Documenting Your Value

By Liz Simpson

Founder of HeartWork

These days the word that's most likely to make a hiring manager's eyes light up is “results.” It seems few companies are willing to invest the time and money to train folks - even those with great attitudes, who will inevitably make the most effective and dedicated employees. Hiring has become a risk-averse activity with supervisors looking for people who can hit the ground running.

How do they know that?

By asking questions that highlight what candidates have done before - and the results that came from those actions. So how does that square with being someone fresh out of college who may have limited experience? Actually, not as badly as you may think. You just need to go about it the right way - and that means preparing ahead of time, so that you can articulate your accomplishments in your cover letters, on your resume and during your interviews. Here's how.

The first rule of marketing - and you're marketing yourself every time you approach a company for a job - is “know what your customers want”. Survey after survey that land on my desk show that organizations want pretty much the same set of competencies and it is these areas that hiring managers will probe for in prospective employees and free agents.

· Adaptability - how you deal with ambiguity and change

· Attitude - your commitment, motivation and energy

· Communication - oral and written skills but also the ability to listen

· Decision-making - including your ability to assess risk

· Interpersonal - customer service orientation (and ‘customers' are internal as well as external)

· Leadership - personal impact and ability to influence others

· Planning/Organization - time management, prioritizing

· Problem Solving - creativity and critical business thinking skills

· Self-Management - ability to handle stress, having high standards of performance

· Team Working - effective participation in groups

· Life Long Learning - taking responsibility for your own development

· Technical and Professional Knowledge/Proficiency

There have, inevitably, been experiences in your life in which you have demonstrated some or all of the above. Just because they haven't occurred in a work environment doesn't make them any less real or important. Indeed, organizational psychologists stress that past behavior is the best predictor of future behavior so the more incidences you can relate that demonstrate these capabilities, the better.

Let's take one of the above competencies as an example and work through how you might convince a hiring manager that you are highly skilled in that area. Take team working, for example - the ability to work with and through others in order to achieve a collectively agreed goal.

Think of a time when you operated as part of a team. This could be during school, within a community project, a sports team, an internship or part-time job. These are some of the questions to ask yourself in order to flesh out that competency:

What was the stated goal of the team? For example, while working as waiting staff at a bar or restaurant, this may have been to serve customers quickly and cheerfully.

The above is an excerpt from The Last Job Search Guide You'll Ever Need: How to Find and Get the Job or Internship of Your Dreams, which is available for sale for $19.85 in our bookstore or $27.00 at Amazon.com but for free to those who subscriber to our free career newsletter. This hot new book contains job search secrets of the most experienced, most knowledgeable and most respected career experts. Learn career planning, job hunting tools and tactics, interviewing, cover letter and resume writing (lots of samples!), networking, and how to find an internship. Written by 149 career experts. To receive a free copy, subscribe to our free career newsletter.

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