Communicating your skills and experiences

Earlier in this course, you considered some of the skills that SMEs might value and reflected on your own relevant experience. When it comes to promoting yourself in the job application process, you’ll need to explain your evidence for those skills as clearly as possible. If you’re approaching a business speculatively, this is even more important.

Where you will gain an advantage over other candidates is by explaining your skills in the way that feels most relevant to the employer you are communicating with.

Teamwork example

We’ve established that the majority of SMEs are interested in your teamwork skills. This is likely to be because in a small team working closely together, those skills are hugely important. So – how do you make your answer to a question about teamwork more relevant to this type of employer? For instance, have you used teamwork skills:

• In the same sector that the SME works in – demonstrating your understanding of their context?
• In the same type of role that the SME is recruiting to – demonstrating your understanding of the needs of that role?
• In a small team – demonstrating your awareness of small team dynamics and how to work effectively in that environment?

Try to frame your words according to the employer’s particular needs. You could also use the insight you gained from looking at Belbin’s team roles here.

For example, if when you look through their website or the job description you see words such as ‘friendly’ or ‘informal’ – frame your description of your teamwork experience using that same tone, e.g. sharing something about making sure you get on with everyone in the team and listen carefully to their perspectives as this leads to more effective teamwork. You might talk about using ‘empathy’ to demonstrate your care for and understanding of other people.

However, if they often use words such as ‘efficient’ or ‘innovative’ alongside references to the team, you could put your emphasis on your experience of sharing and building on the ideas of others within a team to reach the most efficient and effective outcome.

Looking at the language used, and aiming to reflect that in your application, will also help you to build a clearer picture of the company culture and understand whether you have the right skills and strengths to fit in with it.

A useful tool to help you structure examples of your skills and strengths, whether verbally or in writing, is STAR. The letters stand for:

• Situation
• Task
• Action
• Result

You don’t have to be too rigid in how you interpret this, especially if you are having an informal conversation with a contact, but it should allow you to cover the relevant information effectively. The main section here is ‘Action’ – where you get to explain what you did in a particular situation. The other parts are all about setting the context.

If you’re interested in exploring this further – Think Like a Recruiter – another FutureLearn course in this series, covers it in more detail, along with ‘CARL’, another acronym that you might also find interesting.

Over to you

Choose a small company from the Yorkshire Fastest 50 list. An ‘S’ on the right hand side means it’s a small business.

Have a look through their website and see if you can get a flavour of the company culture. Using the example we’ve just considered – can you get a sense of what aspects of teamwork they value and the words you might use if you were applying to them?

You don’t need to share your findings, although you might want to comment about how difficult or easy you found it to pick up these nuances.