 Rau padara… teve uvita. Hourbaika? Hourbarika. Power BAEMI.ena.... Singapore, NZ then having this and this is pretty much why first impressions are so important. Having lots of white space, formatting really neat and tidy. So when an employer looks at a CV, they'll go really quickly, so speed reading. So that's why it's just so important the whole first impressions. We'll talk a little bit more about that. It's also surprising how quickly you can pick stuff up when you look at a CV. So I used to get some shockers when I was in recruitment. So one of them was written on the back of a telecom letter. And I thought, actually I spent longer than 10 seconds because I was flipping it back and forth. I wasn't sure what I was seeing. And I was thinking, was this their draft? Were they trying to say they were good at recycling? I wasn't quite sure. And then there were some others that I got by the second one. And I was thinking, this looks familiar by the third one. I was thinking, no. So I went back through my piles. It was exactly the same CV three times with a different name each time. So I don't know what that was about. But you got to get some with coffee stains when that was in the days of mailing. It's really amazing how bad some are. And just the formatting, you can see spelling mistakes really quickly. So the 10 seconds is actually accurate. This is information that employers have provided with us, by the way. Oops, I'm giving you the answer. It's OK to use the same CV and cover letter for every application. Yeah. So tailoring is really important. There's really only one way to write a CV. Who thinks that's incorrect? Yeah. You don't always need to include a cover letter. Think you do, think you do. How many think you don't? Ah. It does depend. Yeah. So sometimes there's an online application form. Sometimes that's replacing cover letters. And we'll talk more about it at the end about that. So not all employers want cover letters these days. So checking the employer's requirements is really important. We've got one final one for you. I know. It's really sad these days. Sometimes you just never hear a thing from employers. So it is OK to follow up after a couple of weeks. My favourite story was one for myself and I applied. And then about three weeks later they rang me up and asked me if I wanted a temping job there. And I said, so I'm guessing I didn't get the other job then. And I said, oh, didn't someone tell you? So they'd forgotten that. So let's just get you warmed up a little bit and we will be covering a lot of these points in more detail. What we're covering this evening is CVs and cover letters. We'll talk about the employer's perspective. And then interpreting job advertisements. It is really crucial to have a look at the job advertisement, the job description if there is one, and mine it for as much data as you can get. Principles of effective CV writing. There are some sort of common principles. And then how to tailor your CV and cover letter. And then also what to be aware of for the future. So future trends. The aim of your application isn't to get the job. At this point it's actually to get an interview. So that's what you're trying to do. And these days we talk a lot about personal branding. So it's not something that... I would say that it's particularly in the last five years it's really gained traction. About 1997 I think it was first data to be talked about. So we're used to sort of McDonald's or Auckland City Council or the University of Auckland having a brand. But we've also all got personal brands. And in terms of the job application we're sort of showing our talent, our values, our passion, our strengths, our experience, our ideals. All of those things come together to form our brand. So we're trying to also show that there's an alignment between our brand and their brand that we've got what the employer is looking for. Just a few figures. So a large employer gave us these figures about a year or so ago. So for a normal job they would expect about 250 applications. So it is really important that you stand out. Time spent reviewing your CV. They actually were less generous than us. They said five to seven seconds. 200 seconds. So as soon as they put an ad online, 200 seconds later they will get their first application. Unless those people knew that the ad was coming of they won't be that tailored. And then 68% chance an employer will find you on Facebook and then one in three chance they will reject you based on something in social media. It varies very much those last two points from employer to employer. So some do spend a lot of time looking on social media. They might not do it at the very beginning of the process but if when they're working on their shortlist then they might look at social media. If they've got two candidates who are very similar and they're not quite sure which ones to choose then they might look at social media. How many of you have actually googled yourself? Yeah. So you might want to google yourself and just see what comes up and see it from an employer's perspective what the employer would think of what they're seeing. From their perspective as well so they've really stressed that they want something that's succinct. So as short as you possibly can. So just go through it. Look at every word that you use. One shot only. So I talked before about sort of less than 10 seconds. So that's why the presentation, the formatting, the layout is also really important. So this is particularly when it comes to the CV. There it sort of like says use words wisely, make every word count, no spelling mistake. In a CV you can use bullet points but in a cover letter we suggest you don't use bullet points. So the cover letter is your chance to show that you've got really good written communication skills and can form complete sentences. But in the CV you want to make it as short and succinct as possible so you wouldn't have complete sentences so bullet points are really helpful in that particular case. You research the company so you're trying to once again it's that brand alignment show that you're relevant, that you are the right person for the job. You don't just copy and paste stuff that you see from the website. Particularly when it comes to the cover letter. So in the cover letter you're saying why you want the job and why you want to work for that company so you wouldn't just go onto the website and just sort of copy and paste a few sentences that you find. You need to sort of go deeper than that. Two things that they really do want to know is why you want the job and why you want to work for that particular company. So they are really important. So it's that enthusiasm thing. They can teach you what you might need to know for the job but they can't inject you with enthusiasm if you don't originally have it. So New Zealand spelling. So some of these things you'll get some employers don't care but the ones that do care really do care. So you're sort of catering to those ones. It's the same in terms of the fonts that you use so you try and use an easy to read font and something that's more modern one of my colleagues used to loathe into Test Times New Roman. Whereas I don't mind but some employers are the same. Some of the easier ones like Arial or Calibri are better than something like that apparently. So it's all very subjective. Active words to make more impact and we'll give you a website link so you can sort of find a list of keywords for you. It is a good idea once you've been in the workforce for a while to explain gaps so just so they know that you haven't been in prison. I don't know why their mind would go to prison but apparently that's what they say. So just explain the gaps and always try and put a positive spin on things as well. So if it was prison, yeah I'm not quite sure how you'd do that but build skills and achievements into your work experience. So some of the employers will talk later about the different types of CVs but a recent trend is not to have a skill section and instead to incorporate the skills into the work experience part and we'll talk more about that in a little while. And then education and work experience is reverse chronological order. So the idea behind that is the most recent will be the most relevant. It's not always the case though so what you can do with that is use subheading. So if it's work experience for example you might have relevant work experience as the heading and then those jobs that are most relevant and then you might have further work experience. It's just so that you always have whatever is the most relevant at the top. So you can use little trips like that so using subheadings is a good way of doing it. You also don't have to put every job you've ever had in terms of you can make it clear that you've done that when it comes to the headings so as I said it might be relevant work experience so it could be recent work experience so you don't have to put every single job. I'll just hand over to Jameson. Okay so of course one of the most important things to sort of kick off the process is actually looking at those job ads really looking in depth at those job ads. So often people will just look at the bullet points and yeah you'll get some really sort of interesting stuff out of those bullet points but look beyond that. Are there any implied messages? Are there any keywords or phrases that are used in that job ad? Are there any qualities that they're mentioning? Or are they just mentioning skills? Is there any repetition? And really checking the employer requirements and Peta talked a little bit earlier about making sure that you do what the employer requires. If they say do not send a cover letter then you send a cover letter and they're going to think okay this person does not have attention to detail and if that's one of the requirements of that job that could be a bit of an issue so it can be a bit of an issue a bit of a problem if you really don't go into some detail. Another thing that is important is to look at what format they've asked for the application to be in. Sometimes they might ask for a PDF. Sometimes they might ask not for you not to send a PDF. They may ask for you to send it all in one document when I applied here at the university for this job I thought oh great I've got it all ready just about to send it off in two documents and then no it was only to be sent in one document for the PDF so then I'd go back and spend a little bit more time. Fortunately I didn't apply for a job that closed at 12 o'clock at 11.59. I had plenty of time so I was able to do that. But that's another thing sometimes bizarrely enough they may also have an odd time of day so check that because it would be awful if you spent all that effort and then discovered that you were actually a few hours late and trying to submit your application and with a lot of those online application things it will not let you submit it so essentially you're toast. If you don't do it on time there's no way you're going to be able to apply. I'm going to get my colleague Peter to hand round this book. It's one that's going to be useful in a few of the activities that we've got but now we're going to click onto an activity now you will have noticed me or Peter dropping on your table a job ad. What I'd like to do you to do firstly is actually just look at that ad suss out what the employer is looking for read it amongst you by yourself and then as a group if you can have a good discussion on that and then we'll do a bit of feedback session on that. Okay so bringing you back to the group discussion from the group discussion sorry keeping in mind these but I know that out there you've been discussing beyond these ways of analysing. What are some of the key things that you think this employer wants? Feel free to shout it out. Flexibility yes someone mature Negotiation skills Negotiation skills I had to motivate them for it but also to try new things Yep yes quite a few mentions of team there someone said superstar Strong leadership skills Strong leadership skills yes and it's interesting that that doesn't come through so much in those bullet points does it if you look at those bullet points you might completely miss out that whole team and leadership aspect of things that's more implied than actually fully stated That's actually a trend we're seeing they used to be really nice and just have a short blurb and bullet points and it was really clear what they were looking for but they seem these days to be doing more like this where you really need to closely look at the text and the job description if there is one as well to really have an idea of what they're wanting and the repetition is really important how often they use the same word Yes, so team and leadership, those things around that was one of those things that were repeated did other people see repeated improvements? Change anything else? Innovation Innovation, yes a self-starter, self-motivated one that leapt out at me service, they mentioned service multiple times in there Anything else that leaps out at you as far as that repetition part of things? Ownership Yep Looking at, really you haven't heard a lot of those those implied ones Yes, that's stated but also it's got a bit about qualifications for process improvement and things, yes Another thing that was there is that they didn't want someone who was a methodology purist so that adaptability change again comes through there Customer care Customer care, yes So as you can see from looking at an ad like this you can actually find out a lot more than just those bullet points, you can actually get a real sense from the ad of what you might put in your CV and what you might put in your cover letter the sort of themes that you're going to be wanting to explore and to highlight in those documents have come through quite strongly in the ad and if you don't actually take those queues then people who do take the queues CVs and their documents are going to be actually more persuasive to an employer than if you have taken those queues and if you have actually added those work keywords and things like that to your application And helps you in two ways it helps with the sort of skills, personal qualities that you're looking for but it also helps you sort of start to think about why you actually want to apply for the job So in the cover letter as I said before that's a crucial part of it and they do talk a lot about innovation and passion, you know we're passionate about building our culture of award winning service so then that's something that you would focus on but you wouldn't just say that you want to work for them because you're passionate about that you would actually provide some evidence and that it is really important genuinely important to you Indeed, now it's also important when you're doing these analyses to actually look at the different types of skills and experiences and also the personal qualities so you'll see on the screen here that in blue are some transferable skills really important skills that can be transferred from employer to employer but they're also in italics they're actually looking for some personal qualities harder actually to provide proof in your CV and your cover letter some of that is going to be perhaps done at interview or you might be able to imply back at them that you've got those personal qualities and then in bold it's those job specific skills and experience some of which are in those bullet points on that job as you would have noted to sort of hark on about it even more it's really really important that you match your skills to the employer's requirements you need to really closely analyse that job and that job description sometimes you might not have the job description but if you have, mind that as well for every bit of every clue but don't just look at that look at the organisation's literature look at their website do research on their company that might not even be on the ad but you think ah yes, I shine in that area so I can actually show in my application that I do shine in that area so it's really really important and so we've got an example there with regard to team work skills because they don't want you to say I have team work skills of course they want you to prove that you've got those team work skills what what they're looking for okay how do I match that and this will be really useful at interview as well because if you do that for everything that's required in here get that interview and you've then got sort of model answers to a variety of questions so it's not wasted effort doing this in some detail for jobs that you're interested in okay I guess the next sort of thing we're going to talk about is CV writing so with that sort of in the back of your mind what you've done as far as the analysis goes then actually getting on to writing your CV we've got some key principles here and gosh you could have many many pages of different principles couldn't you Peter but these I think are the most important ones that you have to keep in mind so there's that conciseness it's not a story of your life in great great detail because if they are going to look five to seven seconds or even the generous ten seconds you you can't get that much across in that set of time so be concise the three R's relevant remarkable and recent relevant have you gone through your CV line by line to make sure that everything that you've got in there is relevant to the position and to the opportunity if it's not relevant is it worth having there is there something else that you can put in your CV that was actually going to sell you better to that employer remarkable stand out don't you you want to differentiate yourself from the other people who are going for this job so that's where that remarkable comes in recent and that comes back to that question earlier if you use an example that's 25 years old it's going to be less persuasive than if you use one that's a couple of years old so that's where that recent comes in Taylor into the opportunity this as you will have already guessed is a common theme through this presentation that's tremendously important to make sure it's tailored to the opportunity that essentially you're going to rewrite your CV and your cover letter for every job I reckon it should take at least a day probably half a day for your CV half a day for your cover letter if you're going to really nail it what do you reckon Peter interesting maybe a real pain we've all applied for jobs and it can be a pain to really do that tailoring but just think if the other people have done that tailoring and you haven't it's likely that their documentation is going to be more persuasive than yours it'll make it a lot easier if you've kept it up to date so that say you make a date with yourself that every year you update your CV even if you're not planning on applying for a job and you can have a base CV and then when you're doing the tailoring you have basically everything you've done would be in a CV and then when you're tailoring you can just lock and choose what's relevant out of that base one we haven't really talked about length and said how many pages because it would depend very much on the type of job you're going for the industry that you're working in the country that you're applying to I'm sorry for those of you in the back table the pillar is in the way so length does very much depend so with our students we try and get them business school specific we try and get them to do a two page CV but it does very much depend even for them on what job they're going for so if they were going for a consultancy firm in Australia we might actually these days be suggesting that they might want to look at a one page CV if they were going to the United States we would definitely say a one page so it is just very industry specific so it's hard to say but as long as it's not repetitive and the other really important thing is the most important stuff is on that first page because they might not get beyond the first page when they're doing that 10 second quick scan so the first page is the really important part and if you're applying for a job as a professor here at the university CV could be 50 pages long and seen as perfectly appropriate to be that length because you've got all your publications and your presentations and that sort of stuff so, yeah What point would a CV start to get a look at something that's recently graduated looking for their first at times I feel like I'm getting a bit long but then what do I cut out perhaps going through and doing the relevance test on everything is really just sort of examining is this all relevant can I summarise some aspects of my experience is there anything I can do can I put a lot more in my LinkedIn profile and refer them to that on my CV so that that can give you extra length outside your CV because a recent graduate trying not to be thinking particularly in business about that two-pager or for consultancy one-pager but if they were post-grad it would be a bit longer because you'd want to put some research for example in there conference presentations so there might be extra information that you do need to put in there so it's very specific it just depends if it was a law CV it might be a bit longer because they do tend to write more in sentences or post a bullet points using action verbs I'll talk a little bit more about this but using action verbs makes your CV a little bit more persuasive because the verbs are quite sort of immediate and using the correct style for your role and experience because people will sometimes come to us and say what sort of styles should I use should I use a skills-based CV should I use a traditional CV should I use this one that I've found on the internet and it's again it's all about appropriateness what is appropriate for that particular role and also what's appropriate for your experience if you are less experienced say you haven't had any significant jobs but you've done a lot of university service and things like that have a skills-based one so it really does depend there's also project ones and that's quite common in the engineering school, isn't it where you talk about the projects and what you've contributed to those projects I think also in ICT they like a bit of project-based CV as well So with the skills-based one you've got the separate skills section but it's not just time management communication skills excellent team worker it's actually providing the evidence so it's how you've done that so you talk about what we showed before that you were part of a project team of four people but then it's also how you contributed to the team so they can get a really good grasp of what you would be like in working for them in a team environment working for them so it's providing that how information so a bit extra and then the traditional one is what I was talking about before where the skills these days are incorporated under the work experience and it's less task-focused so you'd have a look and think about your role think about would the reader know what I actually did in this job and if they do know you don't have to go into a whole lot of details about the task unless it's really relevant instead what you'll do is talk about the skills that you used you'd talk about like that two degrees ad you'd talk about the innovation in the team and the leadership experience in how you are a leader the type of leader you are whether you sort of operate on consensus etc Just a question about that 10 second average I'm just trying to understand the CV review process So are you saying that on average it takes 10 seconds for a recruiter to decide whether to take you on for an interview or is it more iterative as in that's for the first cut it might get two minutes after that Yeah it's the first cut so they will form an impression within 10 seconds and usually what they do is they have a yes and no in a maybe pile most recruiters we talk to and I did that myself is we had those three piles so then you'd be going through really quickly because you've got 250 plus all your other jobs as well the other work doesn't stop so you're going through quite fast you'll form a very quick impression and some of them are really easy to put in the nose straight away and then other ones you're essentially looking at it trying to come up with a reason not to interview them and as soon as you find that reason not to interview you stop and that's really sad but that's how you can do it so quickly and so then you might end up with some in the maybe and then some in the yes you'll have a look and see how many you've got in the yes and then you'll look at the maybe pile and then you will decide whether to go back through it or not so you are reading to basically to cut them out as opposed to opt them in so as soon as you find a reason not to you stop reading also to recruiters everyone does it differently so some think the CV is the most important thing others think the cover letter is way more important so some people will read the cover letter first and then the CV others will start with the CV if they're still interested then they will go to the cover letter which means for you you need to put equal importance on both because you don't know which they will read first and you don't actually know if they'll ever read the cover letter at all for that matter so I used to work in a not for profit and we hired a lot of people with clinical backgrounds and I was looking for a certain education so I would look at the CV go straight to the education section to see if they had the qualification I wanted if it wasn't there they would go in the know if they put it somewhere else they were out of luck now another way to differentiate yourself you might do an online CV and we've got an example here of now this is someone relatively famous we had I think Honcho at Yahu so she should be pretty fluent online but as you can see it follows a lot of the same sorts of things that an ordinary CV might have but it just uses interesting graphics it has some quite interesting stuff I thought this a day in my life one was a part of it was quite interesting but yeah so much of it is like a standard CV but with some additional build and whistles so you'd think very carefully about the industry that you're applying to the type of company so if in New Zealand you're applying to a telecommunication company you might do something a little bit different for two degrees or voter phone then you would do for spark so you do need to think about the industry the type of company so that day in my life might be suitable for some but not for others now I mentioned action verbs before and hopefully this isn't going to come up so you'll see here just a variety of different words that you could use they have a strength about them rather than being quite passive so you can google action verbs for careers and get a whole lot of variety of different ones to use one thing is that as it says on its website don't use it all at once I have seen a CV developed managed mix and match a bit now another thing to be aware of is that we've talked about the filtering process well sadly a human being might not do that it could actually be a robot that does it applicant tracking systems they're not overwhelmingly used in New Zealand apart from larger organisations are they better but they are used more and more and I suspect when people are recruiting large numbers of people then it's going to become a trend so in these do use those key words make sure that you use standard fonts rather than fancy fonts that the computer might not be able to read use proper punctuation and capitalisation are really important do spell check because the computer won't like it if there are typos or it might not understand it and check the employer's requirements reformatting it could be that a PDF will muck up their tracking system and so that's possibly one of the reasons that they might ask for a Word document and be careful with use of abbreviations because the computer may not know what that abbreviation means so just something to be aware of what should go into your CV well definitely your personal information education qualifications your achievements definitely the details of your experience don't forget the unpaid work that you might do the voluntary activities that you might do extracurricular activities don't think just of ones that you might have done when you were at university think of extracurricular activities that you have done in other parts of your life as well professional development that's a tricky one because sometimes people will ask well should I put all the different courses that I did at such and such an employer if they're relevant to the new employer then yes you might put those professional development courses but if that employer has required you to have a food safety certificate and your new job is an accountant then probably you wouldn't put that so again it's that relevance test referees you might put your referees in there but then you might actually you might choose not to because you might want to actually decide before at the sort of interview who you want to give out as your referees so that's a you don't have to sometimes they might ask for a career goal they might ask for a personal profile they might ask for a summary of your skills so if they do that then you probably you definitely include those but if they don't think about whether those sections actually contribute anything to your story see if they contribute anything beyond your cover letter because if they don't then they probably are wasted space that you can use on the other areas and just make it everything is relevant to the role and to the employer so I hope that everyone bought along their CVs tonight what we'd like you to do is just spend a couple of minutes looking at your own CV and thinking about the principles that we've talked about have you followed those principles are there any improvements that you could make to your CV as a result of what we've discussed so couple of minutes to look at your own CV and then if you could discuss it as a group you don't have to show your CV to anyone don't worry about that but anything that you think that you might want to improve in your CV in the future that was quite a great idea cool OK if we can come back to the centre now so as I've been talking to a few people I've noticed people are just scribbling things on their CV so it seems that there are a few people who are going to be making a few amendments to their CVs with regard to applying those principles to your own CV one question that we had was around what Peter said about representing your skills and this gives you a sense of how you could represent those skills so say for that communications one where he talks in some detail about what he did in that particular role so he's got that list of skills at the bottom but he's also got some detail on the skills that he used and applied during that role so does that give you a sense of how to use the skills in your CV? OK so strong introduction the most important part about the cover letter is that first introduction time I'm sorry I hope that's OK with all of you we've only got a few more slides so strong introduction why they should consider you why you want the position so quite commonly someone will say that I'm interested in applying for XYZ position and then they just leave it at that and they don't say why so that why and that enthusiasm is really important and be really genuine personalising it to the role and organisation without saying highlights and key achievements so you would do that exercise where you go through look at the advertisement the job description and then using sort of that repetition decide what you think the most important skills personal qualities are for the role and you'd focus on those you don't want a shopping list and just basically throw in every single skill that they've asked for focus on maybe four five of the really most important ones with a bit of evidence and then the closing paragraph saying thank you in terms of why you want to work for that company it's not just repeating what you've seen on the website it's what I was talking about before where you show that you've actually yes you're passionate about working for two degrees the customer service and you've demonstrated that through your career and then doing the research so researching the organisation what Tamsun was saying about looking at the website or the company literature as well and then just that whole enthusiasm thing so essentially that first paragraph is why you're applying for the job second one the mix of skills experience and qualifications there might actually be couple of paragraphs on that and then another paragraph about why the organisation and then that final one sort of thanking them for considering your application some employers want application forms and they can be repetitive you can sort of think well I've got that in my CV but you shouldn't just refer to my CV on there so they've designed the form for a particular purpose so even though it seems like you're repeating it yet again still fill out everything on that application form and sometimes the question on those application forms can seem a bit older, a bit quirky and you might think oh this is a joke I really want to know this answer that question as well because it won't be a joke they will have a reason for asking that question so yes application forms can have a wide range of different questions including interview questions which can be off-potting but you use the staff formula for most of those as well so in the future we've talked about LinkedIn and some employers are just asking for a cover letter and your LinkedIn URL rather than an actual CV and so we haven't we've seen that over the last couple of years it hasn't sort of turned into a big trend yet it's not really taken off but there are a few aren't there we think that it might be a growing thing another thing you can do if you like sort of the whole online environment is have your own website so have your own domain name have your own website or you can use a site like WordPress or there's another one called branded me if you like doing that sort of stuff then by all means do it and it's quite helpful in terms of your social media because you can have everything all feeding into the website and the website is the central hub if you don't like online stuff then I wouldn't do it if you're going to do it then you'd want to do it well so this is one example on branded me where she's got a lot of different projects so you click on one of the pictures and it takes the employer through to different details and then also recommendations as well LinkedIn use the recommendations feature on LinkedIn so get recommendations from managers and also colleagues the other one was the MJ Rider one that we showed you which is slightly more traditional to that branded me one so he has a blog and then he has his CV but he also has portfolio he's doing a PhD at the moment and he's got a lot of research on there as well but in terms of the lock of his curriculum vitae it is more traditional more what you'd expect the other trend is blind applications so that's partly why they might use an application form or they might use particular software so by that it means it strips off your name they have no idea your name they don't even see what school you went to lots of different things so anything that could identify your nationality or your gender things like that are just taken out of the application and that's to remove unconscious bias so really the only thing they can assess you on is what is left in the application that they see okay and that sorry we've gone over time but that's the end of the workshop at least you've got some more questions okay we'll send you partner you'll send your PDF tomorrow