Tips on landing a job without experience

You don’t have experience and you want a job. You can start on the bottom rung if you are a chump and you can spend the next five years trying to work your way up until they decide to replace you. Or, you can go on an all-out offensive and show that what you lack in experience you make up for a raw determination. You need to turn your supposed “negatives” into positives and then you need to ram them down your future employer’s throat.

Learn how to turn every negative into a positive

If you can do this, you can get ANY job. Simply being a positive person is always good because you will get more done, but having the ability to twist everything into a positive that isn’t a wishy-washy barrel of faux logic is better than having experience. Here are a few examples of how it is done:

– Negative: You have no experience when the other candidates for the job have plenty.

+ Positive : You have just finished your exams and are closer to the newest and most updated material than any of his or her staff. You have not picked up any bad habits like his/her staff, you are more motivated than most of his team put together and you have more drive because you have something to prove where they don’t.

– Negative: You are too new at the job and we need somebody that knows what they are doing.

+ Positive: Hire me and I will be the hardest working member on your team as well as being the cheapest. I am not a quick learner, I am a good learner, which means I do it until I get it. You lose as little productive time as possible whilst gaining the best person for the job for your trouble. Hire me and you get a fresh new candidate out of the box to mould into the perfect employee for your business.

Here are some examples of how it is done poorly.

– Negative: A man is speaking to a door-to-door sales person selling energy contracts. He says, “Nobody buys stuff on their doorstep, people will never buy from you.”

? Wrong – The salesman replied with, “It’s a saving, nobody is going to turn down a saving.” This is not twisting a negative into a positive, this is just plain dumb.

– Negative: A possible employer says, “But you have no experience.”

? Wrong – The candidate replied with, “Yeah, but I am a quick learner and willing to try harder than anyone. Plus, I really want the job and will prove myself to you.” There are no positives here, there are just promises and they are not worth anything. There are not even any tangible selling points.

Resume-building with pro-active objection breaking

Sounds sexy doesn’t it? Making your resume sound sexy is a good way of getting a job so long as you do not go overboard. Using phrases such as, “I engineered a solution on the college campus that won me the Baker award” is good, but saying something such as, “I re-engineered the campus paradigm and drew a conclusion to win the Baker award” is pushing it a little.

Pro-active objection breaking means figuring out their major objections about you and brushing over them in your resume or dealing with them directly. This doesn’t mean bringing up your negative points (because that’s dumb). It means entering your positive points that overcome your expected negatives. Let’s say you have no experience, you could enter points such as these:

+ An effective team member at a starter-wage price

+ Adaptable, fast, efficient and highly motivated

+ I will go the extra mile because I have more to prove

Online resources are not as useful as you may have hoped

Genuinely good online resources are hard to find because the free ones are being used by all your candidate competitors, which relegates them down to tired and overused.

If you are not having much of an impact on employers and you are not getting many interviews, then consider hiring a CV writing company. They may not get you your job, but their work may inspire a new angle with your resume that you have not considered. There is a good chance they include something or do something that your resume is currently lacking.

The only other good online resources are websites showing you job openings. Give agencies a miss unless you want chump work. Find websites that employers frequently use to hire outside talent and start working on sending around three fresh and tailored CVs per working day.

How long does it take from CV to hiring?

There is no set time limit, but if you have heard nothing within two weeks then the news is not usually good. If the employer is interested, he or she will offer you an interview, and if not and if the company is organized you will receive a “thanks but no thanks” letter. Learn from each rejection and each time you are ignored. What did you do wrong (if anything)? If you give up then you lose.

The timeline between CV and hiring is always varied. The company may have a good reason to drag its feet, or they may be itching to hire somebody quickly. Feel free to send a follow-up query within 7 – 14 days if you wish to see if they received your application and see if they have forgotten you, but try not to nag them, just move on and keep trying.