Influences

Don't Leave Your Graduate Interview Preparation Too Late

You’ve worked hard on applications to graduate jobs, your graduate CV is great and you have landed yourself an interview. This doesn’t mean you can sit back and relax though, you will need to start preparing for it straight away so that you have the best possible chance of impressing those graduate recruiters.

Before attending a graduate interview you will need to have done a lot of in depth research. Make sure you know their market position, their latest moves, their products and services and their strengths and weaknesses. Ensure you know their history, their target markets, their marketing campaigns and their competitors. In fact the information you need to know goes on and on. Make neat notes from your research on a nice paper pad or in a folder that can be taken into an interview with you and keep them short so you can easily refer to them. Take a pen for making notes in the interview and jot down lots of questions you could ask so that you won’t be left with ‘no you answered everything’ and instead will be able to ask intellectual questions that will impress.
What Not To Write When Applying For Graduate Jobs

It’s a very competitive market right now and your graduate CV has to stand out. There are a few simple rules you need to ensure you have followed in order to make sure your CV doesn’t turn off graduate recruiters.

Save room for important, factual information and don’t ramble. Listing basic skills everyone has is not beneficial, such as Microsoft and the internet. Only list specialist programme familiarity that will be relevant to the role you are applying too such as programming languages if applying for a software engineering role. There is also no need for ‘responsible for’, just list the responsibilities straight away rather than wasting valuable lines and space.

Avoid generalisations and unsupported statements. With your new found space ensure you back up your claims. Don’t say you are experienced without listing experience, a team worker with no evidence of team working or accomplished and results driven with no proof of achievements. Make a list of what you have been involved with and achieved and go from there, only detail things you can back up confidently in an interview or you’ll fail at the second hurdle.

Tweet Your Way Into Graduate Jobs

There are many different networking opportunities to explore when searching for graduate jobs. Recently social media has been becoming a popular medium for reaching out and finding potential graduate recruiters, one of the most notable being Twitter. As a micro-blogging site Twitter allows its members to remain up to date with the lives and events of the people and companies they choose to follow. This is beneficial as it keeps you up to date with latest graduate job postings and prepares you for graduate interviews by keeping you informed of latest company news.