According to Malcolm Gladwell in his celebrated book – Outliers, “Achievement = Talent + Preparation“. Sometimes the smallest gap between success and failure isn’t the talent component, it’s found in the preparation. Have you adequately prepared to succeed and deliver on your expected goals? If you haven’t put in sufficient preparation, well there can only be one outcome. Are you prepared to work harder than everyone else in order to succeed?
On the surface when you look at any successful individual in any walk of life, you could surmise that they enjoyed a degree of good fortune or a lucky break somewhere along their path to success. But how much hard work, blood, sweat and tears went into providing them with the opportunity to avail of said “lucky break”? How much of success can be attributable to sheer persistence and hard graft?
The one common feature all successful people display is their capacity for hard work – not just as hard as everyone else but 5, 10, 50 or 100 times harder than their peers. They’re simply prepared to put in the maximum effort in order to give them the best chance of success and it comes as no surprise then when it arrives. It’s simply an inevitable result and just reward for their considerable efforts.
This line between success and failure is plainly evident in the world of recruitment too. In a technology driven age with all of the tools available to us, we still regularly see poorly written, poorly presented CV’s in circulation. It begs the question, has this person prepared for success? If not prepared to go the extra mile with their CV’s, what message does this communicate to a prospective employer? Sadly many candidates are never given the opportunity to interview with a company because their CV was substandard and did not adequately market their credentials.
Never one to judge a book by it’s cover, we at Campbell Rochford endeavour to meet or speak with all candidates, irrespective of how their CV reads. What is immediately self evident from those conversations is the difference between good candidates (requiring a little help and guidance to transform their CV’s into documents that truly represent their skills and abilities) and those candidates for whom the job search process is more likely to be littered with near misses and tales of woe.
Preparation for any successful candidate begins with their CV but also includes some interview preparation – researching their chosen employers, products and services, preparing for the expected questions and to make a winning impact face to face. Although not a recruiters responsibility to spoon feed any candidate, we can provide some suggestions around what the most appropriate research activities might be and where the best available information might be contained. The rest of the preparation should quite rightly fall at the candidate’s feet and must be treated as a necessary part of the path to interview and job success.
So the message for any would be job seekers out there is that mediocre efforts will achieve mediocre results and if you want that new job badly enough, you simply must put in the hard yards to attain it. Candidates seeking the most desirable roles with employers of choice must be prepared to graft and differentiate themselves from the masses. But with the help and guidance we can offer, your chances of success increase exponentially.
To obtain the best possible advice with your next job search, why not call or email Campbell Rochford today? Whatever your background or level of experience, we offer candid guidance and assistance, bridging that gap between failure and success.
Campbell Rochford – Turning Good To Great