If you are in your final year or just about to graduate, the first thing you need to consider before applying for a job is to come out with an application form or a cover letter and a resume. Besides putting down facts such as your academic/technical qualifications and extra-curricular activities, do you know the key things you must and must not do when putting together an application?

Strategy One – create each application from scratch

This is essential and very easy not to do. Obviously, your bio details are always going to be the same, but once you have written one or two application forms it is very tempting to cut and paste whole answers from one personal statement section into another one. Do not. One of the most important things to realize is that recruiters are after people who genuinely want to work for them and not those who simply want a generic aspirational job.

Strategy Two – the magic formula: create a life story for every individual employer

Creating applications from scratch should go deeper than the simple avoidance of copying. Each application should be unique and tailored to the specifics of the employer’s stated requirements. Instead of simply listing all your attributes they need, you create a story of yourself that has a hero (you) with estimable qualities (a combination of technical/academic skills and character-based competencies that are tailored to the specifics the employer wishes to see), a plot (a series of challenges and situations from which you learned things about yourself and demonstrated your ability to achieve), and a strong narrative drive towards a happy ending (your finding a job with organization X). You do not make the employer create a narrative from your application, you provide it for them.

Strategy Three – do not be tempted to fake it

Undoubtedly the pressure to get an aspirational graduate job can be such that many graduates are prepared to use every trick they can to secure one. The facts about yourself cannot be changed. However, when it comes to the personal statement section, you can arrange your facts about yourself in the most attractive and appropriate order. It’s called narrative of employability. Its liken to wearing the clothes to a job interview in which you may not wear on daily basis, but the idea of dressing appropriately in a way that highlights those aspects of your physical appearance which you like and hides those aspects you do not is something that virtually everybody understands and accepts.

Strategic Checklist

In order to complete a successful application, you need to be able to answer yes to all the following questions:-

• Do you know what competencies this employer requires?

• Have you illustrated as many of them as possible?

• Are you using a range of activities to do so – academic, social, sporting, voluntary, internships and employment?

• Do you know what the employer’s knowledge brand is?

• Have you included something that shows how you embody it?

• Have you really answered the questions(if any) with credible evidence?

• Has the whole thing been written from scratch?

Source

David Williams, Phil Brown & Anthony Hesketh, How to get the best graduate job, 57 – 65, Prentice Hall Business, 2006