As an accountant or professional, I suspect your career matters to you. After all you probably have invested a significant amount in getting or making progress towards professional qualifications.
Throughout your career you will make a number of job changes. This involves finding roles, getting the interview invitation and then converting the job interview into a job offer.
Over the years the number of job boards, job sites has increased dramatically. LinkedIn is used extensively by recruiters.
With all these advantages one might think that it has never been easier to get to the interview stage.
In fact the complete opposite is true in my experience. Yes there is easy access to opportunities. Getting through the screening and filtering process is becoming more of a challenge.
For that reason it’s vital that you clearly determine how good a fit you are for a job before you waste vital time.
So how do you determine if you are a good fit for a role?
Carefully review the job advert
Within the job advert you get information about the company, the role and what the employer views as being really important.
The employer or recruiter won’t want to make the advert excessively long. As a result you have a degree of confidence that the most important information will be highlighted.
Carefully review the job description
The job description gives the detail about what you will actually be required to do in the job day to day.
Reviewing it will help you benchmark what you have done so far against what you will be doing.
Carefully review the person specification
The person specification sets out the skills, knowledge, qualifications, qualities, attributes and experience that are important.
These are often split between what’s essential and what’s desirable.
Create a series of lists
This is a big task initially and something you can then update. The series of lists I recommend you create are:
- What you have practical experience of
- What you have knowledge of (which you might or might not have experience of too)
- What technical skills you have
- What people skills you have
- What management and/or leadership skills and experience you have
- What digital skills you have
- What business skills you have
- What qualities or attributes you have
Compare your lists against the job advert, job description and person specification
Do this objectively. Consider how closely you fit the requirements.
I do however want to offer a word of caution. You are never likely to 100% match what is being looked for and if you do it’s probably not the right opportunity for you.
As a rule of thumb you want a 70-80% match. The rest is development and something you should always be looking for when you take your next career step.
In reality landing your next job is always going to present some challenges. At the same time taking a systematic approach and targeting your applications can greatly increase your success in my experience.