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How to interpret job advertisements and ensure your CV reflects what's required.

OK, so you've scoured the papers, trade magazines and the web and you've come across something you rather like the sound of. Now comes the difficult bit.

HOW TO ANALYSE AN ADVERTISEMENT

In their book Brilliant CV, Jim Bright and Joanne Earl offer up a helpful set of questions that might enable you to get to grips with a job advertisement:

What don't you understand about the job ad?
What type of industry is it in? What's happening in the company or industry? Is it restructuring or expanding?
What is the main purpose of the role being offered?
Why is this role important to the company? How will this role affect the company's bottom line?
What type of skills do they want? What other skills might be needed, given the job's purpose?
What types of knowledge/training do they want? What other knowledge or training might be needed, given the job's purpose?

MATCHING REQUIREMENTS

Read the advertisement carefully to build up your diagnosis of the sort of person the recruiter is after. Differentiate between the essential requirements and those that are desirable. Most requirements will be explicit, but some may be implicit and require you to read between the lines.

For example, in March 2001 a county council was seeking applicants for a PR post that would involve promoting bus transport, yet a company car was being offered with the job. A representative for the council was quoted as hoping that the person appointed would demonstrate personal commitment to the job by not taking up the car offer. Now there's one way to impress/not impress the council!

Sometimes, what we imagine to be essential is sometimes either desirable or unnecessary. In July 2004, the British press reported with great amusement that the newly appointed chairman of the Melton Mowbray Pork Pie Association, Matthew O'Callaghan, was a vegetarian.

If the ad mentions a website reference, that's your first port of call research-wise. If it doesn't, it's still worth using a search engine to try and track down their website. A company's website will help you to build your understanding of the company and may well provide further information about the vacancy.

Ordinarily, you'll need to show that you can meet practically 100% of the essential requirements and around 50-70% of the desirable qualities sought. However, when the labour market is a bit tight and there just aren't that many people job-hunting, you can afford to drop the former to 70-80%. The desirables become almost irrelevant if the recruiter is likely to get a low response to their advertisement.

When you examine the job requirements in detail, you'll find that you match each of the recruiter's requirements at different levels. These can be characterised as:

High match
Medium match
Low or no match

Where you have a high match, make sure that this is glaringly apparent in both your covering letter and CV. Where you have a medium match, include this in the CV but not in any covering letter. If you can only muster a low match or no match, bury this towards the back of the CV or - better still - don't mention it at all!


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