Do you know what employers are looking for?

I think sadly, the answer is usually no. Having interviewed graduates for the past 25 years, it seems to me that although students are pretty clued up on what they want from an employer, many have only the haziest of ideas about what qualities an employer is looking for.

Employers are looking for skills which are not taught at University unless you are being hired for a pure “vocational” role such as a Doctor or Engineer. Graduates pretty soon  learn that  virtually all of the stuff they have learnt on their degree becomes redundant the minute you graduate.

Employers are looking for people with a high level of Emotional  Intelligence (EI), who can self start, are happy working in teams, can be assertive when necesssary but are quite happy working with people who will be their polar opposite in personality and background.

My first boss in advertising was an old Etonian and son of a British Ambassador who had gone to Oxford. I was the Geordie boy who had gone to a Polytechnic. They even made me share an office with him, something he hated.

We were almost comically different. Yet I knew that although he despised me and thought that I was someone who had just crawled out from under a stone, unless I made it my business to keep him happy I was sunk. Somehow I managed it and it was only 18 months later that the HR manager told me they had deliberately done it to see if I could cope with working with somebody they knew to be their most snobbish employee. They did this on the basis that if I could keep him happy then keeping clients happy would be a doddle. It turned they were right, I did find I loved working with clients and that eventually translated itself into a series of upward career moves.

I had no experience of working in a formal office environment before I graduated and I was very much at sea for at least a year, trying to work out the politics and the general nature of working in teams with people from many different disciplines and indeed different cultures. Small wonder then, that many employers nowadays are insistent that internships are mandatory.

Internships are the perfect opportunity for employers to work you out. Are you resilient? Can you cope with setbacks without falling apart or moaning constantly? Are you bright and personable? Most important of all, are you, or could you, be moulded into one of us? Every company has a very distinctive culture and most companies do not want mavericks, they want people who will fit in from day one.

So when you start your career planning (which should be in your first not your third year) it will pay you to realise that it’s the person behind the degree that the employer wants to know about, not the degree. Think carefully and make sure you plan a series of deliberate internships or at least non-degree related experiences. So  you emerge with an understanding about what makes you tick as a person, what it is you can offer employers and most importantly, what it is that employers will be looking for in you.

Once you grasped all of those questions, you can then frame your CV in ways that will appeal to your employer and  you will be able to ask your employer some penetrating questions at your interviews. Contrary to popular myth, employers like being asked good though provoking questions, far better that then interviewing another wet behind the ears student who doesn't have a clue.

By having a tailored CV and asking penetrating questions you can show that you  understand what employers are looking for, which is every recruiters dream.

Have you seen the Graduate Coach's guide to CV's & Cover Letters?