Glenford Smith | What the employer wants

Q: I read your article the other day about Tackling The Interview Question 'Tell Me About Yourself.' I respected how you brought across your message to others about career and personal development.

I would like to get some more tips on how to go about presenting my resume and application letter to my potential employers. I would really love to further my education in the information technology field. So, please, if you could assist me in enhancing my understanding of job applications, I would be very thankful.

D. Brown

A: Thank you for reading the Gleaner Careers column. Your email was edited for length. Thank you for the compliment.

The employer wants someone who can solve the problems the organisation is having. Even before you meet with such an employer, you need to sit and do the work on yourself. You need to sit down and under each heading in the rÈsumÈ, brainstorm everything you can call to mind.

You don't need to keep it relevant as yet. This is not the time for that. this is the brainstorming phase. Key achievements, work history, experience and education list everything underneath each heading. The reason you list all is that invariably, you find that you undersell yourself. You may find that you looked at something and think it's just not valuable when in fact it is.

Next, you drill deeper down into each key achievement and list all the benefits you gave the employer. You do the same for each of work history, experience, and education.

Key achievement

Say a key achievement is design with AutoCAD, which you happen to have that, the benefit your previous employee had was that you were really good, and you would train young workers. You also did your work, and you gave a work report. You would list this as train, work, and work report.

Do this for each of the benefits. Then write them all, paying attention to the relevant ones. Formulate several versions of your personal profile, career profile or career objective. Each is a brief statement summarising either who you are, what you've done, or what you hope to do.

Practise going through job advertisements. Many look at the classifieds and say they cannot through all that to get a job. They look on the process as too tedious and involved. Don't do this. Your job is too important to think like that. Your competitor may be putting in the hours, while you are slacking off.

- Glenford Smith is a motivational speaker and success strategist. He is the author of 'From Problems to Power' and co-author of 'Profile of Excellence'. glenfordsmith@yahoo.com