Do you know what your true market value is?
Well, this video was the most popular one Andrew made last year by some margin, so it’s clearly a question that people think about.
And the good news for those in the digital procurement and supply chain technology markets is that your value probably went up last year.
If you want to know by how much and why click here to learn more.
If you are in the job market right now your personal brand needs to be as strong as possible in three key areas.
Your CV needs to be punchy and impactful, your LinkedIn profile must attract the attention of specialist recruiters and talent teams and you need to be brilliant at video interviews.
If you don’t know where to start or just want to make sure you have everything fine-tuned we can help you with our three “How to….” guides.
CV Writing
What makes a great CV better than a good CV? How long should it be? Should you include all your academic qualifications and early career jobs? Should you use a personal statement and, if so, what should you write?
Video Interviewing
More than ever before video interviewing is going to be a staple first stage in many companies’ hiring process. But many people have little or no experience of being interviewed by video. How did you avoid unintentionally looking disinterested? What do you wear? How do you create better virtual eye contact with the interviewer?
LinkedIn Profile
You already know that LinkedIn is the go-to resource for most recruiters but how do you make sure you aren’t overlooked for a great job? How do you make your profile as searchable as possible? What proactive steps can you take to get more views of your profile and build your online persona?
If you would like one or all of the documents just email us at info@edburydaley.com stating which you would like and we’ll email the pdf documents across to you.
My first blog article ‘How to get approached about your dream job’ can be found here.
It highlights several ways in which you can ensure that when a recruiter is conducting a candidate search on LinkedIn, for what could be your next job move and ideal opportunity, your profile catches their eye for all the right reasons.
As Senior Research Consultant at Edbury Daley, I not only encounter hundreds of LinkedIn profiles every day, but I also receive and review numerous CVs for the executive vacancies that we advertise.
The most attractive have the following:
If you need some guidance or further information, then please do get in touch via georgia@edburydaley.com.
As Senior Research Consultant at Edbury Daley, I find that LinkedIn is a very valuable resource for identifying potential candidates through searches for executive vacancies. In fact, I use it every day.
So if you’re in the job market and are looking for your next position, then in my experience keeping your LinkedIn profile up-to-date and current is vital. This is true even if you’re not looking for a move as it could make the difference between a recruiter shortlisting you for your dream job, or not.
So when conducting a search on LinkedIn, I am attracted to profiles that have the following:
If you need some guidance or further information, then please do get in touch via georgia@edburydaley.com.
What are your training and education options?
This is the second in the series where my objective is to help procurement professionals equip themselves with the skills to embrace the digital procurement revolution. Each article will share valuable resources to help facilitate personal development. The links at the end of this particular piece focus on training and further education resources.
Imagine this scenario. You hear about a job opportunity that sounds really exciting, you might have seen an advert, heard about it through your personal network or been contacted by a recruiter about it, but it’s really got your attention. You think: “that’s what I want for the next stage of my career”.
Now this job offers the chance to really embrace the potential of procurement technology and that’s where you see your career going, but your current employer has been held back from supporting your ambitions because of internal barriers to adopting the latest spend management solutions.
But this other company has a visionary procurement leader and one of the best solutions available in the market today. You’ve read that they are really using it effectively and seem determined to get the best value they can in S2C, P2P, supply chain collaboration etc in future. That’s what you want – a chance to work in that environment.
This is a situation I envisage becoming more common because we are approaching a tipping point in the professional job market, particularly in procurement. I’ll come back to this tipping point subject later in this article.
So how do you make yourself stand out from the crowd if you haven’t got experience in a relevant spend management solution?
Before I answer that, here’s something to consider. The other side of this particular coin is the problem facing the hiring manager at the company in question. He or she is struggling to find these skills for the salary range they want to pay because they are in such short supply in the market generally, and everyone who is interested in applying for this role wants to develop the skills in question but doesn’t have them yet.
So what’s the solution?
Well my advice to the hiring manager in this situation would be to take a very pragmatic approach to this piece of recruitment.
This is because the perfect candidate (which rarely exists anyway!) might not be available to them because they are ahead of the curve on the use of procurement tech, and most external talent won’t be at the same level as their existing people.
So the manager needs to identify a list of essential and desirable skills, but he/she must understand that they may have to hire principally on transferable skills and the ability to develop the other key skills in the medium term. So they need to really think about longer-term potential rather than hiring someone who can do the job from day one.
So back to you. You are in competition with people with similar procurement skills, the same aspirations, but little or no direct experience of using the relevant generation of technology.
How do you make yourself stand out from the crowd?
In the absence of suitable opportunities within your current employer, the answer is a program of self-development using relevant studying resources.
By doing as much as possible to learn about your skills gaps, you can bridge that gap and send a very powerful message to the hiring manager in the process. You are effectively saying “I haven’t been able to get these skills in my current job, so I’ve invested a great deal of my own time learning about them”.
That gives you a steeper learning curve that will get you into a position where you are effective, more quickly than those who haven’t done this AND it tells the hiring manager you’ve got the right ambitions, attitude and qualities. THIS CAN BE HUGELY PERSUASIVE TO A TOP FLIGHT PROCUREMENT LEADER.
So what resources are out there to help you on this journey?
Unfortunately, there are no specific training courses available on the CIPS website for digital procurement. However here are some alternatives.
Procurement Technology
If you are particularly interested in focusing on the use of spend management solutions in the future, then this route may be for you.
Most vendors offer online training services to support the use of their solutions. It may be worth contacting them directly to see if you can pay to use these services if your employer isn’t a customer. Here are some examples of what’s available:
Many of the vendors offer free webinars to demonstrate their solutions. Of course, they are designed to sell the solution and generate leads for their salespeople to follow up, but they are generally a worthwhile exercise to see how it all works. Spend Matters promote quite a few of them so keep an eye on their site and/or register on the individual vendor websites so they email you with dates.
Even if you can’t make the exact time it’s still worth registering as you can usually access the content afterwards via a recording. You’ll also hear about their events if you are on the mailing list and they are generally worth attending if you get invited.
Professional bodies like The P2P Network also produce some good content. Here’s a link to their webinar archive.
Similar to eWorld, The P2P Network also have an event that offers some interesting content where you can learn from the various presentations. The next eWorld is on the 5th March 2019 whilst the P2P Networks Annual Summit is 5th June. Here’s the speaker line up (I’m delighted to have been invited to take part): Both events are also a great opportunity to network with peers.
Further Education
An alternative way to approach your personal development is further education through a formal qualification. The benefit of something like an MBA is that it could give you a broader business perspective which would help with the development of skills like business partnering and supplier collaboration which are perceived to be of greater value moving forward.
There’s also a variety of MSc courses in procurement and supply chain. Here’s a useful article on the various options.
So I hope you have found this article useful. I talk about this sort of thing nearly every day of my working life but hopefully, it will be helpful to you as a guide to what you can achieve and the value of it. Some might say that this is obvious, but even those who “get it” are rarely able to find the time in their busy lives to dedicate some time to self-education.
My advice is to find that time, whether you take a few days off, promise yourself you’ll do an hour every weekend or commit to enrolling on a new course because time invested now will pay dividends in the future. I’ll talk about why this is the case in one of my forthcoming videos entitled The Tipping Point – the future of the procurement job market. Watch out for that in January 2019.
Andrew Daley
Director
The Future of your Career – Part 1 – This article is the first in a regular series from Andrew Daley offering career development advice and sharing learning resources. Whilst aimed at procurement professionals with a desire to embrace the new era of digital procurement, this series should prove valuable to anyone seeking professional guidance on protecting the future of their career.
“Procurement faces a wake-up call as tectonic shifts in technology threaten to completely alter the function, leading eventually to its automation.” (Source: The Future Of Procurement Technology by AT Kearney).
This quote was the first slide in my presentation at the Basware Connect event in October entitled “Climbing the career ladder in an automated world”.
At SAP Ariba’s Procurement Summit a week earlier, one of the clear themes of the day was that the profession has a unique opportunity to change itself with the technology available, but it has to take responsibility to further its own agenda.
My conclusion from the two events was that the profession can’t wait and allow change to happen to it – it has the embrace the opportunity and dictate its own agenda.
Whilst on stage myself at the SAP Ariba event, I talked about the lack of spending by CPOs on training budgets as outlined by recent research from Deloitte. So my message to audiences at both events was to take personal responsibility for their own development, as it’s up to them to embrace the opportunity for the future of procurement, individually and as an entire profession.
So I’ve decided to continue this theme of developing yourself, or as one of the delegates at Basware put it “self education”, with some regular guidance on personal development that I hope will help you take advantage of all the resources available now, rather than waiting for your employer to invest in appropriate training.
People who take action now will give themselves a significant advantage over those that don’t next time they enter the job market.
This month I’m going to start by sharing what I consider to be some really useful learning resources for those seeking to understand more about the digital procurement revolution.
It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of the Spend Matters website. It’s the ideal place to stay appraised of developments in the technology and thought leadership on the skills required for the future of procurement. I’d advise frequent visits to the site. Alternatively you should follow them on Twitter for regular updates on their excellent content.
Their writers do a great job of cutting through the hype and getting to the crux of the matter. They also keep readers updated with dates for the wide variety of procurement conferences and events which they attend themselves and then write useful reviews.
If you want to dig deeper yourself and have the time, there’s a vast amount of “thought leadership” available on the evolution of procurement. The leading management consultancies and software vendors are particularly fond of publishing research and opinion so it’s well worth registering for white papers from the likes of Deloitte (here’s the 2018 CPO Study) and AT Kearney. Hackett Group has also produced some good reports on digital transformation.
Amongst the software vendors there are always plenty of learning resources available online. Some are quite salesy, while others try to be more educational. SAP Ariba’s Procurement 2025 is a particularly good one, and talks about the golden age of procurement. You can access it here.
One of the benefits of registering to download this content is that you’ll get updated when they publish new content and potentially get invited to their events. I’m a big advocate of attending these conferences. They are a great opportunity to hear about best practice from the profession’s leaders and learn about the power of the technology available now, and in the near future. They also offer a great networking opportunity which might prove invaluable next time you are in the market for a new job!
Of course, social media is another way to find all this sort of content. You don’t need to be particularly active on the various platforms if you don’t like them, you can still gather useful information when it suits you.
Much as we love LinkedIn, the more people you connect with, the more noise and irritating Facebook style behaviour you are exposed to. This reduces its effectiveness as a news source in my opinion.
One way to address this is to use its group functionality effectively. By joining relevant groups you are able to refine your content and focus on areas where the information is more relevant to you.
There are lots of good procurement options to research. We’ve assembled a great community around the procurement tech’ market which you are welcome to join here: Procurement Technology Specialists
You should also take a look at Procurious if you haven’t done so already. They are a much more specialist resource for procurement pros. They are doing a great job of promoting developments in the profession through their “Big Ideas” initiative. You can register as a digital delegate for their forthcoming Big Ideas Summit in Zurich here.
This is what they’ve had to say about this event:
“For the first time ever, we’ll be filming and streaming the entire day’s event via the Digital Delegates group on Procurious. If there was ever a time to register for one of our summits, it’s now. Featuring presentations and interviews from some of Europe’s top procurement leaders, we’ll be discussing procurement and supply management towards 2030, the future of talent, automation, blockchain, diversity and so much more.”
I hope you find some of this content interesting, hopefully even inspiring, and it will help you to start thinking about the future of your career more if you haven’t done so recently. We’ll be looking at other subjects such as further education and training opportunities as this series develops, but I’d like to finish with a couple of points from me.
A great lesson I learnt a few years ago when Simon and I started the business was to “begin with the end goal in mind”. So I’d advise that you start by developing a vision of where you see yourself career wise in say five or 10 years. Then try to work out a plan for how you are going to achieve your goals using all the resources available to you in the modern world.
Finally, some thoughts on what I’m going to focus on myself for my personal development. At the aforementioned Basware event I particularly enjoyed the keynote speech from respected “Futurist” Rohit Talwar. He’s inspired me to look further into the future about what’s next in business technology so I’ve just started one of his books – The Future of Business.
Here’s one of his presentations on YouTube – he’s well worth watching.
Also having really enjoyed my recent public speaking engagements I’ve decided it’s time for us to take the next step and do some video content for our website for the first time. I’ve challenged my colleagues to join me so watch out for our vlog debuts in January. Filming starts just before Christmas. Should be an interesting challenge!!
My next article in this series will be in January. Please let me know if you’ve got any questions that you would like me to address (confidentially of course!!!) via andrew@edburydaley.com I’m also interested to hear about what you are doing in terms of your professional development.
Alternatively follow us on Twitter or Linked In.
If you’ve found this article useful, you REALLY need to read our Procurement & Spend Management Insider report. It’s designed to give you an insight into the employment market conditions for your skills, so it really would be remiss of you to miss it! You can register to download the latest edition here.
Andrew Daley
Director, Procurement & Spend Management
The Christmas holidays and early January are traditionally times when people reflect on the previous year and begin to think about a potential job move. Recent research indicates that many people will use their new electronic devices to start looking for a job from Boxing Day onwards.
It’s important to note that a number of factors make January a time when recruitment activity rises. They include the emotional factor of seeing in a new calendar year and contemplating what the future may hold … but in addition there are sound financial reasons why the early part of the year is a busy one for job moves.
Many people receive their annual bonus payments in the first quarter of the year, so this is a factor in terms of when they want to resign from their current position.
Evidence also indicates that many organisations begin to recruit as their business plans and headcount budgets are confirmed early in the calendar year. This fuels a rise in both advertising and recruitment activity in general.
So it’s going to be a competitive market, whether you are hiring the best available talent or trying to find an exciting new role. We hope our advice will help you achieve your goals in 2019.
There are many varying viewpoints on what constitutes a good CV. It is actually very subjective and CV formats vary from sector to sector and across different job functions.
It is often recommended that you should tailor your CV for every role you apply for and whilst this is good advice it can be very time-consuming and not practical if you are in a busy job. An alternative therefore is to think carefully about your key strengths and achievements and create a general document that promotes your best skills and experience. Then you merely need to highlight the skills and experience important for each role rather than a comprehensive review each time.
Focus on the skills, knowledge and competencies that are strengths or those that you enjoy and want to highlight to develop in your next role. The CV is effectively your advert so make it the best you can and use it for all roles. Get feedback from others before you send it out. Make sure that the first page gets across all the key points you wish to highlight – it is true that unless a reviewer finds something interesting on the first page they will rarely read the rest.
Don’t do a long list of responsibilities or just repeat your job description – it is boring and frankly people will assume you are an average candidate. Reviewers look for clarity and relevant experience and the transferable skills you can offer a new employer and want to use/develop in new role.
Yes, describe the roles you undertook but make it brief and make certain you show what problems you solved and how.Companies want to hire people who can change things, improve results, develop teams or improve processes so you need to show you can do this.
Also be careful not to use too much internal jargon. Most organisations have their own structures and terminology but think what people outside may or may not understand. Often a junior HR person may be sifting the CV first – will they know what SRM means for example?
Most research concurs that the majority of professional jobs are not advertised. So unless you network effectively your job search will take longer and you may miss out on many of the better roles altogether.
Most roles are filled via a number of different networks, whether this is your own personal network or particularly that of recruiters, but it can be via colleagues, old bosses, stakeholders, or even suppliers.
Many people underestimate how many roles are found through social media with LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook all featuring strongly – so if you are not using these then you need to consider them. For professional procurement roles, LinkedIn is the most important.
Recruiters, whether they are in-house or at an agency, widely use these sites as ‘research tools’ to find people with the skills and experience they are looking for. If your profile has little information about what you do, or you don’t make your profile ‘open to view’, then you will not come up in a search so will not get approached.
Your LinkedIn profile is effectively an online networking CV and it needs to reflect your actual CV. Similarly, to create a good profile you need to do the full sales pitch and use many key words relevant to your role or industry, as this is how recruiters search for suitable candidates. Many people use their internal job title, but consider what your job is called most commonly, as this is the term that gets searched for.
You also need to extend your network as the more connections you have the broader your network becomes. However, be discrete as your boss and colleagues will use LinkedIn too, so connecting with ten recruiters at once may raise eyebrows!
Do add ‘recommendations’ on LinkedIn but try to get them from senior people you have worked with – a recommendation from the cleaner (with no disrespect to cleaners) doesn’t look as good as one from a Director (or an old boss).
To bolster your network in a focused way to decide on the kind of role and sector you wish to work in and focus your efforts there – look at the companies in the sector and see if you know people and connect to them. Join groups that are relevant to your role as this also makes you more visible and if you feel confident comment on posts to enhance this or click that you ‘like’ the posts of others, as again this raises your profile and people will notice you.
Talk to recruiters to see what their client base is and what sectors they focus on so that their network compliments your own. Tell them the kinds of organisation you will consider or the values and environment that you prefer.
Most of all remember that this all takes time; finding a job often takes at least 3 to 6 months – so be patient and don’t expect immediate results – connecting or helping someone now may get a pay back years down line. Building a network is an ongoing process and if you don’t respond to ex-colleagues, contacts or recruiters when you aren’t looking, they are less likely to jump to help you when you do decide to move.
Selecting your recruitment consultancies and which ones can seem like a question without a definitive answer. So let’s take the two constituent parts separately.
Firstly, how many? As many as possible maximises your coverage but that comes with serious caveats. It takes time and effort in establishing contact, briefing the consultant on your career situation, discussing your ideas for your next career move and the relevant financial and geographical parameters. For each additional recruiter you engage with you need to repeat this exercise.
It is also worth keeping in mind that within a specific field of employment, such as procurement, many hiring companies will place their vacancy with several preferred recruiters. If you are registered with a large number of consultants expect to get several calls about the same position which can be frustrating and a waste of your time.
So some middle ground on number of recruitment consultants is appropriate. If you are actively seeking a new position three carefully chosen consultants should give your job search good coverage without excessive time spent briefing consultants or crossover with the same job when it arises.
Secondly, which consultancies? A recommendation from your network of a good recruiter is an ideal start but if you don’t have this luxury then an internet search on recruiters in procurement will give you a long list. Visit each company’s website and check out their credentials. Are they really a specialist in procurement? Do they advertise the sort of jobs that would interest you? Can you see the backgrounds of the individual consultants who would be helping you in your career move?
Trust your instincts here. Good recruiters are knowledgeable about procurement and prepared to give you helpful advice on your worth in the job market. The best listen carefully to what you are looking for and keep those criteria in mind when speaking to you about a position they are working on. Be wary of those that over promise, are scant on detail or always seem to be pushing job opportunities.
Many companies successfully hire procurement professionals directly. Often this is done via an in-house recruitment team who may approach you in much the same way as a third-party headhunter would. This may happen if they have found your details on a social networking platform or you have applied to the company in the past.
However, if you want to be a bit more proactive you may want to consider some direct approaches to desirable employers. This may be in the tried-and-tested format of simply applying to an advert. The majority of recruitment advertising is now online either on major generalist or industry specialist job boards. In addition, a number of companies advertise their vacancies on their own websites.
It is helpful to add a short covering email to your online application expressing some specific detail about why you are looking for a new position and why the position you are applying for is of interest. It is so much easier to apply for jobs online than by post so employers are often swamped with irrelevant applications. Make sure yours stands out from the masses.
You may have companies that you admire and would be interested in working for. If that is the case you could approach them directly even without an advertised vacancy. Typically you would need to try to identify a senior member of the HR or recruitment team and contact them to explain your interest and what skills and experience you have to offer. This is speculative by nature and so generates a low success rate, however, it may at least create a dialogue which leads to you be considered in the future for suitable jobs.
Often persistence is key when applying for a position directly. If you haven’t received a response to your CV then make contact by email or phone to ask for progress and any feedback. Even if you are not invited for interview you may learn something positive about another opportunity in the company or at least the reason why you weren’t successful.
It sounds obvious but think carefully about why you want to move. Write down which aspects of your job you are looking to improve on. This helps to take out some of the emotion of the wish list for a new position. It also helps to prepare you to articulate these reasons when asked in an interview situation
Turn any negatives in to a positive as it is important to deliver your requirements in interview in the right manner. For example “I am looking to further develop my negotiation skills” will be much better received than “I don’t get any training where I am.”
With regard to salary package, consider if there any elements of your package which are particularly important to you and consider how likely it is that you are going to get a similar benefit elsewhere. For example, you may benefit from a very generous pension scheme with your current employer.
On the one hand you may be able to negotiate an improved basic salary to compensate for a lower pension contribution. However, there may be a point at which such a negotiation prices you out of the job you want. Put simply, the new company may not be willing to find, let’s say, another 10 percent on the basic salary to compensate for your loss of a generous pension scheme. The message here is work out which aspects of your remuneration package you are willing to be flexible on and by how much.
When assessing your potential new employer make sure they can meet the majority, if not all, of the reasons you are seeking to move. Use common sense as well as what you are being told at interview. If it’s an SME, do they really have the defined long-term career path you are seeking? If they are a global business can they offer you the access to the senior stakeholders you are looking for?
It’s also important to keep you eye on the company news. Just a few minutes online will reveal the financial health and public perception of a company. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t join a firm that has suffered some recent difficulties, just go in with your eyes wide open and be confident that the situation will improve.
In summary, be clear in your own mind about the reasons for moving, be able to articulate those in a positive way at interview and do your due diligence on your potential new employer. In other words check the grass really is greener!
There are many books that have been written on this subject and it takes practice to become really proficient. However even if you haven’t attended an interview for many years there are a few things you can do to help, but the key thing is being fully prepared.
It is often the case that the best prepared candidates are the ones who are successful at interview rather than those who arrive unprepared thinking that they can ‘wing It’.
If you are nervous remember that the interviewer is probably nervous too – very rarely is someone trying to catch you out – they merely want you to show that you can do the job and solve their problem. They want you to succeed so bear this in mind.
It is impossible to prepare for every possible question, however your preparation should include the following:
If you don’t know something or haven’t faced a specific situation before it is much better to be honest about it as it is generally obvious when someone doesn’t know as they either start to waffle or quotes best practice rather than giving a specific example.
There are also some typical topics or themes that will be explored in procurement interviews which you can prepare for such as:
So being prepared and having detailed examples is key.
Also recognise that trained interviewers (often from HR or Resourcing) will be much more formal and less likely to engage in small talk and you need to be prepared for this. They need to ensure they cover the questions and ensure the process is the same for all candidates making this a more formal scenario.
However, no matter how rigorous the process there is still a very strong element of personal chemistry involved in any interview situation. It is true that first impressions count, so do arrive on time, do smile and prepare something to say for the 1st few minutes such as a common connection or a common company or interest.
Andrew Daley was invited by Philip Ideson from the excellent Art Of Procurement podcast to discuss two of his favourite topics, Talent Attraction and Career Development, both of which should be of interest to the modern Procurement or Spend Management professional.
The Rules Of Talent Attraction should be of particular interest to any hiring manager who is focused on recruiting the best people they can find into their team. It covers key areas like recruitment processes designed to attract as well as assess strong candidates, the supply and demand of various core procurement skills and how to avoid some common recruitment mistakes.
The Strategies & Tactics You Need To Secure Your Dream Procurement Job is geared towards the procurement professionals personal career objectives. Philip and Andrew discuss the importance of networking, how you present yourself to the external job market and what skills you will need to develop to progress your career.
Both interviews have been very well received by the audience and have resulted in some excellent feedback.
If you would like to discuss any of the issues raised in either interview, please get in touch directly with Andrew via andrew@edburydaley.com.
We are pleased to share a very useful article written by one of our long standing partners Iain Stewart, director at Medinrun Limited.
A client recently asked me how to approach the process of re-applying for her job, as a consequence of a major re-organisation, with a new boss who she does not know.
She told me that although she hires people quite regularly, she has no template for interview preparation, and has not herself been through an interview for many years.
Here is what we defined as her approach, which, as a generic preparation tool, I want to share with anyone who needs to sharpen up their process, either as an interviewer or a candidate.
First of all, as a candidate, consider the interview as a competition you intend to win – only when you have a job offer do you need to make a final decision about accepting the role or not, a decision which should by then be informed by your due diligence, and the quality of the offer.
Prepare for the prospect that a good competent interviewer should be testing the candidate on three critical, go/no-go questions.
Subordinate areas of the interview will focus, in more detail, on the candidate’s competence in the three areas of:-
And, in addition to having credible answers ready for the interview, the candidate should always be prepared to provide evidence, to support their initial answers – make sure that your answers have precision and conciseness.
Content Knowledge is reasonably self-explanatory, but be sure to have a clear definition of the role, and an excellent understanding of what would be required to satisfactorily undertake the job, from the perspectives of resources, processes, tools, and governance, striking the right balance between theory and practice.
Leadership is often mistakenly considered to be synonymous with Management.
Everyone has had an attempt to define Leadership, but let’s simplify it here.
Management is about the organisation and deployment of resources in order to create outcomes which meet organisational goals, for example achieving production outputs, or customer service levels.
Leadership, on the other hand, involves knowing what good management looks like, but additionally organising resources and people to make the enterprise achieve its strategic goals, and to be competitive and durable; for example identifying the need for additional capacity, or new products and services, and facilitating the successful implementation of these developments.
Not all leaders are great managers, and not all great managers are wonderful leaders!
Knowledge and leadership ability need to be augmented by, and deployed through the application of appropriate Behaviours.
Some of these are innate, others are learned, and everyone has a subtly different make-up from the next person.
However, in the interview setting, some behaviours, which could almost be classed as values, will always be important.
These include integrity, honesty, decisiveness, relational skills, energy, ambition, cultural sensitivity, political awareness, attitude to risk, reasoning ability, and many other ‘soft’ attributes.
In all of the behavioural areas, the interviewee is just as responsible as the interviewer for assessing the level of fit between their personal style and the environment of the recruiting employer.
There is also a school of thought that interviewers are seeking their potential successors – that may be true, although in some cases, organisations are looking for content specialists or experts, who may never have the breadth to succeed their boss.
A decent interviewer is however likely to be studying a good candidate, and wondering if the candidate is:
In any event, do not appear in the interview as though you want the interviewer’s job…yet!
There, then, is some generic structure for the preparation for interviews, and engaging in them.
Of course, do the preparation and the research, on the organisation, and the individuals who you will be meeting.
Of course listen carefully and observe body language, and tailor your responses to questions and situations in a considered and appropriate way.
As a crude rule of thumb, if it feels right, then it probably is, and if it doesn’t feel right, back your instincts – it probably isn’t!
Iain Stewart
iainstewart@medinrun.com
