Awareness of the employers’ expectations is essential to your finding a job. The older job hunting techniques focused on YOU, the person. They laid emphasis on your work history, accomplishments, academic background, and other credentials. It focused on your qualifications, and objectives. But that has undergone a sea change. Today, employers expect that you will know what THEIR needs are and tell them how you can fill those needs.
What Employers Want:
Energy:
Displaying energy is the all-important first step. Energetic people exude enthusiasm, vigor, and drive, and that’s what employers want. They want you to be active. They can easily sense this quality in a person almost as soon as they enter the room. So, if you are not an energetic type of person, it would be advisable to practice ways to look and act energetically in order to make a good first impression. It can make a huge difference, and sometimes job opportunities may be won or lost depending on the manner in which you enter a room.
Specific Skills:
Each job would involve a set of specific skills, and a specific education or training background that is required for it. Most often, these skill sets will be mentioned in the advertisement. If, however, they are not mentioned specifically, finding out information about the company and its hierarchical structure will give a good clue. This will also show your research abilities as well as initiative and can only have a positive impact. Your primary concern, once you have the list of required skills, should be to present evidence of your possession of those skills. This could be your academic qualifications, projects, and achievements. Also added to that would be your responsibilities during work experience or voluntary activities, and tasks in the management of societies or of sporting activities. The key point is to try to match the evidence in your application as completely as possible to what the employer wants. Highlight the relevant areas. Recruiters may not have a lot of time and certainly will have a lot of applications to go through. They want to read only about the particular skill sets that are of interest to them. Make these skill-sets noticeable. Precision and brevity are important, but it is also important to explain how you have the required skills and how you can use them for the benefit of the firm. A plain list is not enough for the recruiter when they take a second look.
Transferable Skills:
There is a set of skills that most employers look for that have nothing to do with the competencies required for the particular job. These skills are an indicator of your development potential and not your knowledge. These so-called transferable skills include communication, teamwork, leadership, initiative, problem-solving, adaptability, motivation, and sometimes numerical skills. Apart from this, private sector companies prefer the candidate to have some idea of how firms operate, of current business news and trends, and their impact on the organization. Your courses, earlier work experiences, and hobbies have provided you with skills that prospective employers may value. Be ready to answer clearly if asked in a job interview about how your education has prepared you for a specific job. You can be prepared with a good precise and concise answer if you think about it in advance.