How To Go About Answering Key Selection Criteria Step By Step To Assist You Win That Interview And Job - A Guide That Will Help You Throughout Your Career
Answering key selection criteria is a difficult task, even for professional resume writers, like me. They are time consuming, challenging and call for a lot of focus and attention to ensure they sell your skills inline with the question being asked
However with a little practice and preparation it does get easier and the rest of this article outlines a system that you can put into practice to help you provide the best possible responses you can, in answering key selection criteria.
Step 1. Determine that there are, in fact, Key Selection Criteria that need to be responded to for your application to be viable. Download any position descriptions and skim read everything, highlighting key points and phrases that appear to be the key to success for this job. Are there any KRAs - Key Results Areas? Is there an importance weighting on any areas of the role? Is there a word or character count limit?
Step 2.Once you have completed step 1 pull together all the terms you have highlighted and use them to create a statement about the key elements for success in the role. This can act as a cheat sheet for your responses to the Key Selection Criteria. Is it necessary for you to answer each criterion briefly or in-depth?
Step 3. Now you can start to prepare the Key Selection Criteria. Highlight key words such as: Demonstrate; Experience, Knowledge of, capacity to acquire, qualifications, problem solving, team, leadership.
Step 4. To build your confidence select the criterion you consider the easiest, this could be one about qualifications and experience, perhaps. Create a short piece that outlines your qualifications and years experience and state your qualifications in full. If your experience includes titles that are particularly relevant include them too. This is your outline response. If a more in-depth response is needed add with an example of your experience.
Step 5. For each criterion you repeat as the above. A great way to help you create strong examples is to use C, A, R - circumstance, action, result or S, A, O - situation, action, outcome. For each criterion construct a story following one of these formulas. For example, if you are writing about problem solving - the circumstance might be: There was a backlog in getting Christmas gift mailings out on time. The action would be: I investigated using express post parcels - this was still within the budget and the parcels arrived on time, with happy customers. The result: Without this there would have been many returns and refunds due to late delivery. I have paraphrased the above and if I was responding to such a criterion I would add a little more detail, but not too much.
Step 6. Since you have written a story for each criterion, re-read and edit each one, making them only as long as they need to be. You want to make every word count. Remember also to keep your answers in the first person, action oriented - by using verbs and positive.
Step 7. Ask someone else check the responses. Perhaps even get someone to read them out loud to you, or just do it yourself. This is an excellent way to check for clumsy grammar and any errors.
So there you have it, 7 steps to answering key selection criteria that will keep you focused and should assist in your success, as long as you follow them.