Remember your P’s and Q’s
Posted on 21. Jul, 2010 by Lindsey Davies in Blog
Recently, while on Twitter, Graduates Yorkshire asked for guest bloggers to come forward and submit their thoughts about the current job market. Never one to shy away from an opportunity, we submitted the following post providing some thoughts on the subject and most importantly what we feel really helps graduates to land their perfect position. We hope you enjoy it…
When I was at University I remember people saying that all you had to do was get your head down, get the grades, get the pieces of paper signed and sealed and then the world was your oyster.
Now this is the point where you should hear a car screech – a bit like you do on naff PowerPoint slides. It simply doesn’t happen like that. It didn’t happen then and it doesn’t happen now.
Let me explain. It should go without saying that qualifications are important but they are not and I repeat NOT everything. I was never academically gifted and had to try really hard at school and during University. Things didn’t come naturally and often I would wonder why I was bothering.
Never the less, 4 years and a sandwich course down the line and I was three steps in – I’d got my head down, got the grades and even got the paperwork but what now? Get a job. Easier said than done.
After applying for a few roles I quickly found that although the paperwork was a necessity, it wasn’t the be all and end all. Just because I didn’t have a ‘first’ it didn’t mean that those who did would necessarily be any better at the job – they just interpreted the books about the subject better than I did.
I realised very quickly that if I wanted to land my perfect job it was actually more about attitude and passion than paper. It was about really wanting the position and about researching the company and understanding as much as you could before an interview. It was about the natural ability to talk to someone, whoever that might be – cleaner or Managing Director – and finding a way of connecting with them. To some degree it was also about how I looked and presented myself and of course, the firm hand shake.
The job I ended up getting wasn’t even in PR, it was as a Marketing Assistant for a European Print Company. I had to make the tea and get lunches ready, prepare sales presentations and cover reception, none of which were mentioned in any of the books I had been studying during the previous years!
Despite that it was one of the best jobs I could have wished for because it threw me in at the deep end and as well as working in a male dominated environment, we had to deliver day in and day out and no two days were ever the same.
I was involved in board meetings, business decisions and brain storms and to this day one story that still makes me cringe was the day I sent an email, copied in to all board Directors and Senior Managers of the business, titled “Second shit of the day”. It should actually have said “Second shift of the day” so I also learnt a quick lesson about attention to detail.
Some time has passed since then and as an employer I now understand there were two lessons that I learnt; you have to be yourself and expect that your personality will be as important as your results and you have to start at the bottom and never believe that any job is beneath you.
So ultimately it’s about your P’s (personality) AND your Q’s (qualifications).
At Open Communications, the PR agency I now own with my business partner Emma, we don’t look for candidates with exceptional academia, we look for someone with confidence, personality, the necessary basic skills and more importantly someone who we can trust implicitly with our clients.
We need to know that the people we employ fit well within the business and whether they get a 2:2 a 2:1 or a first class honours degree, at the end of the day if they are passionate about PR and prepared to work hard there is little more that any business could ask for.
This is so true; recently I’ve been mentoring some year 10s (15/16 year olds) about the ‘expectations’ of the employer (having recruited staff on various occasions throughout my career both – I can talk from experience).
Many of the students were shocked when I told them that a good dose of work experience will quite often win over academic qualifications when employers make a recruitment choice and that, as you say in your post; getting the degree, GCSE, A-level (or whatever) should only be considered the starting point. “Even if it’s working in a cafe on a weekend, or gaining experience in an office or factory during your holidays, it’s all ‘real world work experience’ which coupled with a degree or some other relevant qualification, puts you in a better and more saleable position from an employers point of view.” I told them.
Whether this sunk in or not is difficult to say. No doubt as we all do, they’ll learn.