Careers Support Hub

Yes definitely, we encourage you to share information about career breaks on their CV. Very often these breaks are legitimate reasons for not working at that given time of your life and we believe many valuable transferable skills and lived experiences come from career breaks for reason such as, starting a family, travelling, volunteering, or caring for a relative to name just a few. LinkedIn have also recently included a new feature that allows people to represent a career break within their LinkedIn profile, with 13 options.

This usually indicates that the employer may have concerns around why you are applying for a role that they deem to be more junior than the applicants experience suggests. These concerns could be around your genuine interest in the role or how long you will stay engaged and productive doing the work. They may also have concerns the role will not be challenging enough and therefore lack development potential.

Our advice to help overcome this, would be to be very clear in communicating why you are interested in the role and cover off any concerns by clarifying the reasons for your interest in your cover letter or supporting statement. You might mention points such as; you are changing sectors, or because you have other commitments that mean you will be very happy with a role at a particular level, or as is more common these days, the role or organisation has many other attractive qualities that appeal to you as well as a genuine willingness and desire to do the role.

Another helpful approach is to always ensure you tailor your CV according to the role you are applying for to highlight your most relevant skills and experience.

A disability is defined in the Equality Act as a physical or mental condition which has a substantial and long-term impact on your ability to do normal day-to-day activities.

We would advise anyone that is unsure about whether they have a disability or not to discuss this with your GP, or access other support services for specialist and tailored advice, for example Access to Workor Evenbreak Career Hive. It is important that as a job seeker, you are aware of the resources and support available to you when searching for a job.

At TPP, we encourage job seekers to share information about any support and adjustments that would help with the application process and if needed, to share this with prospective employers so that they can do the same.It is our experience that organisations are usually open to making adjustments and we believe it will allow you the opportunity to present yourself and your valuable experience in the best possible way.

In this blog we share information about what reasonable adjustments are and how you can go about asking for these.

This is disappointing however, some organisations do unfortunately have very rigid application processes. We encourage organisations to offer alternative application methods and would always explore this with hiring organisations on behalf of a job seeker who requested this.

If you do have a disability or long-term health condition under the Equality Act, organisations are obliged to consider making reasonable adjustments to the process and you should definitely explore this with them.

Inflexible organisations will miss out on attracting the best and most diverse talent and an inflexible recruitment process might give some insight into the working environment and overall culture of that organisation.

The most important point to consider here is how relevant your previous roles are for the role you are applying for. We would always suggest that if the experience you gained in a previous role is relevant to the role you are applying for, you should include it. We suggest keeping your CV to 2–3 pages and usually more detail is included in your most recent roles.

It is worth noting that for certain roles in particular sectors or settings, for example, social care or clinical, you may be required to outline your full work history in your CV.

Yes, do ask the recruiter or hiring contact for salary information, we believe this is critical information for any job seeker to have to ascertain whether the role is suitable and one that is worth applying for.

TPP has signed up to the Show the Salary campaign, which means that all roles advertised by us will indicate a salary or salary banding.

This is a great question and really demonstrates the value of transferable skills and experience. In this example it would be worth considering whether blogging experience is relevant to the role or any aspect of it. For example, it may be a great way of expanding on your ability to do a role where writing blogs or content creation forms part of the role you are applying for.

We encourage including information about volunteering you do, as this demonstrates a good work ethic, commitment and interest in sharing your knowledge and experience for a good cause. Organisations in the non-profit sector are generally very interested in both paid and voluntary experience that job seekers have gained.

At TPP we recognise that it is very important to get feedback from an interview whatever the outcome. Your consultant will always follow up with you after an interview, although it will usually be a couple of days before the client makes a decision and provides feedback. We pass on feedback as soon as we receive it.

Firstly, here is a link to more information about the STAR technique, which is a commonly used formula for preparing the best answers to competency based interview questions.

S – Situation
T – Task
A – Action
R – Result

In the absence of a person specification, you could do the following:

• Review the essential criteria and try to apply the STAR technique to some of those elements

• Review the duties and responsibilities and assume, based on those, what personal attributes would typically be associated with that, eg – if the role was a Student Records Manager where you were going to be managing a large team, prioritising work and overseeing the student records system you would need to evidence strong management skills, past experience of student records systems/databases and having worked in a busy environment where you were able to prioritise accordingly

• Look at past, similar job descriptions you may have access to

• Google the role and you might find some example job descriptions online that you could pull the person specification from to draft some preparation answers

• Ask your Consultant or the recruitment team if they could provide you with a person specification for the role ​

The internal language used in organisations can vary, you might get a sense of this from the website or the job description itself. For example do they use quite formal, academic language? If they do, it might be okay to sound a little ‘textbook’. If, however, the tone is fairly informal you might want to avoid using too many theoretical phrases perhaps. Saying that, the answer is probably somewhere in between, you want to give the impression that you are experienced at a leadership level and have had the relevant training perhaps, but you also want to use examples and language that speak more to a real-life approach to management. Use language that most authentically reflects you and your style. You could even use quotes from current/past colleagues or appraisals that evidence your leadership and management style.

With this question it is really important to personalise the answer to the specific role or organisation – pick out 2 or 3 aspects of the role/organisation that really appeals to you. This feedback often comes up if the organisation is worried about you becoming bored too quickly and then moving on, so try to demonstrate what it is that would keep you engaged and interested in the role and/or organisation. Consider whether there is something in the job description that you haven’t done before and are keen to learn/improve on. Alternatively, you could explain that the organisation is larger than your current one or that you will be challenged by learning and getting exposure to new projects for example.

This is not very helpful feedback unfortunately. For this feedback to be more constructive you would ideally want examples of answers that lacked the strategic element. We would however suggest that if you are applying for a role where strategy will be a focus (usually a more senior role), then cover off both the strategic and practical elements of what you did. Ensure that you put some emphasis on the vision and your ability to plan forward strategically. You can do this by explaining how you put the strategy together, how you implemented it, monitored and measured outcomes, and the role you played. You may need to focus a little more on the strategy element by talking through exactly how you developed the strategy. It is, however, impossible to do this without covering actions, process and tactics, so it is very likely a blend of both.

Take some time to gather your thoughts, allow some uncomfortable silence (it feel’s worse than it is in reality). Re-focus by controlling your inner voice which is likely to be negative, and bring yourself back into the moment by noticing something visible on the interviewer’s face, the colour of their eyes or hair for example. Have a glass of water with you, so that you can break for a sip and gather your thoughts. You could also ask the interviewer to repeat the question which might be all it takes for you to come up with a suitable answer. If you really find the question difficult and do not have an answer, then we would suggest you are open about this, rather than attempt to give an answer under pressure that you might regret later.

This is a great question, and certainly a new challenge in the remote working world we find ourselves in now. The best way to do this is through research online, trying to find anyone you could talk to who may already work there or has in the past. You can also ask your Consultant for any information they might have on the organisation, often recruitment consultants meet their clients on site. If this aspect is very important to you, you could opt for, or request, a face-to-face interview. Unless a role is geographically always going to require remote working due the location, it is quite likely that the organisation will have a face-to-face element as part of the process. Commonly, this face-to face stage is is usually the second interview or a ‘meet the team’ stage.

The likelihood is that they would have seen the maternity leave noted on your CV already. If you just leave it out and there is a gap that they ask you about, then yes, we would always encourage candidates to be open and confident about maternity/paternity/adoption etc leave. We do however suggest that candidates include this on their CV, as raising a family or caring for a loved one accounts for a constructive and important part of your life and overall experience. In relation to redundancy, this usually comes up when an employer explores your reasons for leaving a role and again, we would suggest being open about any redundancy situations.

​It is worth noting however that you are under no obligation to share any information you are not comfortable with (obviously there are certain roles that will require certain disclosures based on legislation).

We haven’t come across this issue and don’t have any examples of situations where a request for an adjustment has led to a negative outcome. Usually, we find that organisations are happy to make adjustments and offer the required support, particularly in the context of a disability or health condition, which is a legal requirement anyway.

If an organisation in any way demonstrates a concerning attitude towards a request for an adjustment or support then it would certainly highlight the need to consider whether the organisation is inclusive and one that you could see yourself working for.