I Want That Job

By Robert Cubitt

If you are unemployed, have never had a job or are just looking for a change in jobs, then this book is aimed at helping you.

 

Getting an interview for a job is a competition. Getting the job from the interview is even more competitive. You have to show the prospective employers that you are their only choice and that isn't easy.

 

In this book author Robert Cubitt takes you through the recruitment process step by step, from interpreting the job advertisement to negotiating your contract. At every step he gives you the insider knowledge of how the process really works (which is not how HR Managers think it works) and how to present yourself in such a way that the employer's decision is made easy. He then teaches you the tools,  techniques and tips necessary for you to use that knowledge to convince the employer that you are the best candidate for the job. They have to choose you because you have shown yourself to be the best candidate.

 

Get the job you want. Get the job you deserve.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Robert Cubitt
• Release date: Mar 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9798215423639

Robert Cubitt

Robert (Bob) Cubitt has always been keen on writing and has tried his hand at various projects over the years, but the need to earn a crust had always interfered with his desire to be more creative. After serving for 23 years in the RAF, working as a logistics planner for Royal Mail and as a Civil Servant with the Ministry of Defence, Robert took up writing full time writing in 2012 and now has a large catalogue of work published. Bob likes to write in several different genres, whatever takes his fancy at the time. His current series are sci-fi and World War II history and genres don't come much more diverse than that.  In his spare time Bob enjoys playing golf, is a member of a pub skittles team and is an ardent Northampton Saints fan.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION - WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT?

I will put this out there right from the start: I’m not an HR professional. If you think that means I’m not qualified to write this book then that’s your opinion, thank you very much, put this book down (or close the pop-up), thank you for your time and I hope that you find what you are looking for.

OK, still with me? Good, because I may not be an HR professional but I have, in the past, been (a) a person looking for a job and (b) an interviewer/assessor for literally hundreds of candidates for jobs. You learn a great deal doing both.

It may come as a bit of a surprise to you, but the HR department of a company doesn’t play a big part in the recruitment process. They place the adverts, they receive the CVs or application forms and they may arrange the interviews, but that’s about it. The decisions about who will be interviewed and the decisions on which candidate will be selected are all taken, usually, by the person who has the vacancy in their department and, perhaps, a colleague. They will also be the person (or people) who conduct the interview. That is where I come in, because I have been involved in those processes almost as often as I have had hot dinners.

When you read this book, you are tapping into the knowledge and experience of a person who has done the short-listing, conducted the interviews and made the decision about who to appoint to the job. Very few people in the HR department ever do that any of that and they almost never do all three.

Perhaps I should say a little bit about myself, so you can judge whether or not I am qualified.

I started my working life in 1968 when I applied to join the Royal Air Force as an apprentice. The RAF were quite fussy about who they took and so I was summoned to the first of many Assessment Centres that I would attend during my life. I’ll be talking more about Assessment Centres later. I duly joined the RAF to learn the trade I set my heart on and as my career advanced, I attended three more assessment centres before arriving at RAF Cranwell in 1983 to undergo training to become an officer. It was here that I gained my first formal training in interview skills.

I left the RAF in 1991. There was a recession on and jobs were hard to come by. I attended several interviews during that period, learning as I went what went well and what didn’t work. I applied for over a hundred jobs and when I was turned down after submitting my CV or application form, I made a point of phoning the company and finding out why. I learnt from each experience. I was invited to more interviews and again, when I was turned down for the job, I rang up to find out why, so that I could improve my performance next time. I started to get job offers, two of which I turned down. I was finally offered the job I wanted with Royal Mail.

To advance your career in Royal Mail it is necessary to apply for vacancies within the business. In addition, the business frequently went through organisational changes and each of those resulted in job holders having to apply for jobs in the new structure and to go through selection processes. I refined my interviewing skills and served on countless selection panels recruiting all levels of staff, including those for graduate trainee programmes. In all, I must have interviewed in the region of five hundred candidates over the years. Many performed well, but many didn’t and it was often those who had been in the same job for several years who performed the worst because they simply hadn’t had the practice and the world of recruitment had moved on while they were doing their jobs.

During this period, I also did a lot of coaching for people who had failed to find jobs and whose performance during job interviews had led to alarm bells sounding. I won’t claim total credit for these skilled and knowledgeable people eventually getting the jobs they deserved, but it was noticeable that they performed better at interviews after my coaching than they had done before. I was amazed that other line managers hadn’t done this sort of coaching and were leaving it up to me. In the end the penny dropped. The line managers didn’t have much more of a clue about how to be interviewed than the applicants had.

In later years, when Royal Mail was shedding a lot of managers, an external consultancy was recruited to support employees looking for new employment. From them I learnt most of the remaining tools and techniques that I talk about in this book. Again, I put those techniques into practice for myself, but I also helped in the coaching process. I can tell you that they work, so long as you are prepared to put in the effort.

I will say this many times during the course of this book, looking for a job is a job itself. When you do any job, you gain skills and experience and the same applies to the job of job-hunting. You find out what works and what doesn’t, and you adjust accordingly.

So, who is this book aimed at? It could, literally, be anyone who is looking for a job. However, I do have three specific groups of people in mind.

The first group is the most obvious; the people entering the job market for the first time and who have the least experience in job-hunting.

The second group is those people who have been absent from the UK workplace for a few years and want to get back into employment. While you were raising your children, or back-packing through Tibet, or studying for your PhD, the world of recruitment changed. The changes may have been small and subtle, but they were still changes and cumulatively they became bigger changes. This book aims to offer ideas on how to deal with those changes.

The final group is those people who have been with one employer for a long time and who want to, or need to, find a new job. You may be just a bit bored in your current job and you want a change, or you may be being forced to make a change because your employer is cutting staff and you are a victim of the knife. Either way, you haven’t been out job-hunting for a long time and are not sure how to go about it in this modern world, so like the people in the second group, I have some ideas that I hope you will try out.

Here, early in 2023, a lot of people are finding themselves to be reluctant job-seekers because of the Covid-19 outbreak and the havoc it has played with the UK economy. Some will find it easier than others, but there will be a lot of people applying for the same jobs and anything that gives you the edge has got to be worth considering.

I’m not going to promise you a magic formula that will guarantee that the next job application you make will be successful. Life isn’t like that. But I can offer you the opportunity to improve your chances of success. Just as an athlete knows that training, diet and state of mind all increase his or her chances of winning a race, so similar small things can make a difference in the race of life.

If your CV is just slightly better than those of the other candidates then it is you that will be selected for the short list and not them. If you are the best prepared candidate attending the interview then that may overcome some of the gaps in your skills, knowledge or experience. These tiny, seemingly insignificant things are the difference between getting the job you want and losing out to a better prepared candidate who may not actually be the best person for the job..

As I said above, finding a job is a job itself. No matter how qualified you are, no matter how good you are, or were, at what you did, no one is going to come knocking on your door to offer you a job while you are sitting in your living room watching the Jeremy Vine on 5 show, or Homes Under The Hammer or whatever other daytime TV show you can use to fill the empty days..

You have to be out and about in the job marketplace, putting on a show and letting the whole world know that they are missing out on the best (insert whatever job descriptor you do or want to do) if they don’t employ you.