Two Bits – Make your first impression really count

Here we are in March already, and only three weeks to go to the opening of the new Junction regional shopping centre – 80 000 sq metres, 220 or so shops, movies, hairdressers, supermarkets, and more retaurants than you can shake a stick at.
With nearly 20 new restaurants and fast food outlets, that will take the Dolphin Coast count to well over 50. Competition will be tough and never will a community be so well fed. And with half a dozen new hair salons – on top of the 25 or so in the area – that’ll put us in the stratosphere of healthy hair. But the question of new competition is true for every business in Ballito. We’re all going to have to up our game to stay ahead of the pack.
Most of those businesses are new to town, many of the owners will have moved here from other towns to cast their bait into the new phenomenon that is the Dolphin Coast, so they will be going flat-out to survive. Only the best will survive – sad for the losers, good for the consumers. That’s how the world works.
At the tenants’ meeting last week, Mayor Ricardo Mthembu mentioned that the developers had been snowed under by people wanting jobs in the Junction – 13 500 applications for about 1 800 jobs. He pushed hard for Flanagan & Gerard to consider locals first and threw in a punt for them to consider funding/ sponsoring a “higher grade” education facility for the region. I would suggest it be of a practical and technical nature – from hairdressing to bookkeeping to engineering.
Talking of trying harder, I received about 50 CVs for a vacancy I advertised recently. Reading them filled me with despair.
When an employer advertises a position, what do you think they are looking for? Unless it’s for a modelling or acting position, it doesn’t matter whether you’re short or tall, thin or fat, black or white. What matters is your level of education, experience, specialist skills, age, where you live and what your salary expectations are.
In the age of Google and a wealth of information for free on the Internet, there should be no excuse for not writing a solid CV. There is no end of advice out there and some sites even provide templates and examples. It was obvious that most hadn’t bothered to do that research.
A good CV should be max two pages long and condense what I’ve set out. Then, how do I judge if you are dependable and conscientious? Considering that this is a publishing company, first things I look at are grammar and spelling. Well, I don’t really look for them. The mistakes just jump off the page at me.
It’s not a crime not being able to spell. But every CV was prepared on a computer, so I would expect that they have spell checkers. It was obvious that many had not bothered to press the F7 key. I counted 11 errors in one! If you can’t be bothered to check your own work, will you be bothered to check mine? Probably not, so those with more than a few spelling errors got tossed out.
Many were keen to tell me how valuable they would be to my company, but did not tell me basic stuff like their age, where they live, married or single, children or not, and salary expectations. The last I can live with, but it is useful to know what you earned at your last job. It won’t determine your salary, it’ll just give me an indication of your preparedness to be straightforward.
Then there were the unexplained gaps, the dates that didn’t add up. If you were without a job, or pregnant, or travelling, say so. Otherwise I might think the unexplained gap was a short holiday in prison!
Of the 50 applicants, there were a handful of brilliant CVs, well thought out, well designed, crisp and clear. Though only a handful used graphics and multimedia to get their message across – for a position as a designer!
Bottom line, any employer is looking for a person they can depend on to do the job they want done. Set out to prove that you are conscientious, hard-working and take pride in anything you do, you should have no trouble landing a job, even if it takes a while. Dependable people are like gold.

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At school one morning, the teacher asked little Johnny what he had for breakfast. Little Johnny said, “Well, on my way to school I come across this apple tree, so I climbed up there and started eating apples. I guess I eat about six,” said little Johnny.
“No,” said the teacher, “It’s ate!”
Little Johnny said, “So sue me, it could’ve been eight, I don’t remember.”