Book extract: Erin Devlin tells how to get the job you want

Whether you’re applying for a new position or seeking a promotion, you need to stand out from the crowd

Securing the job that you really want is all about selling yourself well to an employer. To do that, you’ll need to know what’s great about you: your strengths, your values, your achievements, your ideas and why you’d be a valuable member of the right team. You might have heard of an “employer value proposition” (EVP). It is a combination of benefits and rewards that an employer offers in exchange for your skills, experience and hard work. But what about your value proposition – an employee value proposition? Your EVP is what you can offer the company, and it’s what makes you stand out.

Your EVP forms the basis of your resume or CV (curriculum vitae) and how you represent yourself in an interview. It articulates your points of difference, makes you more appealing than other candidates and is ultimately what can get you the job.

Think of your EVP as a pyramid, with each layer of brick forming an important foundation for the next, culminating in your vision for success in your job.

To develop your EVP further, let’s start with your values.

Determine your values

These underpin your EVP. They are at the base of the pyramid because they are the foundation of success in your career. A great way to determine your values is to look to people you admire and note the qualities you like about them. Maybe they have qualities that you want to emulate in your own life. You can also think of a time when you stood up for something. Why did you stand up for that cause and how does that play into your value set? Lastly, think of a time when you really felt like you. What were you doing at the time and how might this be reflected in your values?

Once you’ve completed this exercise you will hopefully have a list of five or six core values. Here is an example of what this might look like:

• Giving: giving back and contributing for good

• Happiness: enjoying life and work, and always seeing the positive

• Achievement: learning, developing, seizing opportunities and continuously improving

• Integrity: staying true to what I believe in, and having the courage to advocate

• Teamwork: helping and supporting others

Your education: what counts?

The next level of your EVP pyramid is education you have completed. You can include high school, university degrees, TAFE courses, on-the-job training, online nanodegrees, short courses, mentoring programs, conferences, industry certifications and any other professional development that you have undertaken. Focus on and emphasise education that is closely aligned to the positions that you are considering. For example, you might have undertaken a barista course, but now that you’re applying for a marketing assistant position, you’ll want to highlight your communications degree.

What qualifications you include in your CV and online profile depend on the level of education you have achieved. For example, if you are applying for a job straight out of school, you can include your high school qualifications, even listing the subjects. However, if you have a PhD, you might start with your undergraduate studies.

University degrees can show that you have a highlevel strategic understanding of particular subjects and have completed detailed research too. A nanodegree is typically a course of study that you can complete in under 12 months and is delivered online. Completing a nanodegree or TAFE course can reflect attainment of specific job-ready skills, such as UX (user experience) design, carpentry or data engineering. Mentoring and on-the-job training can also help advance your career in your current job. You can attend conferences or industry events to help reinvigorate, reshape and re-energise your thinking.

What experience have you had?

Paid work is important in developing your career and experience in a variety of settings, but internships, volunteering and extracurricular activities are all valuable experiences too. Employers love to hear about charities

you’re involved in, clubs or groups that you’re committed to and where you’ve contributed to side businesses. This type of experience gives extra insight into a candidate because it can often demonstrate values, proactivity, leadership, work ethic, interpersonal skills and community spirit.

Employers want to know what ideas you’ve come up with, initiatives you’ve sparked, projects you’ve driven and work you’ve completed. They’ll be interested in the scope, size, process, outcomes and results that you’ve achieved. They may ask you about your mentors and your experience working with them, and who you might have led and developed yourself. Your experience may include blogs that you have written, cars or boats that you’ve restored or social media pages that you’ve managed. It depends on the job that you’re pitching for, but more often than not you’ll have much more experience than you think you have. Get a head start on your EVP and note some of your key experience.

What are your skills?

Having worked with more than 500 professional athletes on career planning and transition, I am always pleased to see how many of their sporting skills are transferable into new professions. However, the number of times I’ve heard an athlete say “I don’t have any relevant skills” is astonishing. Highly trained professional athletes have learnt to work to schedules, push their minds and bodies to the limit, contribute to teams and show leadership on and off the field. As Justine Whipper, general manager of player development and wellbeing at the Australian Cricketers’ Association, explains: “When athletes transition from sport to another career, they often find the most challenging aspect to be understanding their worth outside of the game (industry). But by building their level of self-awareness, industry exploration, formal or informal education, work experience and networking, they develop confidence in their unique strengths and realise they are often sought after by employers.” Whether you’re straight out of university, taking the next career step or changing direction, the chances are that you have more skills than you give yourself credit for. Here are some examples of relevant skills that any employer would love a candidate to have. Most students will have already developed these during their studies, and as professionals in their work.

• Teamwork

• Leadership

• Report writing

• Generating innovative ideas

• Research skills

• Critical thinking

• Problem solving

• Flexibility and adaptability

• Collaboration

• Initiative

• Entrepreneurial skills

• Public speaking

• Presentation development

• Creativity

• Interpersonal communication

• Technology management

Now’s the time to think about your own skill set and what you’ve learnt at work, school, university, or from extracurricular activities like sport or charity work. Make sure you give yourself credit for all the brilliant skills that you have obtained throughout your employment and life, and articulate these well to an employer.

What have you achieved?

Moving up the pyramid, let’s look at your achievements. When interviewing for a job, it won’t be enough to have relevant skills and experience, and an interest in the position: you need to find ways to stand out. Therefore, it’s critical that you showcase your achievements from earlier workplaces, not just that you attended work. Often recruiters see on people’s CVs their positions and duties listed, but nothing about their achievements. They don’t just want to know that you were in an outbound sales position for two years – they want to know whether you were good at it or not. Did you hit your targets consistently? Did you contribute new ideas? Were you reliable, turning up on time? Did you operate ethically and with empathy? These are the things that they want to know.

But how do you articulate that in a CV or during an interview? The first step is to think about all of the achievements that you have amassed in your career to date. If your career has been short, or you haven’t had a job yet, then you might want to include achievements from school, university, sport or extracurricular activities. Here are two examples of achievements that you could list on your CV and online profile, or discuss at interview: •

“As the nurse unit manager for the Wellness Hospital, I designed and implemented a revamped infection control training module which was delivered to all incoming team members upon arrival. This led to a 30% decrease in infectious outbreaks in the unit over a

12-month period and was subsequently rolled out across the entire hospital.”

• “When I joined Terry’s Trucks as a logistics coordinator, the business was scheduling 30 trucks daily, but only able to deliver 45 loads of goods. In reviewing the driver routes and geography, and rearranging the pick-up and drop-off schedule, we were able to deliver 50 loads per day, increasing our daily delivery output by 10%.” Often when you think of achievements, you think of awards or formal accolades, but there are plenty of other forms of achievement, including:

• Ideas you have contributed which have improved culture, performance or efficiency

• Ways that you have given back to the community, helped to reduce environmental impact or improved diversity within a business

• Key performance indicators (KPIs) that you have achieved or exceeded, such as sales results

• Ways in which you have demonstrated the business’s core values

• Your efforts in helping colleagues;

• Projects you have managed successfully

• Presentations you have delivered well

• Problems you have solved with great outcomes, such as showing proactivity that improved a situation or achieving a better return on investment

• Recognising and acting on business-critical trends

• Demonstrating attention to detail that has had an impact

• Showing empathy in interactions leading to a great outcome

• Using influencing skills effectively

• Meeting and exceeding expectations

• Mentoring or developing someone to great success

The Collins English Dictionary defines achievement as ‘something which someone has succeeded in doing, especially after a lot of effort’. It’s not about what you did in the job. It’s what you achieved. After all, an employer wants to know that you will add value to their organisation. In my experience, when I have worked with individuals to flesh out their achievements, I’ve found that most people underestimate themselves and what they have achieved. They often dismiss results or actions as ordinary, when in fact they are extraordinary. So, if you’re sitting there thinking, ‘This is all well and good, but I haven’t done anything special’, you probably have. You are likely to be more accomplished, more spectacular and more valuable than you think.

Here are some questions to ask yourself. Have you ever:

• been the leader in a situation? What happened? How did the group perform?

• offered up an idea that was taken on board and improved the situation?

• helped someone?

• hit a KPI?

• been given positive feedback?

• stood up for something that you believe in and made a difference?

• proactively solved a problem that no one else had noticed?

• improved revenue, finances or return on investment?

• made a business or environment better because of your actions?

• improved the customer experience?

• made a great website, presentation, document or piece of work?

• noticed and flagged something that was important? If you answered yes to any of these questions, you definitely have achievements that you should be proud of.

What ideas do you bring?

The last part of your EVP focuses on the future, and what you are going to do for the organisation and team that you’ll be working in. Your ideas are typically grounded by your values. Your vision might centre around what you want to achieve in the role, but also, importantly, what you believe the organisation wants and why you think they’ll hire you.