You’ve just found a job advert that sounds perfect for you – you believe you have the skills, the experience, and the passion you know the employer is looking for – but how do you approach the selection criteria to make yourself stand out from other candidates? How do you communicate to the employer that you’re the perfect fit for the position?
The first thing to consider when approaching the selection criteria is to be clear around what the employer is asking for. Do you meet the requirements for the essential criteria? Can you even provide additional skillsets through their listed desirable criteria?
Like other applicants, your main goal is to fill out the essential qualifications, but it’s the desirable skills where you can stand out. Be sure to demonstrate as many of these key criteria as you can to give yourself your best shot.
Common Criteria
Selection criteria are generally the combined skills, experience, knowledge and attributes required to actually do the job. What employers are looking for can fall under the following:
- Knowledge/Qualification Criterion
As the title suggests, this where you explain what qualifications and knowledge you have, or will soon have. How have you gone about acquiring it? How has it been applied? This is also an opportunity to express your commitment and initiative by expressing the ways in which you have pursued acquiring knowledge and where you might be adding value next
- Experience Criterion
Having prior experience in the field of work or relevant experience from other areas e.g. customer service is almost, always a requirement of any employer. Therefore, it’s important to provide evidence (ideally relevant to the targeted job) that clearly demonstrates your capabilities.
- Skill-Based Criterion
Transferable skills are the easiest way to indicate what you’re capable of. By coupling these skills with your most targeted-job-related, study projects or community experience, the more chance you have of convincing the employer that you’re more than suited for the position.
- Yes/No Criterion
This often refers to qualifications or certifications that will only require one to two sentences. (e.g. Do you have a specific degree, First Aid Cert, Driving licence?)
- Value/Attributes Criterion
Are you a self-driven individual? Do your own values coincide with that of the organisation? Employers will occasionally include values and attributes to assess whether you would be a good fit for their organisational culture. For this criterion, explain how you believe these values are important for the role, and what your own attributes might bring to the organisation.
Finally, the best way to approach writing your selection criteria is through the guidance of S.T.A.R. This technique provides a layout to efficiently communicate and provide context and examples of your suitability.
For further information or guidance on selection criteria, our Careers Cube is open for Curtin students Monday to Friday in B102 Curtin Connect, with no appointment necessary. We’ve also got some great resources available through UniHub.
