Grabbing the Audit Recruiter's Attention
Grabbing Audit Recruiters Attention With A Fine CV
With just sixty seconds to make an impact, how can you ensure your CV will grab a reader’s attention?
A good CV is the best way to get ahead, and ensuring that it contains all the buzzwords that the recruiter is interested in can sometimes be more important than your skills, qualifications or experience. Terms like “transferable skillset” are vague at best, but recruiters love them.
Many recruiters look for attitude rather than ability, favouring applicants who have enthusiasm over technically gifted or experienced candidates. While after investing so much in learning, you might feel that your professional career is relatively boxed-in and pre-determined. But everyone can branch out at any time, and you should never be ashamed to admit that while being totally inexperienced in a particular area, you are highly accomplished and enthusiastic about taking on a new career path.
Your value to a business or organisation is decreased when you refuse to try your hand at areas outside of your professional domain. You may be a highly skilled and experienced auditor, but you are also an intelligent human being who can contribute to almost any area of a business regardless of these skills or experience. To be really valuable to a business you should be able to apply yourself to a range of different areas.
Auditors should be able to ask basic questions to an expert with a far more detailed understanding of the subject concerned. Despite their limited knowledge, they should be capable of understanding how an organisation and all its departments function. This is not about pretending to understand, this is about getting complete, comprehensive and conclusive answers from the authority on the matter.
Auditors should be professional, carrying out work to their best of their abilities and investing in building skills and knowledge, but it’s also a good idea to show recruiters that you are inquisitive and enthusiastic. Transcending the abilities of a professional, you can take on projects outside your field of expertise and still produce great results.
It might seem like madness when you’ve spent so long training and learning, but often recruiters will be stuck between two candidates with identical levels of qualification and accreditation. In this situation a candidate who demonstrates a keenness and enthusiasm for the role is likely to be favoured. Many graduates lie on their applications so sometimes personality plays a greater role in the recruitment process than you might think.
Your CV has a very short time to make an impact on someone recruiting for an audit job, so trying something different, or highlighting an unusual set of skills or expertise can be an effective way of getting noticed. Remember that almost every applicant will probably have a similar set of qualifications, so there are often other areas which become more important to recruiters.