4 Critical Steps for Nigerian Fresh Graduates, Job Seekers to Increase Visibility to Buyers


Just like other markets within industries, the job market has remained competitive in the last two decades, especially in developing countries where millions of graduates are being churned out every year. In Nigeria, the unemployment rate is rising every year. From 3.3 million in 2017 to over 20 million in 2018, job searching and being spotted by employers require planning and strategic use of available resources. Visibility
Navigate the Market: The Place of PPPT Framework
To navigate the market and survive the storms occasioned by the lack of small and large scale businesses to absorb a significant number of the graduates, the sellers (graduates) need swotising themselves along with PPPT framework. PPPT entails process, product, people and technology. At process, fresh graduates and job seekers need to devise means through which the needed jobs could be got. The first stage within the process is to be a qualified person. By virtual of being a University or other higher institution graduates, this stage is accomplished. Beyond this, job seekers must be able to develop appropriate and valuable curriculum vitae that will attract buyers (in this case, HR person acting for the business owners or the owners themselves). Within the process, people must assist job seekers. They could be teachers, mentors, friends and colleagues. The assistance must have been got while in school and during the course of developing disruptive CV.
Having disruptive CV is a matter of doing SWOT analysis before writing and applying for a job. Doing a SWOT analysis will assist the job seekers in understanding how they fit with the buyers’ business environment because the environment is being competitive every day. The tool –SWOT has been used and still being applied by businesses to pinpoint strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to their process, product, people and technologies. This explains why SWOT is important in CV writing.
When businesses want to understand their environment, they identify specific internal prowess, capabilities and competencies with the intent of capitalizing on them while executing or delivering promised values to the clients. Efforts are made by the employees at corporate, business and functional levels to mitigate weaknesses and threats to the business profitability and sustainability. The end result of SWOTIZING by any business is to know how to improve the PPPT. When it is obvious that new hands (employees) need to be added to enhance, process, product and technology, human resources department swings into action by calling for application from prospective employees.
Such employees must also adopt the tool while writing their tailored CV as explained earlier. Infoprations believes that job seekers should see themselves as products expected to add value to the buyers’ process, product and technologies being threatened by external forces capable of reducing profits and ending the business’ life. Job seekers’ strengths and opportunities must align with the buyers’ SO as explained in job description, roles or responsibilities, skills and competencies.
It's important because knowing the negatives and positives remain appropriate means of making the right decisions. When the negatives outweigh the positives for a particular job, the ideal is not to apply for such job. From experience, the CV of such person would not be attended to because the negatives must have established that the person failed to meet the job description, job roles or functions, skills and competency tests of the buyer (employer), which further established that the candidate would not be a perfect person to solve the identified weaknesses and threats.
Weighing and Making Smart Decision
In our model, job seekers must be sincere while evaluating their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats in line with the buyers’ own. The strengths and opportunities could be recorded using +5 or +10. The same approach applies to weaknesses and threats, but it must be in negative form. The score for each strength, weakness, opportunity and threat must be added to have cumulative score that point out the direction of the decision that should be taken. SO belongs to positive polarity while WT belongs to negative polarity, according to our analysis. With this, it is easier for the job seekers to decide whether to apply for a job or not.
From PPP-Driven CV to Technology-Driven Job Search: The Place of LinkedIn
LinkedIn is a platform for value presentation to colleagues and businesses. It has features tailored towards career growth and development than other platforms like Facebook. LinkedIn is not Facebook, where professionalism is not respected. The ideal thing for any job seeker is to have his or her profile updated using PPP-driven CV explained earlier. Beyond profile building, connections must be built along with the chosen career path. The value must be equally presented through posts, comments, shares, likes and publications using appropriate features of the platform. When these are presented uniquely getting endorsements and recommendations become much easier. Any job seeker on the platform who is not creating and capturing value from it must understand that there is something wrong and must be addressed and correct the mistake.


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