Job application advice : What do employers want?

Tweet

More in this section

1. What do employers want…
2. Your application
3. Online applications
4. Example questions
5. Personal statements
6. Speculative applicatio…
7. Analysing job adverts
8. Common mistakes
9. Power words

Print all pages in this section

Perfect your CV

Rise to the top of the job pile with a professionally written CV and a free CV review from The CV Centre.

Graduate employers recruit motivated applicants who have relevant skills and the capacity to ‘fit in’. Many also require a good degree.

Some jobs require specific technical expertise but others are open to graduates of any discipline, as employers often focus on potential.

Finding vacancies has information about the UK graduate recruitment cycle.

Transferable skills

These are competencies that can be carried over from one activity to another. They are key attributes within graduate recruitment.

You should get involved in a wide range of activities and work experience while you are at university to develop these skills so you can promote yourself to employers. 

Every vacancy requires a unique set of competencies but some transferrable skills are commonly requested, these are listed below:

• self-awareness: knowing your strengths and skills and having the confidence to put these across;
• initiative: anticipating challenges and opportunities, setting and achieving goals and acting independently;
• willingness to learn: being inquisitive, enthusiastic and open to new ideas;
• action planning: prioritising, making decisions, assessing progress and making changes if necessary;
• interpersonal skills: relating well to others and establishing good working relationships;
• communication: listening to other people and clearly getting your point across orally, in writing and via electronic means, in a manner appropriate to the audience;
• teamwork: being constructive, performing your role, listening to colleagues and encouraging them;
• leadership: motivating others and inspiring them to take your lead;
• customer service: being friendly, caring and diplomatic with clients and customers;
• networking: building effective relationships with business partners;
• foreign language: specific language skills;
• problem solving: thinking things through in a logical way in order to determine key issues, often also including creative thinking;
• flexibility: ability to handle change and adapt to new situations;
• commitment/motivation: energy and enthusiasm to achieve goals;
• numeracy: competence and understanding of numerical data, statistics and graphs;
• commercial awareness: understanding business and how it affects the organisation and sector;
• IT/computer literacy: office skills, ability to touch type and use common software packages.

You can develop these skills during your work experience, your studies and your extracurricular activities. For example, you could improve your customer-service skills by working on the customer service desk in a supermarket or demonstrate your teamwork skills in a group project at university.

Work experience/volunteering

Employers greatly value work experience because:

• it clearly demonstrates skills and motivation;
• skills are easily transferable;
• it delivers experience of the workplace.

Voluntary experience is usually as highly valued as paid work.

'Volunteering provides an insight into a profession and a company, allows an individual to build confidence in a role, develop or enhance relevant skills, generate useful contacts that can offer "insider" knowledge, and potentially lead to paid positions. Overall, it is a great way of improving a CV.'

Andrea Grace Rannard, Head of Student Volunteering

Volunteering England

Start out by getting any general work experience to put on your CV - your university careers service should be able to help. Then you could get experience that is more relevant to your chosen career, perhaps even an internship at the end of your penultimate year (but apply early).

Relating skills to job opportunities

In order to promote your skills effectively you should outline:

• when you have demonstrated the skills required (using specific examples);
• how you have performed them to a high level;
• a positive outcome.

For example, you could prove your problem-solving skills by outlining a specific problem at work when you weighed up possible solutions, sought advice, trialed different resolutions and effectively communicated your decision, resulting in a solution. For more examples, see analysing job adverts.