile. You can easily sanitise your profile so that only your actual friends can see this, rather than complete strangers who are being put off giving you a job.
- Your constant news-feed posts updating the world on your progress playing Pearl’s Peril, during the working day. This should go without saying, as it says that you are not working very hard at your current job and it really isn’t much of an incentive to go ahead and offer you a job to work with them. The fact that this information is publicly available even shows that you don’t care enough about being caught to attempt to hide it, so this also speaks to a bad attitude and contempt for your place of work. It’s not exactly a look that will help you win any interviews.
Then think again.
