Claude RAIMOND - LAnglais des affaires - Guide de conversation Pour les Nuls

Many people are ill at ease ( uncomfortable, embarrassed ) when looking for a job, thinking they lack ( dont have ) what it takes ( what is required ) to sell themselves. Yet ( however ) being asked to an interview is similar to enticing a potential customer to enter a shop, and obtaining a job offer is akin to ( of a similar nature as ) completing ( closing ) a sale.

Looking at the problem from the buyers perspective ( viewpoint ) raises following questions:

• 1 What kind of talent are they really looking for ( trying to find ) and why?
• 2 What might cause them to reject your application?
• 3 What elements in your profile might they regard as pluses?
• 4 What elements in your profile might they regard as minuses?
• 5 How many application letters are they likely to receive?
• 6 How many candidates will they likely interview?

If you are sending off your CV to an organisation advertising a job vacancy , the ad itself will answer the first question, but only a tiny ( minuscule ) fraction of questions 2, 3 and 4. To answer them, you need much more information than that provided by the recruiting ad. You want to know what type of organisation it is; if a company, whether it is privately owned or public, in the latter case, who the shareholders ( stockholders ) are; how many people it employs in your region and elsewhere; how the organisation has evolved since its inception ( beginning ) and how it is likely to evolve in the future.

Twenty years ago, getting answers to all above questions would have been a daunting ( an intimidating ) task. Today, you can get at least tentative ( preliminary ) answers to most of them in half an hour to an hour of Internet surfing. Once your rsum has been tweaked ( adjusted ) in the right direction, you can then write a motivation letter expressing your interest in this particular company and your eagerness to contribute to its success.

Its now time to worry about questions 5 and 6. Bear ( keep ) in mind that the only objective ( goal, aim, purpose ) of your correspondence is to pass the first hurdle , namely to be selected for a job interview. If you think the number of applicants with a profile similar to yours is very large, expect the person who opens your letter to look mainly ( primarily ) for reasons to put it on the rejection pile. Suppose there are one thousand replies. Then the person in charge of the selection will try to reduce this to a more manageable ( practicable ) number, say fifty applications. To eliminate nine hundred and fifty letters, very coarse ( crude, rough ) negative criteria will be used at this stage , e.g. the legibility of the letter and CV, spelling mistakes, age above or below preset limits, sex and/or marital status , minimum number of years of experience or higher education.

If you have any reason to assume the number of candidates will be very large, avoid giving details that might cause your application to land on the rejection heap, proofread your motivation letter and CV several times and have someone check ( verify ) them for spelling or grammatical mistakes ( errors ).

You might try a trick ( ploy, ruse ) to cause your letter to receive more attention than those of your competitors: delayed sending. There is of course the risk that it wont be examined at all, but if it is, chances are that the reader will no longer be in elimination mode and will notice positive points.

But the best way to have an edge on ( an advantage over ) your competitors is to send your letter and CV before the ad is published. How can you do that? You can do it by sending spontaneous ( unsolicited ) applications to companies you would like to work for, doing so at a time your application has a chance to trigger a positive reaction. There is no point in writing to a company in trouble, which is more likely to decrease than to increase its staff . By contrast, a company currently undergoing or planning changes is likely to show an interest in your spontaneous application if your profile has any relevance to its present or forthcoming challenges. To discover changes that are likely to ( will probably ) cause a company to look for new talent, use the Internet.