Graduates not only do not have much professional experience – they also do not have much experience in looking for a job. This means that their CVs and cover letters often do not encourage contact and are full of truisms. Here are the most common ones to which recruiters (whether HR specialists or managers) are already slightly allergic.
1. Internship / job will be a great opportunity for me
“I am asking for a chance”, “Work in your company will be a great opportunity for me to gain experience”, “I deserve a chance”, “It would be an honor to work in a company like yours” – such statements are found in most cover letters of people with little professional experience. They are deprived of only applications for jobs that do not require qualifications and constitute a “spore form”, e.g. gastronomy, call center. Why such statements do not have a positive effect on managers? Firstly, because no company is a charity that aims to give opportunities and opportunities. Of course, a company can give a young person the opportunity to develop, but it requires the trainee or employee to have competence, willingness and commitment . And this is important, not whether the employee expects an opportunity or not. The manager must be sure that he is investing properly in the candidate’s time and financial resources. In other words, whether it is an opportunity for an employee or just normal work does not matter. Their competences convince a person to employ them.
2. I want to gain experience
The candidate has no (or little experience) and motivates his willingness to work that he wants to gain such experience. Meanwhile, the company is not interested in giving the employee the opportunity to learn from mistakes and thanks to cooperation with her to enrich his CV. The company wants to teach someone and to do it well. What the candidate can help is described in the advertisement – what tasks are waiting to be done. The statement that “I expect experience” is a vague wording, imprecise and does not add anything. However, if you write specifically what you want to learn, the manager will look at such an application differently. Instead of writing truisms about experience, list the specific competences you want to acquire, for example, “I had little opportunity to work in a team during my studies. We implemented only three group projects. As part of the internship, I would like to develop my competence in the field of communication and cooperation in a group, learn how to conduct an event project in practice and what elements of this process must be remembered to bring the project to the finale “- this wording allows the interview to develop the topic and definitely “sells” the candidate better than vague answers to the question “and what experience would you like to gain”? “Well, general, because I don’t have any.”
3. I want to learn the practical application of knowledge
After graduation, students most often carried out fictitious or theory-based projects. They wrote essays, prepared presentations, and all of this was based on theory. It is no wonder that there are problems with using this knowledge in practice. However, writing about it does not give the candidate any advantage over the competition – and this is what the application is all about. However, this advantage is given by specifying the skills the candidate wants to acquire . If you know the theory of techniques of influence, putting them into practice can mean establishing business relationships and winning new contracts for the company. If you have written scripts on a given topic, your practice may be to co-create software that will be used by the company’s clients. Such sentences show that you know what you want and know what – in your profession – practice is.
4. I want to see if I like this kind of work
And if you don’t like it, what? You will leave and we will be left with vacant vacancies and funds wasted on training. Of course, after graduation, we do not know what exactly we would like to do – we often have no clarity about what work in a given position is. So we try. And if we don’t like it, we keep looking. This is reality. Unfortunately, such honesty is not desired in the application documents. Every manager knows that by employing a person with no experience, it may turn out that this person is not good at the job and will not want to do it. However, when a candidate writes something like this in the cover letter, he seems to have insured himself and emphasized that he is not convinced that this is what he is looking for. And with a large number of candidates, an insecure link is skipped and reaching for the next application. So don’t write that you want to try. Write about it that you know that you will be sure, because you know both and you are so-and-so.
5. I can even brew coffee
You would like to pay for making coffee? Not lower than the lowest national, and preferably above? The employer, when looking for an employee or trainee, does not want to settle down for photocopying and brewing coffee. Unless the employer is not fair, he does an unpaid internship and does not intend to hire anyone after him. However, if you get such an internship, what experience will you gain? What will you later show off during the interview? When writing a cover letter, you should want to carry out more and more responsible tasks.
6. I am young and creative
Every graduate is young (those who graduated from the third age university are young at heart) and everyone is creative. At least he thinks so. Once, one of the candidates to the question, what creative then did last week, replied “I went to the gym.” Admittedly, it is extremely creative … If you consider yourself a creative person, do not write about it, just prove – through examples, portfolio, creative cover letter. And pay attention to whether this is needed at all in a given company and position. Do not write about your being young – first of all you give your date of birth, so you know how old you are, and secondly, is this a special advantage? Not necessarily, it is simply a fact that sometimes (if the employee is too young) can be an obstacle. Youth is worth emphasizing when you have done something unusual for your years, e.g. you have already run a company, you know five languages. Nowadays, a 26-year-old with a master’s degree and two internships and one occasional summer job is not unusual. Sad but true.
Well this is the end. thanks for reading.