[Webinar Report] Behind Your Employers Mind: What We Look For From You!
In order to adjust our working program due to the pandemic, HR Discussion was virtually held through a webinar entitled “Behind Your Employers Mind: What We Look For From You!” on June 30, 2020. This webinar was moderated by Priska Andrina, a management student at Universitas Indonesia and we invited Fajar Mahdi Fatahilah, an experienced recruiter at Multinational Companies such as Korn Ferry, Traveloka, and Google as a speaker. Down below is the resume from our webinar.
1. Labor market outlook
With the current rise of technology, it has become a global culture for businesses to be technologically adept. This result has brought forth these characteristics to the present environment:
Borderless states that has brought upon endless opportunity
An abundant labor force supply that helps in strengthening the competition
Ambiguity becomes the norm, therefore having the ability to navigate through them becomes a very important aspect.
According to a research by Deloitte, business strategies in the recruitment process of the open talent economy are affected by Global Talent Trends which are as follows:
An open economy, which helps widen the variety of talents.
An acquired real-time access to cloud-based technology, a form of technology that connects data through different devices. (Ex: Icloud data of Apple products)
Being active mobile users, “Always on your phone”.
Approaching community engagements and social sharing.
Adapting and applying massive open online education. (Ex: Ruangguru, Harvard Online Business School, etc.)
Adaptation of one’s decision making skill to be data driven.
With major changes happening around the world, essentially overflowing information, has risen both uncertainty and volatility to the world. Therefore, a tendency amongst the majority is to question, “Which skills will help you compete”?
There are two major types of laborers, which are generalists and specialists. Generalists are laborers which understand a wide range of aspects, being a “Jack of all trade”. Although, the weakness of generalists is that they do not possess a mastered skill. Unlike specialists, which are experts in particular fields. Similar to generalists, a specialist has a weakness, which is their lack of versatility. Both types have a trade-off, therefore there is no exact answer to the question because it all depends on how you plan your career.
2. Plan your career
There are many changes happening in the business world, especially on how a company attracts its talents. Therefore, it is important for us to understand and synchronize our experiences during university life. To find out the available career options to pursue, it’s a prominent way for us to initiate from the beginning, and it starts with:
Identify your own strengths.
Find out areas to improve and what’s most relevant with our post-campus life.
What excites you.
Set an objective (maybe for 3-5 years ahead)
From here, we now have a clear illustration for a further career options, such as:
Pursuing higher degree
Entrepreneur
Professional worker
Government institutions
Creative worker
Private sector
You’ll probably end up with a career shift anyway, but that’ll be fine. You may not know what you want, but at least you know what you don’t want.
3. What are they looking for
With so much buzz words out there on job postings, you as a candidate must be able to determine which of these words will correctly attribute to the traits and skills you would like recruiters to recognize. Among those traits and skills, there are six notable ones which would help you stand out among the pool of applicants.
Humility: Shows your ability to appreciate different perspectives when working in a team.
Curiosity & critical thinking: Helps you continually seek truth, learn and see things through different lenses.
Problem solving: The universal job skill that applies to any role in any industry.
Analytical skill: Data and insights are detrimental to business functions, hence the ability to analyze it is a very sought-out skill.
Multilingual: The globalized and multinational nature of businesses requires applicants to be fluent in more than one language, with English being the bare minimum.
Self confidence & good communication: Helps you articulate your ideas clearly and soundly so that others are convinced.
4. Acing recruitment process
After we determine the desires for ourselves and the company we are aiming for, the next step is to conduct research about particular roles, exercise, and prepare the requirements. The recruitment process in general, involves these activities:
Screening CV: It is very possible for HR to choose a candidate within their first 30 seconds looking at the applicants’ CV. Therefore, we must be able to construct strong impressions and relevant content that’ll attract the recruiter's attention in the CV.
HR Phone Interview: This process will only take a short duration, approximately 15 minutes, to ensure the suitability of the candidates' motivation, aspirations, and understanding which will indeed be prioritized to proceed to the next stage. Also, making sure that sanity check and must-have check lists are completed.
Onsite interview: An interview panel consists of Hiring Manager, peers, and (possibly) Directors.
Case study: Usually, this phase includes individual and/or maybe group presentations.
While creating a professional resume, there are several points that must be considered in maintaining and shaping an interesting and professional CV content, which are:
Avoid putting too much personal details.
Avoid using abstract, buzzwords without something concrete.
Don’t oversell, be realistic.
Don’t use jargons.
Be concise, keep it short within 1-2 pages only.
Put a short description of the organization/company you work for.
Before you meet the team, try to research who you are meeting with. In general, there are a Hiring Manager, Peers/Cross-functional Team, and Director in a team.
While doing an interview, there is an interview structure. First is a quick introduction, make the introduction in less than five minutes. Secondly, there will be questions around motivation for applying, aspiration, and career goals. Third, behavioral and hypothetical questions will also be asked by the interviewer. Last, be prepared to ask questions.
The star framework is particularly helpful for behavioral types of questions. The star framework comprise of these elements:
Situation, describe the situation you were in, or the objective you needed to accomplish.
Task, explain the goal you were working toward.
Action, detail the specific step you took and the role(s) you played.
Result, describe the achievements and the overall outcome, quantify it to signify the impact.
While answering the hypothetical questions, you have to understand the problem, identify the root cause, identify possible solutions, determine best fit solutions, and support solutions with data. These hypothetical questions look at how you would deal with a situation you would never encounter.
Written and Illustrated by : Orlando Ngabito, Adelia Farhana, Diandra Alya, Kynan Dio
Check it out on the following link to watch the webinar