How to be prepared for the job interview without any previous experience and skills?

First of all, we need to change our mindset about employers who want to hire everyone with experience. That is not always true. Sometimes it’s easier to teach needed experience during training rather than change someone’s personality or attitudes that they represent.

About skills…

It is important to be able to recognize the differences between hard and soft skills.

Hard ones are very specific and they refer to particular tasks that cannot be done without it, for example for a taxi driver it can be a driving licence or for a project manager it can be a certificate with PRINCE2®. It needs to give you a skill that you can perform in order to finish exactly the tasks that are given to you. Hard skills are considered more difficult to gain and in some cases better paid but also they are hardly applied to other tasks. It is definitely a better way to combine them with soft skills which are very often put in the background. This type of skill is focused on your personality and attitudes towards work and other people, they can be your most valuable card to play with during the interview.

Why is it important ?

A good taxi driver can have 3 or 4 driving licences but it can be nothing if he is unfriendly and can’t communicate with people in a good way. His hard skills are the best but the attitude that he has can make him a better employee if he has a solitary work as logistic supporter where he doesn’t have direct contact with clients. The same applies to everyone, even if you don’t have many hard skills or experience that is required, you can expose your soft skills that you have gained during your studies or voluntary project. You should discover what exactly you can bring to the company and what particular skills make you a good candidate.

How to show them?

First of all you can analyse your duties or responsibilities that you needed to take care of as a student: it can be time management skills when you needed to combine your time with work and university classes or also communication skills when you were a volunteer in a project that required a direct contact with people, maybe even in an international team or you needed to communicate in English? Congratulations, you have developed efficiency in cooperating in a multicultural team and even your communication abilities in a foreign language! These are all precious competences that you can use during your job interview. To make better impressions on recruiters, you can use the STAR model that shows also your proper preparation for communication with the company.

What is a STAR model?

These 4 letters stand for Situation, Task, Action and Result, they show the way you should present your skill on interviews, which means when you mention a particular skill you should also describe a situation in which you used it, what was the task that you needed to complete, with what action did you managed to do it and what was the result. In this way you can show that your skill works and they can bring profits to the company and also thanks to this model rectiters can verify that what you say is a measurable truth, not just a string of good words about your character.

If you are looking for new opportunities feel free to check our open vacancies. We are recruiting all over Europe for many sectors. Our multicultural team is dedicated to finding the best opportunity for you so feel free to reach us.

You can reach us at info@itselecta.com or +48 506 033 065.

Check our website to be sure you will not miss any vacancy that might be your future dream job also with different languages: www.itselecta.com

We wish you GOOD LUCK for your future interviews,

your ITSELECTA TEAM