Recruiters face major challenges in times of skills shortages. One is recognising applicants who have not done exactly the same thing as in the new job but have job-relevant experience from other domains. This means evaluating transferable skills. How can you support recruiters in this and thus expand your job market?
Many applicants recognise the challenge of demonstrating that they are suitable for a job, even if this is not immediately obvious. However, they usually pursue one of two strategies that do not work.
The first strategy is to describe their previous experience in such an abstract way that it seems relevant to the job in question. For example, someone says that he is experienced in selling products that require explanation. This describes what he has done so abstractly that his experience matches the requirements of many other jobs. However, despite the need to explain a razor, the corresponding sales experience in fund sales at a bank is unlikely to be of much use. More concretisation is therefore needed.
Explaining helps, but is not enough
The second strategy is to explain to the interviewer that their previous experience is relevant to the new position.
For example, one client tried to convince me during a job interview training that his IT project experience at a retail company was a good fit for the position in a hospital. He explained eloquently, but I couldn’t recognise the match. It was clear that he was convinced of his suitability for the job. But I couldn’t rely on his judgement – after all, as an applicant he was biased.
I asked him to tell me exactly what he had done at the trading company. He told me about the challenge of integrating various suppliers on the one hand and major customers on the other into the company’s systems and programming interfaces.
Good storytelling creates images
In addition, the system landscape had been poorly integrated due to the growth of recent years; departments had installed software in an uncoordinated manner. He therefore had to standardise and negotiate with different suppliers. His descriptions gave me a comprehensive picture of his experience. I could see that the structure of the organisation, the challenges of the job and the specific tasks at the retail company and the hospital were the same.
However, this did not become visible through abstraction, but on the contrary through the detailed description; recognising a match requires images. And I didn’t need an explanation, because after having heard the story, I could see the match.
Candidates often rightly criticise recruiters for overvaluing domain experience. But it is the job of the applicant to use storytelling to demonstrate the transferable skills. You can find out how one client did this impressively in the article «Do you know your transferable skills?».