How To: Make Yourself More Employable

In a fiercely competitive job market, knowing how to make yourself stand above the rest can be the difference between signing up, and signing on. And with the UK forecast to fall into recession in the latter half of 2020, there’s never been a more important time to take stock and weigh up your employability.

Redundancy, furlough and down-sizing can happen to any of us, which is why being prepared for the worst is something that all of us should consider, no matter how safe our job feels “right now”. Here are our top tips for making yourself more employable, not just in the hospitality industry, but across all sectors.

Update Your CV

Eugh, we know, no-one wants to spend time updating their CV, particularly if you’re not actively looking for work. BUT, it’s easier to load up your resume annually and give it a quick once over than it is to update multiple years worth of information. Save yourself a headache down the line (when you’re potentially already stressed by job loss), and keep on top of your paperwork now.

Some people even choose to have two CVs, one specific to their industry for applying for similar positions, and one that is more general, when applying for unrelated jobs. Your next potential employer may not care that you “hit your annual KPI for ancillary products”, but they will care that you “outperformed company sales targets”.

Interview Practice

So, your CV is on point, you’re in a good position to make it to the interview stage, but that’s when it all goes wrong. So many people are terrible when it comes to the formality of the interview process. If this is you, start working on your interview skills now, long before you need to put them into practice.

There are plenty of online resources to help prepare you, covering everything from the right amount of eye contact, to nailing the first handshake. They might seem like little things on their own, but combined they can make you appear more confident and therefore more able to do the job.

Look For Blind Spots

We all have things we’re not good at, and when we’re comfortable in a role, we can often get around this by skill-sharing with colleagues, each doing the parts of the role we’re best at. Unfortunately, this can come back to bite you in the long run if you no longer have your colleagues to rely on.

Start taking note of the parts of your role you aren’t confident in and find ways to get better at them. This could involve spending time practising difficult tasks, asking colleagues to help get you up to speed, or better yet, undertaking a training course.

Diversify Your Skills

The world is full of one-trick ponies, so branching out is a great way to make yourself more employable. When the job market is struggling, employers look for staff that can wear more than one hat, so look for ways to diversify your skills.

If you’re in retail, why not expand those customer service skills to enable you to work front-of-house in a restaurant? You’re a pro-barista? Can you transfer those skills to cocktail making? Hospitality is such a massive industry, there really is no end of opportunities if you’re willing to take your existing skills and build upon them.

No-one wants to find themselves out of work, but by thinking about ways to make yourself more employable in advance, you can make the transition between jobs a breeze.