Learn to speak “Behaviourese”
Use your CV to illustrate your competencies and you’ll impress recruiters.
Over 70% of UK organisations now have competency systems in place, sometimes covering just the key roles in the organisation but often embracing every job.
Broadly speaking, competencies are skills and characteristic actions used by individuals to enable them to cope successfully with the variety of situations both within and outside of work. In a nutshell, they define the skills and behaviours that are directly related to superior performance in any given role.
As well as organisations having competency systems, most professions have come up with their own set of competency standards too. And not just for accountants and HR professionals. The British Standards Institution even published a professional standard for nightclub bouncers!
Most of you reading this will have worked in an environment that makes uses of a competency system and you’ll know that they are regularly used to support recruitment and performance monitoring as well as for training and development purposes.
Demonstrate not assert
Many job advertisements explicitly identify the competencies that you’ll need to have to be successful with your application. For example, an advertisement for a management role might refer to the need for, amongst other things, a high level of skill in team building, change management, results orientation and a hands-on attitude.
demonstrate your proven capability in these areas in order to make the recruiter swoon at the thought of meeting you
If you are applying for this role, merely reciting these qualities isn’t enough. You will need to demonstrate your proven capability in these areas in order to make the recruiter swoon at the thought of meeting you!
You’ll need to show specifically how you have demonstrated each quality. So, in response to the example quoted above, your CV might read like this, “ Instigated a series of “working together” workshops at a time when cross-functional team working was virtually non- existent, and morale generally low. Awarded the company’s Team of the Year prize and the latest employee opinion survey shows a noticeable increase in morale levels.”
Producing and documenting examples isn’t as easy as it sounds. After all, how many of us naturally file our organisational experiences under competency headings? Instead, we are more likely to move from task to task, rarely pausing long enough to capture behavioural evidence from our daily working life. And that can be a problem when we want to move jobs. But when you do, it is worth finding the time to consider your skills in this way.
What did you actually do?
Write and talk in terms of action – having established the context, describe what you actually did to achieve certain results. Consider what happened as a direct result of your actions. Competency interviewers are very wary of answers that always refer to “we”. A potential employer wants to discover what you bring to the party, not how great the team is that you are planning to leave behind.
Get used to talking – hey, even boasting a bit – about what you do. The great thing about a competency based approach is that it ignores job titles and takes no notice of how you might behave in a hypothetical situation, so if you’ve spent time re-filing your work life experiences in this way, you’ll be ahead of the pack in an interview situation.
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This is interesting and i for one have for some time compiled competancy evidence for future employers.
However it cuts across another issue- The length of a CV! . For those of us with wide experience over many years it is already difficult to keep these punchy and with recruiters urging us to confine CVs to 2 page documents that barely have enough space to evidence the skils of a sucessful 25 year old it is difficult to se how the comptancy evidence can be meaningfully conveyed for those of us with wider skills.
So how can we combine these two seemingly oposing agendas?
I have recently carved pages out of my highly specialised ,but wide ranging, CV only to have a prospective employer to subsequently ask for much of the detail I had previously removed.
Recruiters always (OFTEN WRONGLY!) state to candidates that organisations like CVs that are short- Yes but as an employer myself many times there is ‘to the point ‘ and ‘To short!’
Any comments?
Try a simple three lines for each competency.
First line describes the context of problem or issue faced.
The second line says what you did about it and the competency shown. The third line describes the outcome or affect that your actions had upon the situation with financial or numerical value of the effect shown.
E.g. several multi-million pound projects at work had gone badly over schedule. Using strong leadership skills I undertook a project review and re-planning process. This brought the projects back on track all of which delivered on time and saved 15% of the total budget.
This can be done through you CV with thee or four examples for each role you have had. It reads a lot better than a list of I did, I did etc.
Don’t be afraid to blow your own trumpet as the CV is you opportunity to shine, like a marketing brochure for a house. Just don’t lie.
You can always set yourself up a web page and point readers of your CV to it, here you can out as much info as you like.
I hope this helps.
Regards,
James
For those wanting to find better ways to describe themselves in terms of their behaviours, I found a nifty Facebook service that helps you build a detailed profile of yourself, it’s called OpenProfiler.
It generates text and graphical results in response to your inputs – I found it errily insightful!
Oh my wordy word.
Getting a job is becoming more difficult than doing one. Gone are the days when we had ‘butcher, baker, candle-stick maker’ but come on guys, human societies don’t change so fast that jobs people did well 10 years ago are now not required. We all just have to pick up the new skills that new technology requires, What makes people happy and contented doesn’t change nearly so fast. If you were able to do a job well 10 years ago, 20 years ago, odds-on you’re the sort of person who can do a job well. I know researchers are always finding ‘new’ things (that’s their job) but in occupational psychology, one of the most consistent findings relates ability to do a job well to levels of general intelligence. Is intelligence genetically determined or a product of your environment (i.e. school etc). Probably both, as with most human behaviours. Is it fair to reward those who are more intelligent more than those who are not? Well there’s a huge moral philosophy literature there. One can be fairly sure though, that most people adapt to situations and learn to do tasks well with a bit of time and perseverance.
One of my recent interim assignments involved designing [with others] a set of management competencies for 3 levels of operational staff. We endeavored to make them aspirational rather than behavioral tick boxes where the annual battle for a successful appraisal becomes mind numbingly tedious and negative. I’m not a great fan and I don’t think asking people to evidence their particular contribution or compliance with a job requirement is the same thing
To Bernie Watson:
The ideal length of a CV: it’s certainly up for debate.
How about the following analogy – actually, it’s how my vicar father used to describe the ideal length of a sermon!
Liken it to a mini skirt:
Long enough to cover the essentials; short enough to maintain interest!