How to get a job without experience.

One of the main questions young people always ask is, we are expected to have the experience to get a job but how are we supposed to do that if nobody is willing to give us a chance to start somewhere?

Well, brace yourself, people, we are going to show you how to defy norms and become the master of your destiny. We are going to show you how you can beat mainstream hiring practice and get the best out of life, with these fantastic tips and tricks. 

Nexus Academis has come up with a checklist just for you because we know that you are capable of doing everything, you just need the right direction and a little guidance. 

So, how do you go about getting the job you want with no experience at all?

1. Filter your job opportunities to your academic level and choose the one the best suits your personality

By doing that you will not only buy time, but you will feel less desperate and more confident about the way forward. Having a list of job that fits your academic level bring more clarity to your search. Moreover, by shortlisting the position that best suits your personality, you are incorporating your passion and what you love into your job. They say you need to love what you do to give the best at work.

2. Research on the selected role or position

Once you have found what you would like to do, that best suits you, go online and research about it. Research on the industry, gain maximum knowledge on the list of duties and responsibilities involved in the job you have chosen and how best you can implement it. Remember that, it doesn’t matter how much you know, all that matters it how best you can apply it. Look at how best the role that be executed and make sure your personality can contain these traits and characteristics. If it cannot, work for it, work your character and make it include the attributes needed.

3. Gain experience by reading on the current or previous experience of people who are or have worked in this industry

You can gain these online or through acquaintances. Go out there and grasp the maximum knowledge from these people to better understand what is needed of you and how you should prepare yourself. Depending on the experiences, good or bad, these people have had and depending if you have the correct mindset, their experiences will either dissuade you or persuade you to go further. If you have a challenging mentality, you will be prepared to win at any cost if not their experiences might just scare you off. And trust me the first mindset is the best to adopt, not just here but always. 

4. Read about what, immediate management considers as an excellent or ideal employee for this post.

When you know what is expected of you, you have a clearer roadmap of what is the way forward. You can now make a checklist of your targets and also what needs to be done to meet them and how to achieve your ultimate goals, that is to be the ideal employee for the job you have selected.

5. Find and acknowledge your weak points and scare them off

Ask yourself questions about what you do and don’t know about the job/position you have selected. For example; if you have chosen a sales job because you probably are more comfortable with human interaction or just because you can convince people more easily, know what these qualities are not enough to make up for a good sales, you should focus on other aspects you are not good at. For instance; 

• You don’t have enough computer skills or 
• Your English proficiency is not robust or 
• You lack professional communication skills

The good news is that you can find many tools and websites online to help you develop or enhance these basic skills. Regardless of the job, big or small, the same rules apply. Focus on building a solid personality that covers all of what is needed to be good at whatever you choose to do.

Great skills are not inborn or gifted; they are learned, applied, practiced and mastered.

You must have the desire to discipline yourself and teach yourself the things that you need to reach somewhere. Personal development is imperative.

6. Surround yourself with the right tribe

They say you are the sum of the five people around you.

To be who you want to be or do what you want to do, you need to surround yourself with like-minded people or at least people who share your philosophy and can help elevate you by contributing to the achievement of your targets or goals rather than those who would distract you from your goals. 

If you want to work in a specific industry, hang out with people in or close to this particular environment and learn from them. Join online platforms and communities and acquaint yourself with their situation and the technical slangs of the industry.

Now that you have learned about some of the tips to create your work experience organically, without actually working for a single company. Let us look at the way forward. That’s is how to find your suited job on the market and how to make sure you make it to the interview level and probably get the job “without any experience.”

1. Proper job hunting

Look for available jobs opening currently available on the market, either online or in newspapers and select few openings that most suits you, your qualification and your selling points. Be selective and confident. Never be desperate while job hunting, you end up choosing a job that you probably don’t like, and you will end up delivering poorly to the company that has hired you, and at the end of the day, you will hate yourself for the choices you have made. There always a job that fits you the best. You need to have faith and patience that things will work out great for you. 

2. Research the companies background and stories

Once you have shortlisted 3-4 available openings, investigate those companies. Find about :

• Their history and stories
• Where they operate and why?
• Who is there target market?
• What are their goals and visions?
• What are their challenges?
• Also, most importantly think about how can you contribute to bringing value to the company or the company’s market.

Think you about how you can make up for a valuable asset to them

Companies invest in labor because they expect their employees to bring value to them; this is how they make a good ROI. This is when their labor force becomes their greatest asset. 

The question comes down to why they should invest in an ‘inexperienced-you’ rather than a candidate backed with the right qualification and experience?

The reason why employers choose candidates with experience is because they need a proactive workforce who will help their business thrive towards success. 

This happens, when the employee can think and decide the best way independently forward, the employee can work effectively with minimum supervision. More effort is concentrated into working towards achieving the regular targets of the company than the training of staff at elementary operations. Because at the end of the day, the company’s goals are to make profit and not to cater to your personal or professional development. 

In short, companies want to hire you to do the things they don’t want to do, the way they would do it so that they can focus on more complicated stuff that require their immediate and personal attention. 

The ideal employee for them is:

• The one having absolute knowledge of the company’s background, and target market, 
• One who is in line with the companies vision
• One who considers the company as their own and will go to great lengths to make their business profitable.
• One who can help them overcome their immediate challenges

So if you can position yourself as their ideal employee, they will most likely welcome you on board even though you don’t have previous physical experience in the field. 

3. Building your CV/resume

After having prepared yourself to become the ideal candidate, it is now time for you to build up your CV to apply for the job. There’s two aspects to consider while building your CV. 

The first one is the academic part where you mention all your qualification and awards. The second part is where you list your experiences and professional pathways. Since you have never worked before, you won’t have much to talk about in this section. 

What you can do is; mention some voluntary programs you have been part of as an initial option which of course is much in line with the given field. Alternatively, the best strategy is to attach a motivation letter to your academic CV/resume.

What to include in your motivation letter?

Your motivational letter needs to include:

• the knowledge you have amassed on the industry and 
• The personal work you have done to build up yourself up to the level of the company’s needs. 
• Things you have learned on the company and the value you can contribute to the company as per the challenges you have analyzed while studying the company.

The aim here is to demonstrate that you know all the ins and outs of the company, their market and you know perfectly what you are talking about and present a solution to a problem they might be facing, from what you have studied about them. 

Bringing value and solution is the key to win them over. 

Be honest about your hobbies and stay true to your extra curriculum capacity. It is absolutely useless and pointless to mention;

• I promise to give my best
• I will do the job correctly if you give me the chance
• I will at no point disappoint you

These are stereotyped fake promises every passing candidate makes, these interviewers have heard it a million times, and they are fed up of listening to the same thing every time. If you have done your homework correctly, you will know the right words to use to demonstrate the willingness and ability to give you best. The above mention scenarios indicate desperation. 

You should at no point evince hopelessness and despair, employers/interviewer do not like to deal with weak and docile beings because this is going to be the overall culture of the workforce, they want to see bold, wise and self-contained candidates who are motivated and have a healthy mindset to conquer. 

So for you to conquer them, you need to be accurately confident about how good you are and what you can bring to them. You need to build up your mindset to change their perception about the dogmas of believing only a candidate with previous experience can do the job correctly. You need to defy them by showing why and how it can be the other way around.

“Be the change you want to see in others”

It is up to you and no one else to change how they see this situation. If you want them to take you seriously, you should be able to show them that you can be serious.

4. The Interview

One thing you should understand and pay attention is that, how successfully the interview will go, will be determined at the very beginning. You have successfully impressed them with your CV, and they have called you for an interview. How do you go from this point to get hired?

Ever heard about the saying “The first impression is the lasting impression?” I am sure you have. Well, know that this is very applicable here. How well you are dressed, how poised you are, how comfortable and relaxed you are, will give them an overall idea of what type of candidate you are. 

There are two types of candidates

• The Stereotyped one ( They never gets hired)
• The outgoing and unique ones ( They are the gems, interviewers look for)

By now, I am sure that, you have probably decided which type of candidate you want to be.

The dress code

The first thing an interviewer notices, when you walk past the door to an interview is the way you are dressed. This initial image gives them an idea of who you are.

Your style says who you are before you even begin to speak.

Therefore, you need to make sure that you are well groomed, neat and simple and above all very formal for a job interview. You should pick the appropriate colors that will put your traits under the spotlight. Beware, don’t confuse the interview session for a runway show. Don’t overdo. Interviewers are not at all interested in your fashion sense unless you are applying for a job in the fashion industry as an image consultant. 

You might want to avoid dull colors that will probably give you a heavy allure. You want to demonstrate boldness and dynamic, so look online about colors which are suited to what you want to communicate to your audience. 

Remember that the formal dress code applies to every candidate regardless of how big or small the position you have applied for is. From Janitor to Manager the same rule applies, there’s no way out. 

Now, let’s talk about the interview itself. One thing you should get straight from the very beginning is that the interviewer is not at all interested with your qualifications. Yes, qualifications are just your entry ticket to the interview room. So during the interview, you should not expect to have room to boast about your academic achievement whether you came first, whether you where team leader or captain of the football team in your college, makes absolutely no difference to the interviewer. 

You have been called for an interview to prove them in person why should be hired. What they expect is for you to show them the reasons why they should hire you. Now is the time for you to give you best and apply all of what you have learned to convince them why you are the right one and how the company can benefit from your service. You will need to sell your selling points in a very confident and convincing way. 

Think of the interview as a negotiation. You both need something at the end of the day, and the only difference is that the interviewer has many options to get what he needs whereas you only have one choice for the time being. Since there is nothing like something for nothing, you will need to negotiate with them by giving them something tangible for them to hold on to something. You need lure them into believing that, like you, they also have only one option to get what they need, and that is you. You should be able to install in their minds, the loss it would mean to their company by not having you on board. You must, at all cost present yourself at the missing puzzle they need to complete their game. 

Your job would be to take them from being reluctant to give you a job you have absolutely no experience in to, being completely engrossed in the dynamic energy you are demonstrating and change their position to ‘okay, you’re good, we can consider to hire you.’ If you can bring them to this level, you would know right the minute it happens. 

Now, obviously there are many interviewers who despite, how much you put on the plate, they will still put some reserve at to whether they are doing the right thing or not, because they might be among those who are still functioning in the old methods on hiring and as a result are quite unsure about the way forward. 

Compromise

One thing you can do to alter this situation is a compromise. Put an offer on the table. To prove yourself you can offer to start on a lower salary than that you are being provided for the job for until you prove them wrong and deliver or you could offer to work for them freely for 15 days (never more) to convince them that you can do what is expected of you well.

Note that, this only applies, only if you have done your homework correctly and have implemented all the steps and is confident that you can deliver quality.

At no point should you there be an ounce of desperation in your offer. Your offer needs to be perceived as a strong desire to prove what you can do rather than despair to get a job. This is an essential point to maintain, and you should at not cost overlook this aspect. 

Remember that “Every Failure brings with it the seed of an equivalent success” - Napoleon Hill.

You should not make the mistake of believing that by following and implementing this step, you will find success on your very first attempt. Because it will all depend on how well you have applied the steps and secondly the person you are dealing with. As we all know the world is not always made of the right person. For some, it might work on their very first interview, while for the others it might happen on the fifth one. 

If you don’t get it right the first time, don’t give up and most importantly don’t feel discouraged. Instead, use these failures as opportunities to get it right the next time. If you have failed three interviews, don’t take it as a failure, you can see it as a free way for you to gain more interview skills. Analyze the parts you got wrong and rebuild your strategies. Take those failures as testing experiments before the big day. Analyze where and why it went wrong and seek new ways to address them to perform better at your next interview. 

We have put a lot of effort to bring this detailed checklist to your guys, and we hope that this article has been insightful to all those looking for a job, with or without experience, the same rules applies. If it has, please like this article and comment your challenges if any, so we can bring more clarity to your doubts. Also, don’t forget to share this article with your friends who might also be struggling to find a job.