Chapter 2. What an employer actually buys

Part 4 of 15 in How to Find a Job: Stop queuing on portals. Show an employer the value you can add.← Part 3Part 5 →

This chapter explains what employers really look for when hiring and how job seekers can present themselves effectively. It helps job seekers understand the employer's perspective and craft a compelling offer.

A job is not a prize for suffering through a degree. It is a rental. An employer rents your attention, your skill and a share of your week, because something in their world is more expensive unsolved than your salary. If you cannot name that something, you are asking to be rented on faith. Faith is how relatives hire. It is not how a company with a payroll hires a stranger.

This is the shift Bolles kept forcing on readers, and it is the shift Indian graduates resist, because college trained the opposite habit. In college you are the buyer. You paid fees, or your parents did, and the institution owed you classes, a hall ticket, a degree. At work you are the seller. The company is the buyer. Buyers do not owe sellers a chance. They owe their own payroll a result.

The sentence that gets you hired

Every useful application, website and interview in this book is trying to support one sentence, said in the employer’s language:

I can take this specific costly problem, and make it smaller, with evidence you can check.

Neha’s sentence, once she learnt to say it, was not “I am a hardworking B.Com graduate seeking a challenging opportunity in finance.” It was “I can find the GST and stock mismatches that turn into notices, because I have already done it for a hardware shop that was about to get one.” Karthik, whom you will meet properly in a later chapter, did not say he was passionate about mechanical engineering. He said a jig he redesigned on a shop floor cut a rework step. Imran did not say he knew Python. He said three kirana shops on his lane stopped losing WhatsApp orders.

Notice what these sentences contain. A person with a nameable pain. A change in the world, not a feeling in the applicant. A way to check the claim. Passion is not in the sentence. Passion is cheap. Every cover letter in the queue has it.

Five things employers quietly score

Indian interviewers rarely show you the scorecard. After enough rejected candidates, the scorecard is still there. It usually has some version of these five lines.

• Can this person do the work in month one, or only after we train them for a year we do not have?
• Will they stay past the first salary, or are we a waiting room for a government exam or an MBA?
• Can they write and speak clearly enough that a customer, a vendor or a senior is not embarrassed?
• Do they tell the truth about what they have done, including what they have not done?
• Will they make the manager’s week lighter, or heavier?

A marksheet answers none of these for long. A portfolio page can answer the first. A direct sentence about your plans can answer the second. A clean email answers the third. Not inventing a six-month internship at a company that does not exist answers the fourth. The fifth is felt in the room, and it is why manners are not decoration. In an Indian office, the manager is often one late night away from doing your job themselves. They are hiring relief.

The fresher objection

The fresher objection is real and it is overused. “We want two years of experience” is sometimes a way of saying “we do not want to train you, and we do not believe college trained you.” You cannot argue the objection away with a slogan about giving youth a chance. You can make the objection smaller by arriving with a piece of supervised work that looks like the job.

That work does not have to be a famous internship. Famous internships are distributed the way campus jobs are distributed, by college brand and by network. A useful substitute is a bounded problem inside a real organisation that will let you touch it: a family firm, a clinic, a coaching centre, a society office, a kirana, a workshop, a non-profit, a professor’s lab if the professor will sign the result. Two weeks of careful work, written up with numbers, beats a certificate that says you attended a workshop on leadership.

What they are not buying

They are not buying your potential in the abstract. Potential is what parents see. Employers see next month’s deliverable. They are not buying your willingness to do anything. “I am open to any role” reads as “I have not looked at your work.” They are not buying a discount on desperation. Offering to work for free forever does not make you attractive. It makes the serious employer wonder what is wrong, and it attracts the employer who wanted unpaid labour all along.

A fair apprenticeship is different from free labour. A fair apprenticeship is short, supervised, and aimed at a piece of proof both sides can point to. Chapter 12 deals with that bargain. For now, hold the distinction. You are not begging for a seat. You are proposing a trade.