Is Less Experience Killing Your Chances of Getting a Job?

You’re a graduate from the 2014 batch, but are not getting interview calls from any employer because they need experienced candidates?

It’s probably going to be more than 6 months without a job and your friends from other colleges are already earning salaries and buying the latest smartphones!

Yes, this is painful. But no employer or HR manager will empathize with your pain. To get rid of this pain, you need to impress those employers.

You need to get your skills noticed. Let me tell you how you can do that and come in the eyes of an employer.

At here, between 1st August and 30th September 2014, we received job applications from 580 fresh graduates, from all across India. At that time we were looking at hiring 3 people across 2 different job roles. We gave everyone a chance to prove themselves.

Instead of focusing on filtering and reviewing 580 CVs, we asked the applicants to show us their skills.

Here are 5 ways in which the best candidates really impressed us:

1. They had read the job description well and knew what skills mattered.

The best guys had done their homework well.

They highlighted those skills in their applications which were not only their actual strengths but also important to us. We didn’t notice this at first because we didn’t pay much attention to their CVs. However, we certainly noticed later when we read their profiles in detail.

2. Proof of work-done was shared with us upfront.

As a credible indicator of skills, the really good candidates sent us links to their software codes through tools like Github, DropBox or simply Google docs. People in the non-technical domains shared with us links to their completed or published work.

These men and women had done some real work in the past and were confident enough to show it to us. Even though some of it was part of their academic work or internship work or projects that they are done out of their personal interest.

This is awesome for me, since as an employer it makes my job easier.

3. They undertook Coding Challenges or Sample Projects, for the screening.

The best candidates wanted to show us their skills and they jumped at this chance. They finished the sample work within the given deadlines and made it so easy for us to evaluate them that we were able to decide very quickly who to shortlist and who to eliminate.

4. They took short, online skill-based assessments.

All candidates were asked to take specific skill based assessments and the best ones completed those right away. We wanted a fair and relevant way of ranking these people quickly, so that we could compare and decide who were the top and bottom folks.

Through such as assessment, their relevant skills stood out immediately. The candidates who were just writing fancy words in their CVs were either too scared to take real assessments or they did and scored badly. They got to know their percentiles as compared to others and also got their skills noticed in the process.

5. They gave us great talking points in their interviews.

Due to the focus on skills during the initial screening process, the great candidates gave us very interesting and relevant discussion points.

This may sound like a trivial thing to a candidate, but to an employer it is critical since you know what to focus on during the interviews. When those candidates had their assessment scores handy and sample work completed, we knew which areas of work to probe on and discuss in detail.

We knew what were their real strengths and weaknesses and whether those candidates would succeed in the job roles that we wanted to hire for. This just allowed us to predict better and reduced our chances of hiring the wrong candidates. This makes the life of a hiring manager easy and allows the people with higher capabilities to get ahead of the less capable ones in a transparent way.

So instead of worrying about not receiving any interview calls or email replies from recruiters, you can get your skills noticed, the next time you apply for a job.

Employers love it, when they know the real you and can take better hiring decisions, faster.