It’s time to move on to another role. You should make sure you leave on the best possible terms with your current employer. You may consider the following guides:

• Make sure you have already secured the employment contract before handling your notice.
• Be aware of a possible counter offer. However you should remain confident once you have decided to move on.
• When handing in your notice, do your best to continue to work to the same high standard and to finish your remaining work as well as to leave a comprehensive handover to your replacement.
• Do not burn the bridges. Leave on good terms and keep your frustrations to yourself. As a gesture of professional good will, you could even offer to stay on an extra week to help manage the work load/train a replacement.
• Do not talk negatively about the company. Find a polite way to explain why you left. If you can’t say something nice, say nothing at all.

The power of social media

Social media can be a useful tool to help you find out information about a potential job and your employer. Websites like Linkedin and Facebook allow you to get connected to people easily, and you can communicate your questions through these venues. Sometimes, it is also possible to find out about job openings through friends or contacts, so good practice would be to explore any potential job opportunities in your professional and social networks.

Social media can also work the other way around – your reputation both online and offline is very important. The industry you may be applying for may have many interconnected people, and a potential employer may know your previous boss or even your friends and colleagues. You should be aware of what you post online on social media websites, as it is very easy for employers to do an online search on your name and profile. 

 
How you say something is as important (or sometimes more important) than what you say. Interviews are emotional assessments as much as they are intellectual ones.

 

Motivation and Passion

No employer would hire someone who does not like what they do. Motivation and passion are often a large source for interview failures. Employers will want to test how committed you are to your career and ultimately the company and may explore your motivations in depth. It is important to show you are passionate about the role you are applying for; for instance, you can use examples of what you are proud of, what you found interesting in your job, what you want to achieve with your role and why you like the company you are interviewing with. Another way to show interest is to prepare intelligent questions that make an interviewer think while also demonstrating your interest and desire to know more about the company and its people.

 

Be Positive

Most people like to work with positive people. Unless you are in a situation to critically analyse something, a positive outlook on most subjects is generally more favourable in interviews. It is helpful to be enthusiastic and show that you would be happy working for the new company. Even when you are asked to talk about a negative element about yourself, you should find a way to turn it into a positive experience or outcome. 

 

Body Language and Appearance

Body language can also communicate a large amount of information to an employer. For instance, if your role entails dealing with other people or meeting clients, an employer will want to see how you would represent the company. You should make sure you have a firm handshake, a good level of eye-contact, confident tone of voice, good body posture while sitting and not fidget with your hands or other items that might prove to be a distraction. You should also dress appropriately as how you look can affect an employer’s perception of how well you will perform your role. In most cases corporate interviews are relatively formal, and you should ensure that you are you present yourself professionally (clean hair style, ironed/non-wrinkled clothes, polished shoes, clean hands, no excessive jewellery, etc).

 

Practice makes perfect

We highly recommend practicing for your interviews. Practicing for an interview can allow you to objectively see how you perform when asked a range of interview questions as well as spot any key areas of improvement. You can ask your family or friends to do mock-interviews – ask them to really challenge you and critically analyse your answers and assess your body language. Doing many mock-interviews can make you familiar with your answers and give you confidence when you are doing a real interview.

As the interview may be the only chance your employer gets to assess you, preparation is very important. You should anticipate the questions that you will have to answer based on the information you have included in your CV, as well as some standard questions asked in most interviews.

 

Know your CV inside-out

A starting point in preparing for your interviews is to review your CV. You must be able to explain everything you put down in your CV during your interview. Employers will be curious about your background, and the experiences on your CV are often the first thing under discussion. Failing to prepare adequately may make an employer doubt your experience or skills. One way to become familiar with your CV is to go through every line and sentence in detail and elaborate on each point. Employers are often keen to know what work you have done and so you must be able to talk about your role in a project, the nature of your assignment, what problems you might have faced and what you gained from your experience. Sometimes employers may ask technical questions so be prepared for those as well.

 

Commonly asked questions

Below is a list of commonly asked questions. You should carefully think about how to answer each of them and how your answers would sound to an employer. If it helps, you can list your thoughts down on a piece of paper.

• Why have you chosen to apply for this role?
• Why are you applying to our company?
• What are your career motivations/where do you see yourself in five years?
• What other companies are you interviewing with? What makes us different from those companies you are interviewing with?
• Why are you leaving your current position?
• If you have a gap in between period of employment, what where you doing, and why was there a gap?
• If you are moving cities or countries, you must be able to explain your reasons for doing so.

 

Responding to unexpected questions

It is likely that you will be asked an unusual question or one that you may not have prepared for. It is important to stay calm and critically analyse each question. Think about what the point of the question is before providing your answer, rather than answering it immediately.

 

Structuring your answer

The answers to your questions should be thought-out and provide enough depth and be a convincing answer. You should think about what you are trying to say, and what kind of examples you have to back-up your statement. You should be very specific with your example so that an employer can have a clear picture of what you can do and believe what you say. Think about how you should present a point and support it with examples from your experiences. You can use structuring phrases such as “first, I think (x) because… secondly, I believe (y) because… thirdly, (z) is …. because…” or “I believe (x) for two reasons, the first reason is (y)… and the second reason is (z)…”.

INTRODUCTION
 
 

Interviews are the next stage in the recruitment process. Depending on the role and company for which you are applying, you may have one or multiple rounds of interviews before receiving a job offer.

Many people think that interviews are only for employers to assess potential candidates. However, interviews are also a good chance for a candidate to know more about the company and assess whether working there would be good for them.

• Interview preparation
  • Know your CV inside-out
  • Commonly asked questions
  • Responding to unexpected questions
  • Structuring your answer

• Interview Style
  • Motivation and Passions
  • Be Positive
  • Body language and Appearance
  • Practice makes perfect

A CV is your potential employer’s first impression of you. A good CV is the main and crucial factor in getting you an interview. Strong competition for a great position means that your CV needs to present an accurate and concise picture of yourself, contain no errors, and allow you to stand-out from the many other CVs being reviewed by a hiring manager.

While there are many ways to write CVs, the key points a CV should include are often the same. This guide will explain the fundamentals of writing a strong CV.

Layout and Content

Your CV should be easy to read and follow. A strong CV is very concise and presents information in an organised and logical way. The CV should also be visually presentable, by using universal fonts (such as Times New Roman or Arial in standard sizes). CVs can be any length, but effective CVs are generally no more than two or three pages long.

Key details to include in your CV:

Personal: Your name and contact details (address, phone and e-mail).

Brief Profile: A short introduction setting out your core skills, qualifications, accomplishments and goals. This profile should immediately give the reader a broad impression of who you are and what you can do.

Work Experience: A concise outline of your work experience including the companies you worked at, your titles, main responsibilities and achievements for each job. You should present the most recent experience first.

Qualifications: Your education background and professional qualifications. These should be relevant to your current skills. The most recent education and qualifications should be presented first.

Development: Any education, training and professional development that could demonstrate that you have other relevant skills.

Referees: The contact details of two or three referees (recent employers or academic references).

 

Tailoring Your CV

Your CV should be specifically tailored to each company you apply for. You should research the job requirements of your target role and present the information in your CV to match those requirements.

Common Mistakes : Spelling Errors

It is very important to ensure that your CV does not contain any grammatical or spelling errors. Since your CV is a reflection of who you are, mistakes may lead a potential employer to think that you are someone who does not care about your work or is someone who has poor attention to detail.

 

Not Tailoring Your Application or Cover Letter

As mentioned in the section above, your CV should be tailored to the company and role for which you are applying. This also applies to any cover letters that you may send with your CV.

While it is tempting to write one generic cover letter that you use to send out to many different companies, doing so will show a potential employer that you are not truly interested in the company. The credentials in your CV should be tailored to highlight the skills that the company is looking for and you should include specific reasons why you want to work for the target company in your cover letter.

 

Presenting Information Poorly

How your CV looks is also an important factor. One of the challenges to drafting a good CV is to present the information in an appealing way, such as by using lists, bullet points, headings and captions. Since there is a lot of information, it may be easy to put all the information down in a disorganised fashion. Your CV has to be tidy and be easy to follow.