This video interview with Mr. Joshua Yim, CEO of Achieve Group, is a continuation of the interview with ‘Hangout with ST’ in June 2019. With his decades of experience in Singapore recruitment, he is going to elaborate more on the tips he shared in the show, and insights on how you can stand out among job seekers to impress your potential employers or recruitment agencies in Singapore.
Engage Proactively with the Recruitment Agency
It is import to proactively approach the HR or the recruitment agency after sent out your resume. Show them your interest for the job by asking them the outcome of your application, or following up with them whether there is a need for interview. Once you managed to have an interview with the recruiters or departmental head, call them to find out the progress, or any outcome of the interview, or is there a second interview.
Some of you may feel such proactive engagement can be intrusive to the recruiters or your interviewers, but Mr. Joshua with years of experiences in Singapore recruitment industry assure you otherwise. They will be impressed if you could proactively talking to them, showing your interest wanting to engage with them. With that, even if the position you applied for has been filled by somebody else or being hold up due to undisclosed reasons, the recruiter or the interviewer will still remember you.
Being a candidate, you want to be in the good books of this potential employer. Hence, we should be proactive, need not be shy about things. Obviously, we do not need to be too loud. But they are all professionals and they will respect that you are interested and that will give a very good impression.
Job Seeker Should Quantify Your Achievements
Number two, that is your credentials. Being an employee or a job seeker, I am very sure that you would have said some form of contribution to your previous employer. This may be in terms of all the awards that you have won or the recognition with star awards. You should especially put them all in numbers. If you are sales profession, it is straight forward. Even if you are doing projects, for example, how much money you saved for your organization. Or you did a project that sprouted out to multiple locations. All these are achievements. People want to see that because the recruitment agencies Singapore and employers have got so many resumes that they received for every single position and literally all HR would have only maybe 1 – 4 minutes for every single resume. Meaning to say that they only look for the essence of the resume. Therefore, you want to put in numbers. People love numbers, quick and capture their eyes. You need to have your achievements all put into numbers, to help outstand against the rest of the candidates.
Job Seeker Should Demonstrate Your Interest
Number three, you need to do research especially when you are excited about certain things. For example, say in productivity or Six Sigma, JIT and so on and so forth, you can write some research because you are enthusiastic about it. You can do all these findings and what is happening in the arena that is on this particular topic and this industry. You can have this blog or articles that you did, send it over to the HR or the company or the end user. I am very sure they will be impressed.
Job Seeker Should Show Your Passion
The last bit is very important – passion! No bosses in Singapore and entire world will reject people with passion. Just like you having a friend, you see the person so enthusiastic, so excited about certain things, you find that there is a lot of energy in the person. You will want the person to be part of the team. Hence, for a job seeker, you need to arrest things that you find excited and keep you awake. These are things probably that you want, meaning that these are the passionate areas and these are things where you want to contribute to the organization that you are going to join.
As I mentioned many times to our people in Achieve Group, we have our values and one of them it is passion. Without passion, we can’t get things done. If the person is competent but does not bother about anything, the person will be side-lined. We want our recruitment consultants to be engaged and passionate about what he or she is doing. Just like our company, we are impacting lives every now and then. When we find a good opportunity and good career for our candidate, we feel excited! And the candidate will usually send us flowers, cards and buy us chocolates because the candidate knows that through this process we are contributing to his or her life and career. So, our consultants will feel very excited because we have done a good deed. Similarly, I beseech all job seekers to find exactly what makes you tick. A very good example will be Mr. Tan Min Liang, the founder of Razer. I think he is very passionate and the company is one of the five or six unicorns in Singapore who has made it. I’m very sure all these guys must have put in tons and tons of time, passion and efforts into the work that they are doing. How many unicorns are there in Singapore or how many of these start-ups really make it? One out of twenty or one out of thirty? The number can be quite small. There is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, I’m very sure. The point now is that they put in effort, they put in their enthusiasm and time into their work. They are passionate about it! Hence, we should be looking out for something just like these guys – putting in time and effort and build ourselves a career.
Life is short, so I wish everyone of us can have great values and contribute. Find a place where you can contribute with your passion. Each one of us are different but you must find your passion and whatever things you do will be fun and meaningful.
I wish everyone a great career ahead and be able to find success, meaning and fulfilment in life!