Article By the Experts

Away from the books - Raymen Yang, HRM; Proctor and Gamble

Job hunters and headhunters agree it takes more than good grades and a glossy resume to bag the right job.

This month that's Guangzhou digs deep into the minds of several human resources managers, a headhunter and an overseas study returnee. Each has their own take on how to best land that dream job.

Away from the Books

Guangzhou-born Raymen Yang is Human Resources Manager for Proctor and Gamble. Raymen graduated from Jinan University. He currently manages staff training and recruitment at P&G's head office in Guangzhou.

When it comes to landing a job with a multinational company, most graduates are keen to present a polished CV that highlights academic achievement and involvement in extra-curricular activities down at the student union. Yet to many Human Resources managers and recruitment specialists these credentials mean little when compared to the countless other applicants toting the same experience.

In fact, many job recruiters are looking for applicants who possess people skills that can best be obtained off-campus. According to Proctor and Gamble Human Resources Manager Raymen Yang, the best way to develop that kind of maturity and skill is by getting a part-time job and doing some volunteer work. "You need to change yourself from a student to a businessman," asserts Yang, a Jinan University graduate who was ranked in the top ten per cent of his class. During his university career Yang held part-time jobs as a sales and marketing promoter for Sony electronics and as a salesman for an insurance company. According to Yang, his part-time work experience equipped him with business knowledge and personal skills that benefited him after graduation. "That experience helped me a lot before I got a job at P&G," explains Yang.

Yang says that most students are unprepared for the real world because they spend so much time studying. "In some Western countries you have to earn your own tuition through a part-time job," says Yang. "But here the system is totally different because students' parents pay for everything."

Besides getting a part-time job, Yang advises students to invest their time in volunteer work. "When I was in college some friends and I started an organization called 'Warm Touch.' We made regular trips to the orphanage in Long Dong where we played with the children and washed their clothes," recalls Yang.

"When you're helping others you need to do something selfless. This is the foundation for working with others," says Yang. "I think the most meaningful things for me in college were the things I did for others."

Interview Polish

Yang Zhi Hui is Recruitment & Personnel & Hong Kong Human Resources Senior Manager at Avon (China) Company, Ltd, and has been working in Hong Kong for the past 14 years. Yang is responsible for nationwide recruitment on the mainland.

The fresh graduate job market is very competitive, as Yang explains: "According to some unofficial statistics, there are currently about 230,000 graduates trying to find jobs in Guangzhou, and while skill levels are increasing, so the quality of applicants needs to increase as well."

Quality, or lack thereof, is something that always comes out in an interview. Mistakes are often made during the interview process - which can usually be avoided. "Interviewees from big companies are sometimes overconfident, give sketchy answers and prefer not to be too detailed," said Yang. "This can lead to a bad impression."

Yang experienced one such case while interviewing a candidate from a famous Beijing university who met the criteria and had excellent qualifications. But during the meeting the candidate challenged Yang's experience, insisted the interview be held in English and asked many complicated questions. "I felt like I was the one being interviewed," Yang recalled. Impressed with the candidate's skills, Yang called him back for a second interview, but the candidate replied that he was too busy and would call back later with an answer. At midnight, the candidate woke Yang up in his hotel room and said, "I'm free now. Are you?" Yang, clearly more patience than most, agreed to meet the candidate the following day.

In the end, the candidate was offered the position and is now a senior level manager at Avon. "The point," Yang concluded, "is that an interviewer needs to judge objectively, and overlook occasional behavioural problems. Our job must be to assess whether the candidate is capable of doing the job or not." While not all interviewers are as professional as Yang, candidates looking for jobs can increase their chances of a successful interview by avoiding such faux pas.

Getting a Head

Jonathan Fraulo, originally from the United States, is Business Manager at 51job.com. Jonathan is based in Hong Kong and leads the company's headhunting department for the South China region.

Handling six million CVs from across China at any one time is no easy task. When Jonathan Fraulo and his team at 51job.com are hired to sift through a gargantuan database to find just the right candidate for a company, it is like looking for a needle in a haystack. Still, Fraulo and his colleagues regularly manage to fill senior, middle and junior management positions for multinational companies looking for local talent.

"At the middle management level there is an absolute shortage of qualified people," says Fraulo, who agrees that more vacancies have been appearing as many big-name multinational companies have been localising their staff in recent years. "In Guangzhou there's a war for talent."

According to Fraulo, headhunters typically search for prospects on campus, through job fairs or via a database such as the one constructed by 51job.com. But for graduates and other candidates who are already in the work force, Fraulo has some practical advice for getting noticed.

"Most people spend way too much time crafting a resume," says Fraulo. "The only purpose of a resume is to get you an interview. The average time a resume gets looked at only lasts between 10 to 15 seconds. That's all the time you have."

The best thing a job seeker can do to increase their chances of getting spotted is listing quantifiable work achievements. For example, if you are looking for a job in sales and you helped your company turn over a 30 per cent profit last year, then highlight that on your resume. "You want to be able to give measurements about how effective you've been," said Fraulo, who added that any cross-cultural experience should also be identified.

There and Back Again

Dee Lee, 24, is a Guangzhou native who graduated with a master's degree in International Marketing Communication at the University of Greenwich in England. After studying and working in the United Kingdom for one and half years, Dee returned to Guangzhou where he discovered that finding a full-time job was not as easy as it seemed.

"For some time after I returned from the UK I felt lost. I had spent 15 months in London, earned between GBP 3,000 and 4,000 doing part time jobs and visited ten European countries. I found it all very splendid and worthy, until I started looking for a job.

"In November, the first month I started looking, the only reply to my 60 outward enquiries was from a very famous advertising company. The chief director told me I would have to start from the bottom as an account assistant, making me equal to some secondary school pupils. Besides the frustration, I did not buy what she said about my ability being self-deceiving. So I kept looking. Time flew by and I became bitter - there were no more replies to another 60 application letters. I could not help wondering why I had gone to the UK for a master's degree and got nothing in return.

"At the beginning of January I received six calls. After many interviews, I chose Guangzhou's biggest communications company. My faith in myself was reawakened. The salary was good, the company was good and the colleagues were fantastic. Everything seemed perfect, except for one thing - the unbelievably scary workload. This made me anxious about my future at this company. A leisurely life as a student in the UK had given me an easy-come-easy-go attitude. I was freaked out and decided to do a runner. Though my childhood dream was to be in advertising, I left the company without informing my supervisor who had given me a warm reception and so much training. I felt guilty and a coward, not for running away, but for doing so without any acknowledgement to my colleagues. I still sometimes tell myself I am an idiot. The job was great but I could not make a proper connection to it.

"Any job hunt is about finding who you really are. Having a master's degree or good oral English is meaningless until you can apply them. Even with a gimmicky job title and a high salary with a famous company, nothing is more important than the future. I finally got a job at Meinet Marketing Research, a small private company, where I now work as a market researcher. The most important thing you can do is to choose an industry or company that you know you are going to enjoy. In the long run this is more important than the salary or the status that goes with working for a big company."

Source: http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/english/doc/2004-03/04/content_311647.htm

GOOD COMMUNICATIONS SKILLS MAKE A STRONG STATEMENT

There’s no doubt that technological advances have been a great help in the business world. Devices such as email, fax machines, text messaging and cell phones have all made life much easier for professionals in the workplace.

Lost Art

But through gains in technology, people sometimes also lose; they lose their ability to properly communicate during a face-to-face conversation, which is one of the most valuable tools anyone can have in the business world and workplace.

Everything begins and ends with the ability to effectively express or present ideas, opinions, objections, emotions, directions, dissatisfaction and pleasure. While this is critical to success in business, it is very often the skill we most take for granted or assume we have, since we’ve been communicating with people and getting what we need or want virtually all of our lives.

According to Don Straits, chief executive officer of CorporateWarriors.com, good interpersonal communication skills are paramount to success not only in the workplace, but for life in general.

In his essay Living Through Communication, Commitment and Character, Straits, an authority on career issues as well as career development programs, emphasizes that the more you verbalize, the better you become at it.

“Communication skills are an art,” he says. “The more we practice, the better we become at it. Break away from the television and computer and start talking to people. Get up, get out and get moving.

Powerful Pointers

Among his suggestions for becoming a more adept communicator:

	Don’t be afraid to break the ice. Find a reason to draw people into conversation.
	Ask questions. Sometimes the best conversationalists do the least amount of talking.
	Be sincere. If your questions are hollow or you do not listen, then you are not sincere.
	Stay contemporary. Develop a breadth of knowledge and stay informed.
	Don’t be too quick to judge. Be open to new ideas, opinions and attitudes.

A potential problem is that business communication can be different than social discourse. In the workplace, we usually interact with a wider variety of individuals with different educational backgrounds, ages and experience levels than in our personal lives. And each has expectations about your job performance based upon your ability to express yourself effectively. Poor expression, diction and grammar are often cited among the major reasons for rejection in job interviews, according to studies.

Among the suggestions experts give for improving your verbal communication skills:

	Don’t be afraid to express your ideas. Use interaction with your colleagues to sharpen your ability to think on your feet, use proper grammar and make points.
	Practice talking with friends or relatives about a subject that requires you to express ideas or emotion and talk in extended sentences. In a job interview, this ability to express your feelings and experiences in an enthusiastic manner is a critical skill.
	In discussions, practice using facts to strengthen a point of view rather than just stating your opinion. One way to do this is to read the paper for a week or two about a particular subject, whether it’s a political race or another important issue, so that you’re able to express an opinion and support it with facts. The substitution of facts for opinions in conversation is particularly important as a contributor in a business meeting.

Source: Mark Edward Nero

Team Players are a step ahead

One of the most important requirements for success in today’s job market is the ability to be a team player.

Jobseekers may overlook this basic requirement because it is not the sort of thing that commands their immediate attention. In the job interview most interviewers will never mention the words “team” or “teamwork,” but it remains a basic underlying consideration upon which their opinion and estimation of the jobseeker is based.

What kind of an employee would this person be? How well would he or she get along in our corporate environment? Those are questions in the interviewer’s mind. They will not be asked of the job candidate directly, but the interviewer will get the answers through other questions. A major measure of what kind of an employee the candidate will be is whether the individual has demonstrated teamwork ability, in the view of most employers.

That criterion represents a distinct departure from 20 or 25 years ago when the individual performer could be a star. Employers at that time put the emphasis on individual accomplishment, although the ability to get along in the workplace has always been important.

Now, companies are beset on all sides by increasing competition and in order to survive, they must have teamwork. Management must operate as a smoothly functioning, unified whole. There is no time for disruption, dissension and acrimony in the workplace because that will cost the company in its efforts to keep up with its competition. Differences of opinion will inevitably occur and it may take long hours to iron them out, but the result is a consensus that is arrived at through teamwork.

No Personal Credit?

The jobseeker may rightfully ask, “How can I distinguish myself from the others if all the decisions are made by committee and nobody gets any personal credit?

The answer to that question is that your ability to skillfully interact with others and help determine the course of action without imposing your own ego on the rest of the group will be what stands out and commands the attention of senior management. You may think that you are not being noticed if you do not dominate the discussion or have others turning to you for advice. But the fact that the group as a whole works well together when you are present and contributing will most assuredly be noticed, and rewarded at the appropriate time.

The successful team player senses what contributions need to be made, and how he or she can best support the group in achieving its goals. It may consist of turning to someone and asking key questions at the appropriate time, or making observations based on the statements of others. It may also consist of melding differing views into a cohesive whole and providing the perspective that is needed to establish a plan of action. The team player has a sensitivity to the needs of others for recognition and does not propose any course of action without at first considering the views of all parties who will be concerned with the decisions.

Convincing the Interviewer

You should be ready to convince the interviewer that you are an effective team player. The way to do this is have your answers prepared in advance for questions like, “Tell me about yourself,” or “What do you do well?” Before going on any interview, you should sit down with a note pad and write out your best job-related accomplishments. Then go through them with an eye toward teamwork: which projects required successful interaction between yourself and the group? In what ways were you a team leader? Make a special note of the examples and commit them to memory. Then emphasize those teamwork-related accomplishments when you talk to the interviewer, being sure you take whatever credit is due.

Too often, jobseekers tend to be modest in their assessments of themselves. While we are all taught from childhood that modesty is a virtue, it has no place on the job hunt. You will have only 20 to 30 minutes to convince the interviewer that you are wonderful. If you do not, who will? Particularly when you are talking about teamwork-related accomplishments, there may be a tendency for you to bury your contributions. Don’t do it. Keep yourself in the forefront.

You are there to sell yourself, not your former work associates, to the potential employer. By emphasizing your teamwork-related accomplishments, you are sending the message that you recognize the importance of teamwork in successfully conducting a business. The prospective employer will appreciate this attitude and it will go far toward answering the unspoken questions about what type of an employee you would be. Most importantly, it may provide you with the competitive edge you need to get the job over other candidates who appear to be equally qualified.

What you have done is to accomplish one of the basic requirements of the job interview – you have given the employer a reason to hire you. We have found that in over half of the instances where a candidate did not get the job, it was because the individual gave the employer no reason to hire him or her. The focus on teamwork can provide that reason and be the clincher that gets you a job offer.

By James E. Challenger,

James E. Challenger, president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc, pioneered outplacement as an employer-paid benefit. His third book, The Challenger Guide: Job-Hunting Success for Mid-Career Professionals (Contemporary Books) is available at Amazon.com.

You Gotta Believe - A positive attitude will get you hired

Low self-esteem is one of the major roadblocks to a successful job search. To attract a job offer, you need the opposite – a confident, can-do attitude.

It is common to feel apprehensive about your future after you have experienced difficulty with or been separated from your job. However, people often exaggerate their apprehension for no reason. You may ask yourself, "Will I be able to find another job?" If you left your job voluntarily, you may ask, "Should I have taken the risk?" These concerns are understandable, but if you do not resolve them prior to your job search, you will limit your success.

If you feel down and uncertain about yourself, and negative about your prospects of finding another job, you will probably project that negative attitude. If you carry that negative attitude with you into an interview, you will turn the interviewer off. A jobseeker who appears to be capable and confident about their abilities in an interview is perceived to be competent by the prospective employer.

The interview is the make-or-break point for any jobseeker. You want to come across in the most favorable light and not do anything that might take you out of contention for the job.

In addition to the tangible evidence of your accomplishments, you need the intangibles associated with a positive frame of mind and approach to the job interview.

Without the right preparation and mental outlook, your chances of being able to convince the interviewer that you are the best choice for the job are greatly diminished. And, if you are hired, it is also important to continuously sell your accomplishments.

Following are five beliefs that hold the key to success or failure in the job interview:

Believe that you will make a good impression on the job interviewer. The right way to make a good impression is to be whomever the interviewer wants you to be within the truthful scope of your own experience. This is accomplished by listening for clues as to what he or she wants and responding with the appropriate answers. Consciously or not, most employers tend to hire those who reflect their own views. How well you address yourself to their image of the ideal candidate will most often determine whether or not you get the job offer.

Believe in your abilities. You need to convince yourself that you are the best at what you do and also get that impression across to the interviewer. While modesty is usually considered a desirable trait, it has little place in the job interview. You must tell the employer why you are wonderful, without sounding like a braggart. If you do not tell the employer how good you are, and why, chances are you will be rejected. The employer has no other way to learn what you can do except from you.

Believe that you can show the interviewer why you are best qualified for the job. Before you go on a job interview, you should write down a list of your major accomplishments. Memorize them so that you can cite specifics when your past employment record is under discussion.

Unless you are applying for a technical or academic position which requires highly specialized knowledge, or you are applying for an entry-level position, the average employer is not interested in how many degrees you have or when you graduated from college. They want to know how you improved an employer’s bottom line, how you were able to bring about product or service improvements and solve problems, and how well you work with other people.

Believe that you will win the job over the competition. This requirement is closely related to confidence in your abilities. You need to keep in mind that you are one of at least five to six people who are competing for the same job. All normally appear as equals to the employer, so the question is why you should be hired over the others.

You should demonstrate an enthusiastic, confident manner and associate your abilities with the employer’s requirements. Do not be reluctant to "ask for the order." When the interview is concluded, ask the interviewer when the decision will be made and when you can check back. Further, restate your interest and enthusiasm for the job. In many cases, a candidate who seems seriously interested in the job is the one who will be asked back for subsequent interviews or be hired.

Believe that you will prove you were the right choice for the job. Maintain visibility after you are on the job by seeing your supervisor regularly and telling that person what you have done and what you are doing. The company does not automatically know what you have done for it lately. Make it a point to keep your boss informed concerning your job activities. Another way of reaffirming your status is to become part of the corporate culture by volunteering for company-sponsored welfare drives or civic work and by participating in the firm’s social activities.

The most successful jobseekers are those who have a positive attitude, and that attitude comes from the knowledge that they are valuable workers who are capable of making an effective contribution.

Greater confidence and self-esteem will also come from positive feedback from prospective employers during your job search, such as being invited back for a second interview, or better yet, being offered a job!

By James E. Challenger,

James E. Challenger, president of Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc, pioneered outplacement as an employer-paid benefit. His third book, The Challenger Guide: Job-Hunting Success for Mid-Career Professionals (Contemporary Books) is available at Amazon.com.