Page 79 - Marky Stein - Get a Great Job When You Don't Have a Job-McGraw-Hill (2009)

Get a Great Job When You Don’t Have a Job

Knowing your skills builds a rock-solid foundation for your Q
statements. It will also be an extremely valuable lesson to you for
interviewing.
If you know as few as six of your skills as well as you know
your own home address, both your interview and your résumé
are likely to be smashing successes. Once you can describe your
skills (how you used them and what the result was) on your
résumé and in your interview, you are literally unstoppable as a
job seeker.
This is exactly what Q statements do. Consider this study:
When more than 4,000 employers were interviewed about
why they did not select certain candidates, the first thing they said
was that the candidates could not clearly describe their skills.
Now stop and read that last sentence again. It doesn’t say
that the candidates who were not chosen did not have the right
skills for the job. It says that, in the employer’s eyes, they could not
clearly describe their skills. The employers in that survey also
responded that, in their opinion, 85 percent of the job seekers
they saw could not or would not describe their skills in a clear
and specific manner.
You will be able to do this. And you certainly don’t have to be
a writer or a scholar to do so. All you have to know, you’re going
to learn in the next two chapters. If you know what the words
who, what, when, where, how, and why and the question what hap-
pened? mean, you will very shortly become an expert at clearly
describing your skills.

• Can you believe that simply by completing this and the
next chapter, you will be part of the top 15 percent of job
seekers? Well it’s true. And the sad part is that everyone
doesn’t take the time or have the knowledge that you are
going to learn in just a few pages. Are you ready?

Three Categories of Skills

There are three types of skills that we will be talking about in this
chapter, and all of them are very important for both your résumé
and your interview.
These three essential skill categories are

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