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As true as night follows day and day follows night, every project has a beginning and every project has an end.
In the case of this project, where you’re aiming to secure your first position in HR, you’re reaching the end of what’s sure to be the first critical steps of your HR career journey.
If you’ve been following this series of blog articles about how to start your HR career from scratch, you’ll have completed most of the theoretical work behind the process. You’ve done a huge amount of work to get here, which you should be truly proud of.
One final task remains, however, and it’s only by conquering this, that you’ll be able to say you’ve been successful – you need to win your first HR role!
The main process of winning your first job role in HR looks something like this:
When you’re applying for a job, the overwhelming majority of employers will ask for one or two of the following documents from you:
In addition, employers might also ask you to fill out something called a Diversity and Equality Monitoring form that allows them to track diversity, equality and inclusion in their organisation. The people reviewing your application won’t have access to this document and it won’t influence your application: it’s only used to anonymously monitor DEI at an organisation.
Your CV is perhaps the most important thing that you’ll create when you’re applying for jobs and opportunities. It’s not hyperbolic to say that it’s probably the most powerful tool that you have at your disposal when you’re applying for jobs.
Made up of one to two pages of A4, a CV is a formal, professional document that summarises your career experience, educational history and key skills to date. It’s also known as a ‘resume’ in North America and in other parts of the world.
A CV follows a formal structure and there are some strict conventions about what should be in a CV and what shouldn’t be. The UK Government’s National Careers Service has some practical advice about the key areas that it’s best to include. They include:
The introduction is just that – a short paragraph or sentence introducing you and outlining what makes you unique as a job candidate.
This can often be the trickiest part of the CV to create. Mainly because you have to condense what makes you special as a professional into a few clumsy words. Sometimes you might find it easier to actually create this section last. That’s because when you’ve created the entire CV it might be easier to summarise what you’ve already written.
Employers expect to see evidence of your education too, so it’s normal to include an educational history section in your CV. This part sets out what qualifications or training you’ve received over the course of your life.
You’re expected to include information like:
This will give you something that looks like this:
‘Education History
A Level Kitten Petting
Cat College, Fakeville
(01/10/95 to (01/05/97)
Grade received: A*’
This section is the foundation of your CV, exploring your previous employment and volunteering experience. It details your recent employment history, covering which employers you’ve worked for, what roles you’ve held and the key responsibilities you’ve had for each, over the past few years.
You can use a range of formats to display this information, but the conventional way is to display it in this way:
So, that would look something like this:
Kitty Kat Enterprises
123 Fake Street, Fakeville, Fakeland, AB12 34C
Chief Kitten Petter(12/05/2002 to 23/07/2023)
I was responsible for overseeing kitten petting in the Feline Fun department at Fakeland’s largest private sector kitten-petting organisation. Managing a team of kitten-petters, I devised petting strategies and cuddle campaigns to maximise kitten happiness, ensuring that all kittens received timely and high quality cuddles.
Key responsibilities
It’s best to explore your employment history chronologically, listing the most recent role you’ve held first and the preceding ones after that. It’s also important to keep this information concise. Best practice suggests that you limit your work history to around 10 years to keep your CV within the two page limit.
References are contacts that you have made over your career who can ‘vouch’ for your performance, skills and experience. Convention dictates that they are usually previous employers. A reference is something that these contacts give a prospective employer (usually when they’ve offered you a job) to provide veracity to the information you’ve given in your CV. It’s essentially a way for potential employers to check that you’re not just making up job roles and skills on your CV, and that they’re grounded in reality.
Most prospective employers won’t request references from your previous employers until they’ve offered you a job. This means that you generally don’t have to worry about your current employer finding out that you’re applying for other jobs – a natural worry.
The format to use to lay out your references is pretty simple – just include:
The most successful CVs are those that manage to balance between being informative but succinct, conventional but unique and formal but interesting. It can be hard to do this well, but the trick is to not think too much about it. Just be yourself and follow the conventions!
When you’re looking to secure your first role in HR, it’s likely that you won’t have any prior experience in Human Resources. That’s completely fine and most employers will understand that. Just because you don’t have years of experience of a paid HR role under your belt that doesn’t mean that you don’t have anything you can include on your CV.
Transferable experience and transferable skills are one of the most powerful things that you can include on your CV if you’re short on actual job experience.
You might have to think outside of the box slightly, but finding transferable skills and experience isn’t as difficult as you might think.
Things that you can include on a CV that can highlight transferable skills and experience include things like:
Most people associate work experience programmes with school, but they can be an invaluable thing to invest in if you’re a professional looking to change careers. A short period of work experience will prove to an employer that you know what to expect in an HR environment and that, more importantly, you can cope with the demands of it.
Most work experience will take the form of you attending an organisation for a week or two, shadowing staff and generally seeing how the workplace and HR department functions. It’s not particularly high-stakes and is a good way to work out if HR is right for you too. Employers that you complete work experience for may even be able to provide a reference for your CV too.
Your work experience doesn’t even necessarily have to be rooted in HR either (although it does help). Any role where you’ve experienced what it’s like to work in an organisation can be used to highlight transferable skills and experience.
Volunteering is a particularly effective way of showing that you can cope with the demands of work and that you have a range of hard and soft skills that are suited to the position that you’re applying for. Having evidence of volunteering on your CV also shows that you’re a compassionate and motivated person – it shows that you have an altruistic element in your personality, willing to help others without gaining anything in return.
Again, managers that you’ve worked with whilst volunteering will usually be able to give you a reference that you can use on a CV or job application.
Sometimes you might be able to find transferable skills and experience in things like hobbies and interests too. For example, if you’re particularly interested in tennis, play it regularly and you’re on your local tennis club committee, you can pick out some elements of that role that have some relevance to HR: perhaps things like, organising admin, coaching others or dealing with challenging situations.
A cover letter (also called a ‘covering letter’) is a supporting document that you submit along with your CV. The UK Government’s National Careers’ Service describes it as a document that ‘introduces’ you to an employer and ‘asks them to think about your application’. It usually takes the form of a letter, written to the company, that’s formed of a few paragraphs.
The purpose of a cover letter is to provide more detail about how your skills, experience and professional interests make you a great fit for the role you’re applying for.
Similar to a CV, the cover letter is ruled by conventions, and you’re expected to follow a formal structure when you’re writing one.
It normally follows a structure like this:
The introduction is basically just that – an introduction. It outlines who you are and why you’re applying for this specific role. It doesn’t need to be more than a couple of sentences at the most.
In this paragraph, you’ll be drilling down into the specific ways that your job and educational experience match that required in the role you’re applying for. In this section, it pays to closely study the job description for the role and to draw direct links to what is listed there to your skills and experience. Use specific examples and highlight achievements in your current and past roles. These will help you to prove that you’re a great candidate for the role.
If you have space, it can be useful to finish by exploring some of the personal traits and interests that you have that would make you an exceptional choice in the role. If you don’t have space, these ideas can be threaded into other arguments that you make in the course of the letter.
The final part of the cover letter is the sign off. A lot of people struggle with getting this part of the letter right because there are some arcane rules about the specific sign-off you use based on who you’re speaking to and your relationship to them.
There are generally two ways to sign off a cover letter:
Yours Sincerely: Used when you know the name of the person you’re writing to, ‘eg. Mr Smith’
Yours Faithfully: Used when you don’t know the name of the person you’re writing to.
In most cases, you probably won’t know the name of the hiring manager at the organisation which has the role that you’re applying for, so you’ll probably use ‘Yours Faithfully’ as your sign off.
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am writing in order to apply for the Director of Kitten Petting role, at Fun Felines, as advertised on your website. My name is Jeremiah Ticklepaw, I have over 10 years’ experience of kitten petting and I believe that I’m a great candidate for the role.
In my current position as Chief Kitten Petter at Kitty Kat Enterprises, I’m responsible for managing a team of professional kitten petters and devising/directing strategy at a busy B2C organisation (business to cat). This role has allowed me to combine my extensive kitten-handling skills with my passion for organisation and strategic thinking and thanks to my leadership, people management and delegation skills, I have been able to improve kitten satisfaction by 56% in three months.
This proven work experience of the kitten-cuddling industry makes me a great candidate for the role. Please find attached a copy of my CV for your consideration. I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours Faithfully
Jeremiah Ticklepaw
Obviously, the example above is tongue-in-cheek and was created just for a bit of fun. It has a serious idea behing it though: it showcases how skills can transfer from one role to the next and how you can highlight this.
Here’s a more HR-specific example:
Dear Sir or Madam,
I am writing in order to apply for the HR Manager, at your organisation, as advertised on your website. My name is Susan Applecore, I have over 5 years’ experience of Human Resources management and I believe that I’m a great candidate for the role.
In my current position as Senior HR Advisor at Fake Company 123, I’m responsible for managing a team of HR professionals and advising on HR strategy at a busy B2C organisation. This role has allowed me to develop practical people management skills, along with building on my extensive employment law expertise and my delegation skills. Thanks to my contribution, I have been able to improve productivity by 24% in a 6 month period.
This proven work experience of HR management makes me a great candidate for the role. Please find attached a copy of my CV for your consideration. I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours Faithfully
Susan Applecore
Instead of submitting a CV, some roles require you to fill out an application form instead.
Application forms are formal (excuse the pun) documents where you provide answers to a range of questions.
Generally speaking, the organisations that use application forms in recruitment tend to be public sector, third sector or large organisations. This is because using application forms allows an organisation to build talent pools and score applications more efficiently and fairly than if CVs and covering letters were solely used.
Whilst application forms can often take longer to complete, they can often level the playing field
Usually, an application form will be made up of different sections like:
The supporting statement is the section of the application form that combines elements of a cover letter and a CV. In this section, you’re expected to go through the job description of the role that you’re applying for line by line and provide evidence from your career history about how your skills reflect those needed in the position.
Application forms can often take a bit longer to complete than a cover letter or CV but that’s offset by the fact that you can generally include a lot more evidence in an application form about why you’re the best candidate for a role than you can in a standard CV/covering letter. Application forms can be a great leveller too, making the process of applying for a job a lot fairer overall.
When you’ve assembled a basic CV and covering letter, you’ll be able to start searching for HR opportunities.
Knowing where to start can be one of the hardest parts of the process because there’s no right or wrong way to look for relevant job vacancies that you could apply for. If you find that you’re the type of person who works best with a clear plan, it can be useful to try and create a short list of target organisations and target roles that you would like and then start looking for opportunities based on that. Alternatively, there’s nothing wrong with using more of your intuition, being open to a range of opportunities and just seeing what interests you, without looking for anything in particular. Experiment with both approaches and see which feels more natural to you.
As you can probably tell, there are a huge range of places that publicise relevant HR opportunities. Here are some of the key places and key methods to find relevant opportunities:
Remember way back in a previous article when we focused on building your professional network? This situation is where it really comes in handy. Your professional network will be able to help you find opportunities that are suited to your skillset, experience and professional interests. They can often help you to discover opportunities that you won’t necessarily have been able to find on your own.
From the point of view of pragmatism, it makes sense to approach people in your professional network and ask them if they know of any relevant opportunities that you might be well-suited for. After all, two heads are better than one. Even if they don’t know of any opportunities at the moment, approaching them means that they’re more likely to remember you if they come across an opportunity. Being proactive and getting your name out there can often help you in the long-term when it comes to finding a role.
Professional social networks are a powerful tool when it comes to scouting out job opportunities and LinkedIn is probably one of the best around. With over 830 million members in over 200 countries, LinkedIn.
It works like most other social networks – you create a profile and interact with others. It differs from platforms like Facebook or Instagram in the fact that your profile is essentially a digital version of your CV – you’ll input things like your job history, your education history and your career achievements – and people who you are ‘connected to’ (similar to being ‘friends’ with someone on Facebook) will be able to view them.
LinkedIn has a built in jobs board, where you can search vacancies and apply for roles. Many major organisations use LinkedIn to recruit for roles, so it’s a very useful place to find high quality professional roles in HR with leading companies. In general, you’ll find that most vacancies listed on LinkedIn tend to be private sector roles.
The humble online jobs board plays an important role in helping you find a broad range of opportunities in your local area, or even further afield.
In the UK, the most popular jobs boards include websites like:
Many industries and fields, including HR, have their own specialist jobs boards and places where opportunities are posted. These are typically places like media outlets or forums. In the context of Human Resources and Learning and Development, these places can be useful to check periodically for the latest opportunities:
Everybody has at least one organisation in their head that they would consider it a dream to work for. Rather than sitting around and wondering if a suitable role will ever come up there, why not reach out and ask them directly?
Even if they don’t have a role listed, there’s nothing stopping you getting in contact with them and asking if they’re likely to have any relevant roles coming up soon. Doing so can help you to develop a feel of whether the company is the right place for you and can get you alerted to new opportunities as and when they appear.
With relevant job opportunities found, it’s time to start applying for them.
The general process for applying for a job online usually goes something like this.
You find an opportunity. If the application only requires a CV and a covering letter, you can customise these to the job that you’re applying for and send them over to the contact details listed. If the role requires you to submit an application form, you’ll need to fill this out and send it. Sometimes, organisations might require you to register for an online account on their internal recruitment platform in order to submit an application.
Job applications take discipline and determination to complete at the best of times. When you’re juggling external commitments like a full-time job, or caring for a family, they can feel particularly brutal things to finish. With a bit of planning – and of course, hard work – you can get on top of the process though.
While there’s no getting away from the hard work you’ll need to invest, you can do a few things and bear some things in mind to make the process as painless as possible.
If you have commitments coming out of your ears, finding time to work on your applications can be particularly stressful.
Creating a set time each week where you work solely on job applications for a few hours can be a great way to build a routine. As Megan Edgelow, Assistant Professor in Health Sciences, at Queen's University, Ontario, explores in this article in The Conversation, routines are useful because they allow your brain to ‘save energy’ when it comes to tasks. If you perform the same set of functions and actions on a regular basis your brain learns to expect them and doesn’t have to work as hard. As Edgelow argues, routines can help you to improve your focus, rebalance your focus and even potentially improve your creativity.
It’s a word that strikes fear into the heart of every jobseeker but there’s no getting away from it.
Customisation.
If you want to have a truly competitive edge on other candidates, you’ll need to customise your CV and cover letter for every role that you apply for. In other words, for every role that you apply for, you’ll need to tweak your CV and cover letter so that it’s unique to that specific job.
When you’re applying for lots of different roles that all call for similar sets of skills and experience, it can be tempting to just submit the same basic CV and covering letter, but this approach can end up selling you short as a candidate. Whilst it will definitely save you time in the short term, helping you complete an application faster, it can blunt the effect of your application overall.
By not customising your CV, you run the risk of really fine-tuning your application for the role in question. In the brutal world of recruitment, where most CVs and job applications are reviewed using scoring systems, every extra point you can score in your application can ultimately help you to win the chance of an interview. You can be sure that other candidates for the role are customising their CVs, so why short-change yourself by not doing the same?
When you’re applying for jobs, you’re inevitably going to get knocked back. A lot. Unfortunately, there’s no getting away from that fact. No matter how many times you experience it, rejection still hurts and it’s never something that won’t provoke some type of feeling from you.
Whilst it’s normal to feel disappointed if you don’t hear anything back from an application, or if you learn that you haven’t made it through to the next round, getting bogged down on the fact that you weren’t successful won’t help you in the long-term. In fact, it can significantly harm your motivation and even sabotage your future attempts.
To avoid this, try to keep your focus (as hard as that might feel sometimes) on your long-term aim – to achieve a career that brings you fulfilment.
A survey of 1,000 job seekers by StandOut CV found that on average (in the UK at least) they would have to submit an average of 27 applications to secure just 1 job interview. Using this data, StandOut CV was able to calculate that it took the job seekers in the survey an average of 162 applications to ultimately be successful and secure a role.
Those aren’t particularly encouraging figures, we have to admit, but the good things in life don’t come easy. If you’re serious about starting a new career in HR from scratch then you’ll need to be prepared to put in some hard graft to get there. With a strong sense of purpose, willpower and resilience, you’ll be able to achieve your goal though. The key is to never lose focus of the bigger picture – the dream job that glistens in the distance.
Don’t forget that interviews are a two-way process. Whilst they might overwhelmingly seem like a vehicle for employers to assess the quality of your skills and experience, they’re also an opportunity for you to sound out the organisation and find out if they’re a good fit for you and your needs.
Here are a few tips to bear in mind when interviewing for a position
Getting your head around what an interview is and how it actually works can really help you pinpoint the best ways to shine in the process itself.
An interview is more than just a basic chat. An interview is a chance for your prospective employer to get to know you and to learn more about your skills, knowledge and experience. They’ll ultimately be doing this to work out how closely your attributes align with the ideal candidate that they’re looking to hire.
Normally, interviews are used to compare your skills, knowledge and experience to other candidates who have applied for the same job. This is usually done through scoring your answers to set questions, but it can also be much more of an informal conversation, where an employer simply has a conversation with you to find out more about you.
An interview should never be about trying to ‘trip you up’ or catch you out – if an employer does that, you’re probably better off not working for them. Interviews are supposed to be about providing a platform for you to present how your skills, experience and expertise fit that required in the role that you’ve applied for. They aren’t supposed to be an intimidatory grilling!
Something that’s become popular in the last few years is asking candidates to complete a short task or a presentation ahead of the interview itself, so if you’re told you need to do this make sure you’re clear on the specifics of what you need to do.
There are lots of different types of interviews that you could be faced with. Each of these calls for a different set of strategies to help you make the best impression. The first thing you should do to prepare for an interview is to try and work out what type you’re likely to face. Doing this will enable you to come up with a strategy.
Interviews can be structured – ie. take the form of a formal conversation, where all candidates are asked a set structure of the same questions and scored on their responses; or unstructured – ie. take the form of an informal interview where candidates aren’t usually scored formally. There are also several different types of interviews that employers use too:
There’s nothing stopping you contacting the organisation and asking them specifically what type of interview it is that you’ll be facing in advance of the actual event. Doing so can help you get a head start on preparing ho
One of the most common anxieties that job seekers mention when it comes to interviews is how do you actually come up with a decent answer to a question under pressure?
Whilst there isn’t any specific secret to this (apart from staying calm) but are a few strategies you can use to make sure your answers are as strong as they can be. It’s called the STAR framework. It’s used to mainly answer ‘competency’ based questions (one of the most common types of interview questions), where the interviewer wants to hear specific evidence from your past career history about how you responded in a situation. Typical competency-based questions might be things like, ‘Tell me about a time when you faced a challenging situation at work.’ or ‘Give me an example of when you made a mistake at work.’
You just just plough in and answer straight away, but using this framework will help you cover more ground and focus your answer – two things that can potentially improve your score for the question.
STAR stands for Situation, Task, Action and Result. It’s a framework that you can use to structure your responses to questions asked in an interview, ensuring that you tick all the boxes in terms of evidence that the interviewer wants to see. Here’s a little more detail about each stage in a STAR-style answer:
Using the STAR approach can give you the confidence to answer questions that otherwise might stump you.
So, whether it took you one interview, 10 interviews or over 162 interviews, at some point in the future (presuming you don’t give up) you’ll be in the position where you have to decide whether to accept or reject a job offer.
It’s normal to feel indecisive about as big a question as this. Try not to let uncertainty paralyse you though. An element of uncertainty about what decision to make is useful – it enables you to consider the pros and cons of a situation and to work through a solution. The problem comes when you let uncertainty stop you from making a decision altogether.
Sometimes, you might be particularly sold on the nuts and bolts of a role at an organisation but less attracted by the salary or the benefits. In this situation, it might be worth negotiating with your employer about their offer – something you’re well within your rights as a candidate to do.
A fantastic article in the Harvard Business Review by Rebecca Knight explores how to decide whether or not to accept a job offer. For Knight, knowing your worth as a candidate is essential to determining whether or not an offer is competitive for you, along with knowing when you’re able to negotiate and make an offer more competitive. She recommends using research and benchmarking to work out what similar offers for similar roles are in your industry and to use this as a guide for your own negotiation.
That’s it for this series of articles exploring how to get your first job in HR. We hope you’ve found it interesting, informative and, dare we say it, even fun at times.
In terms of final thoughts, remember that even the most accomplished HR professional’s career wasn’t built in a day. Developing a career is a lot like building a house or growing a tree – it takes time, dedication and care.
Keep your eye on your final goal – a fulfilling career in HR – and you’ll be surprised at how resilient you can grow to the career challenges that life throws at you. Good luck on your journey. We’re sure you’ll make yourself proud.
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