Chapter 03 - How to Get an Interview

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3

HOW TO GET
AN INTERVIEW
This chapter helps you with practical steps to
getting accepted for interview by a company or
agency by:
■ understanding the three key routes to getting

an interview
■ looking at the skills of networking or cold-

calling
■ motivating you to pitch and keep pitching.

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YOU’RE HIRED! INTERVIEW

Key routes to getting an interview
There are three key routes to getting an interview.
1. Waiting: until a job has been advertised and applying for it.
2. Cold-calling: applying to a company and asking to be considered for
a place, even when one is not currently being advertised as open; or
presenting your CV on the Internet. (A 2006 survey by Personnel Today
found that more than 70% of organisations use online recruitment
methods and that percentage is likely to have increased considerably.)
3. Being headhunted: networking to make sure you’re being seen on the open
marketplace or being contacted in your present job by another firm or
headhunting agency and asked if you’d be keen to jump ships.
Can I do all three?
Of course! There are no real rules about how to get an interview except this one:

Who dares wins!
If you sit back waiting for your ideal job to come along and whisk you off, you
will still be sitting there on that same chair, hoping, for a very long time.
Pitching and marketing yourself is very like marketing any other product.
Again, imagine you’re a chocolate bar. You look good, taste good and you’re
ideally priced and smartly packaged. There would be customers out there
who would love to buy you. The only problem is they don’t know that you exist.
Without active marketing to raise your profile all your talent and skills count
for nowt.
If you’re unemployed, under-used or unhappy in your job you’ll have to start
out on a campaign to find first-time or alternative employment. This will mean
creating written details of all your wonderfulness and abilities (your CV) and
then making sure it gets sent to all the right places, along with a covering letter
and a back-up telephone call.

Pitching yourself
Are you a natural salesperson? Pitching anything takes nerves of steel and the
skin of a rhinoceros. Pitching yourself takes nerves of reinforced concrete and
the skin of six rhinoceroses placed side by side. Although actually it doesn’t.
It might feel at times as if it does, but all it really needs is the ability to pick up
that telephone and ask them to give you a chance.

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for either pride or shyness. Paul Jacobs, who has 30 years’ experience in the
recruitment business, even suggests you should be a bit of a bunny-boiler!

Pitch-perfect
Before we launch into CV and contact planning it would be good for you to sit
back and consider one overall piece of advice:
It’s not all about you!
Self-obsession is a common theme among jobseekers and a cross-section of
the average thoughts of your average applicant would probably be something

HOW TO GET AN INTERVIEW

When you’re placing yourself out there on the job market there’s little room

along the lines of:
■ ‘I want them to give me this job.’
■ ‘I deserve some luck.’
■ ‘I hope they pick me.’

Paul Jacobs advises: ‘Brainstorm like stink. Register with agencies
but also ask yourself which companies you’d like to work for
and approach them directly. Big companies get thousands of
applications, which is why they often use an agency, but that’s no
reason you shouldn’t try.
Be bold. Write to the chief executive and explain who you are and
why you’re applying. Follow it up with a phone call. Your level of
belligerence could separate you from the jobseeking masses. You
need to put in graft. If it won’t come to you, you need to go out to
it. Essentials are enthusiasm, energy and a good support system to
boost morale. Ask and keep trying because it’s easy to start giving up
and lose direction if you’re not immediately successful.
Treat jobseeking as an experience, like having a career. Campaign.
Network with family and friends. In many ways, life’s just one big job
interview. And watch out about the impression you create in the least
obvious places. I know some employers who will use Facebook to
check out applicants, watching to see what you put on it and what it
tells them about you. Recruiters use it to check your background.’

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YOU’RE HIRED! INTERVIEW

■ ‘I will feel better if I get this job.’
■ ‘I need the money.’
■ ‘I need the kudos.’
■ ‘I’d enjoy this career.’
■ ‘I’d look forward to the challenge.’
■ ‘I want to feel confident.’
■ ‘I want to be accepted.’
■ ‘I want the interviewer to be nice to me and ignore that gap in
my employment record where I couldn’t be bothered to look for
work.’
■ ‘I want them to skip over the fact I have a bad record for punctuality.’
When you’re pitching and making those all-important first approaches to a
company it’s not what you want that counts – it’s what they want. It’s not as
hard as you’d think to slip into the mind of the average interviewer. In many
ways, their needs are quite simple:
■ ‘I want this person’s talents and skills to be a perfect fit with the job I’m
recruiting for.’
■ ‘I have to work through a glut of CVs, most from applicants who lack the
ability or qualifications to do this job.’
■ ‘I want to read through CVs that are clear and to the point.’
■ ‘I want them to be good value, i.e. bringing return for the money we’re
offering to invest.’
■ ‘I don’t want to wade through a mass of irrelevant detail looking for the right
fit.’
■ ‘I’m not an archaeologist going on a dig, I want the right person to leap out
at me.’
■ ‘I want them to know they’re the right person and I need them to know why.’
So, here’s a rule to keep at the front of your mind throughout the pitching
process:

Put yourself in the interviewer’s shoes
A constant reassessment of the whole process seen through their eyes is vital.
Or, to strangle a quote from John F. Kennedy: ‘Ask not what the company can
do for you, ask what you can do for the company’.

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Cyberspace and home printers have opened the borders in recruitment terms.
Although this is primarily a good thing (you have access to more vacancies
and the ability to post yourself out there where the whole world can see, plus
the ability to jet as many copies of your CV across to as many companies as
you choose), it has very obvious down sides. The high volume of CVs out there
in cyberspace means there is a huge overload and interviewers complain
that applicants no longer worry whether they fit the job specifications or not,
while many applicants complain that interviewers aren’t providing enough job
specifications in the first place.

HOW TO GET AN INTERVIEW

How to do your CV

The outcome of this is that most CVs are ‘fuzzy’ – untailored, non-specific and
unsuitable for the position.
This advice should help during the actual interview but also at pitch stage. It
will also help explain most of the following dos and don’ts.

DO: make your pitch as wide in scope as you like.
DON’T: make it obvious. Sounding as if a company is just one on a very long list
of longshots won’t impress anyone. Make all your approaches sound and look
personal and specific rather than scattergun.
DO: spend time creating a world-class CV.
DON’T: make it a ‘one-size-fits-all’ CV. Tailor it for each company you send
it to.
DO: update your CV. I recently got one from a guy in his 30s who’d still got
details of school achievements in the first paragraph.
DO: make it easy to skim-read. Interviewers are busy people and they don’t
settle down with a nice hot cup of tea and a pipe full of Old Holborn to read
through your CV cover-to-cover. They get loads – possibly sacks full – and
they cheat and cut corners like the rest of us. Break your CV down into easily
digestible chunks with headlines, like a newspaper.
DON’T: apply the ‘Any way to make my CV stand out from all those others just
has to be a good idea’ theory to CV-making. Personalised touches like bloodred notepaper, ‘zany’ photos or smiley-face logos will make it stand out, but for
all the wrong reasons.

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YOU’RE HIRED! INTERVIEW

DON’T: assume your interviewer/the HR department has a sense of humour.
DON’T: use exclamation marks. (As in ‘Hi! I’m Nicola and I’m a media studies
graduate with a passion for PR!’)
DO: thank the interviewer for reading it in your covering letter.
DON’T: grovel and get too wordy.
DO: create a ‘Standout’ CV that is easy to read and easy to absorb.
DO: work from the top down. Assume they have a low attention span so
stack all your goodies in terms of qualifications and experience at the
top of the CV and work downwards. Leaving the best until last might
mean the best never gets read at all. This type of CV is called a reverse
chronological CV.
DO: make sure you’ve included all the following:
■ contact details (believe it or not some candidates miss this off a paper CV)
■ qualifications
■ skills
■ previous employment history (if applicable) including dates
■ professional development, i.e. training courses attended
■ interests
■ referees.
DO: remember that some of your skills will be displayed on your CV itself,
such as communication skills, writing skills, attention to detail, neatness and
planning. Make sure your own CV doesn’t prove you a liar. For instance the
claim: ‘I have a good eye for detail’ will appear pretty stupid if you’ve written
‘I have a good eye fur detail’.
DO: keep using paper CVs as well. You can distribute them at job fairs and use
them as an excuse for dropping into a recruitment agency. Paper looks good
(please use recycled!) and can be refreshing and pleasant to open, handle and
read in a world of online communication. The fact you’ve bought and gummed
a stamp onto an envelope can show a level of interest and keenness that
online postings fail to do.

Internet recruitment
Sarah El Doori is Marketing Director for Trinity Mirror Digital Recruitment. Her
top tips for maximising your chances of finding a job online are:

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that you want to work in. If you don’t know
where to start, type your key search terms,
e.g. ‘legal jobs in London’ into Google and see
which job boards appear on the first two pages
■ ‘make sure that as well as uploading your CV
to a job board, you also make it searchable
as recruiters and employers regularly use
online CV databases to source and headhunt
candidates
■ ‘most job boards will ask you to create an online
profile and you should always complete this,
as the more information a recruiter searching a
CV database has about a candidate, the greater
your chances of being approached.
■ ‘register for any job alerts or newsletters that the
job board offers, as they will use these emails to
send you jobs that match your search criteria.’

Strategy planning
It’s likely you’ve already reached interview stage
but pitching is an ongoing process. You pitch, you
interview and you re-pitch if you fail to get that job.
Pitching is a campaign that – like your interview

Always think laterally
when you decide
which companies and
sectors to approach.
For instance, you
could think that the
NHS is all about
medical staff, but
it’s not. Doctors and
nurses make up less
than 40% of the
workforce. The NHS
is made up of 440
organisations, and
their careers website
can have details
on jobs from hotel
services, property
and estate work to
scientific or health
information.

HOW TO GET AN INTERVIEW

■ ‘look for job boards that specialise in the sector

techniques – will need re-booting and refreshing
regularly if you’re going to be successful.
OK, it’s roll up your sleeves time. Strategy planning for your pitch should
involve all the following steps.
■ Mapping: selecting the type of job market you’re looking in.
■ Snooping: picking out certain companies you’re particularly keen on working
for and finding out as much about them as you can (Google is a good start).
■ Matching: who or what type of person are they looking for? Reading and rereading any job specification and seeing if your face fits. Or, if there are no
vacancies advertised and you’re cold-calling, getting a feel for the company

35

YOU’RE HIRED! INTERVIEW

and its culture via the Internet or requested information. Tailoring your CV to
ensure you include useful and appropriate details and information.
■ Mating call: making your pitch by sending or posting your CV, phoning the
company, asking for an interview. Or attending recruitment fairs with the
aim of getting to interview stage.

How to use a recruitment agency
A recruitment agency can help pitch you and
Paul Jacobs, one of
the leading names in
recruitment in the UK,
advises:
‘Whereas in the past
most jobseekers would
habitually go into a
recruitment agency to
register and meet a
consultant to discuss
their next career
move, contemporary
life has now provided
the convenience and
ease of going online to
register with recruitment
consultancies at any time
of the day or night.’

promote you in the job market rather than taking
the direct route between jobseeker and company
of employment. There are certain advantages,
including access to jobs you might never have
known existed, and having someone to promote
your talents and skills for you.
A recruitment agency will need you to pitch
to them first, and it can be as vital to create a
good impression with the agency as it can with a
prospective employer, so treat agency interviews in
exactly the same way as you would a job interview.
Smartness, punctuality, keenness and reliability will
all be ‘sell-on’ qualities than can help push you to
the top of the agency books.

Paul Jacobs advises: ‘The down side of today’s modern instant registration
technology is that your CV will automatically be stored on the database of
the agency with no human interaction. No conversation with a professional
consultant – just silence – and the likelihood is that the agency will not even
bother to phone you up, as their volume
of applicant registrations means there are just too many CVs for them to
search.
‘Yours is just another CV hidden in the mass of CVs already cluttering up their
expanding database!
‘Your CV will be kept on their database, and then when a consultant acquires
a new vacancy they will type in keywords and phrases associated with the
role to see which CVs emerge that match the search from their extensive
database.

36

matching is left to the software of the consultant’s computer system.
‘Any human intuition and common sense is excluded by this clinical process,
and since an individual’s personality and attitude have at least as much to
do with obtaining a new job as experience or skills, the question is: just how
do you get your face known by the recruiter so they understand who you are
as an individual, rather than just a random set of competencies outlined on
your CV?
‘The answer is that you have to be brave enough to get on the phone to them.

HOW TO GET AN INTERVIEW

‘The problem with this process is that it is entirely impersonal. Accurate

You need to be belligerent and persistent. Ask if they received your CV and
– very important – obtain the name of the person you are dealing with. Attempt
to arrange an appointment to see them in person, but if that approach fails
just turn up at their offices and ask for the consultant that you spoke to and
introduce yourself.
‘The opportunity to leave an impression on the consultant who is representing
you should not be overlooked or underestimated, it makes the world of
difference. Now you are a real-life person to the consultant, not just another
CV buried on their computer system.
‘Always send a good-quality covering letter with your CV, it will provide you
with a chance to stand out from the crowd. Many graduate CVs all look the
same, i.e. they’ll read something like: ‘I’m 22 yrs and have a degree in …’
Your covering letter will express you as a person and help to personalise your
application.
‘Keep a note of the name of the person your letter goes to, as this can help you
get past the receptionist when you call. The receptionist is the ‘gatekeeper’ and
if you can ask for an individual by name, there is a good chance that you will
avoid being blocked. It might be pushy, but it can get you on.
‘Always look the part. Remember to impress the agency when you go to
meet them making the same effort that you would utilise to impress a
prospective employer. Never think ‘I’m only going to see the agency’. Dress
in a business suit, immaculate nails and polished shoes. First impressions
count – it’s true!

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YOU’RE HIRED! INTERVIEW

‘Try flattery! You could be asked: ‘why have you chosen this agency?’ Do your
research so you can tell them exactly why you selected them, i.e. ‘I’ve come
to you because you’ve been in business for 20 years and have an outstanding
reputation, and I have heard fantastic things about you …’
‘It is vital to know exactly what you want in a career and exactly what you don’t
want to do. Keep an open mind about opportunities, but do not be swayed to
take a role that is utterly unsuited to your skill set and personality. You will not
enjoy the experience and the chances are that you will not stay long in the job.
Not great for your CV!
‘Recruitment agencies often have a lot of work in call centres or sales jobs, like
selling advertising space. This is fine if it is the kind of work that you would like
to do, and you are convinced that you have the ability to succeed, but do avoid
being pushed into the wrong job, if you feel uncertain.
‘Ask your agency to provide detailed information about the employer they are
sending you to meet. They should be well aware of information that you would
not readily obtain from your Google or website search, like details of the person
you are going to see and what type of questions they are likely to ask you.
They could also provide the interviewer with the ‘tactile’ facts, i.e. useful details
about you, for example that you might be nervous or shy during the early
stages of the discussion but that you are well qualified for the job.’

IN A NUTSHELL
■ Always put yourself in the interviewer’s shoes. Jobs aren’t given
out of kindness. Work out what you can bring to the company and
offer that, rather than telling them what the job will mean to you.
■ Be professional. Think of jobseeking as a job in itself and plan
your strategies carefully, taking on board every route available
■ Treat agencies like companies. When you go in to see them, treat
it like another job interview.
■ Make sure you have the best CV. First impressions count!

38

Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.

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