Winning That Job: A kill or be-killed guide to job search and interview preparation for students and graduates

Finding a good job and establishing the start of a career is hard work. The right qualifications are vital, but they alone won’t win an interview. Relevant work experience is a necessity, but on its own won’t win that job offer. So what will?

Technique.

Today, job applicants face a multi-stage challenge and they must: survive initial selection by software robots; get approval from the HR gate-keepers; stand out from their peers during complex multi-stage selection interviews; and finally individually win over the decision-making managers.

This book shows job-hunters how to avoid getting caught out through sending hundreds of applications, wasting time at odds of 1000 to 1 or worse, only to get nothing. Step by step, using the latest tools and techniques, it takes job-hunters through:

• finding and targeting the right opportunities, including the ‘hidden’ ones;
• pressing the right buttons on their CVs, on applications and online;
• distilling the killer shots out of even a short period of work-experience;
• preparing so systematically that they effectively win the job before the interview;
• controlling their nerves & demonstrating that they really are the No. 1 choice.

Job hunters can be sure that, if they learn a good set of search, application and interview skills now, they’re going to have lots of opportunity to re-use them during the course of their working lives. Learning how to win that job by applying the techniques from this book is likely to be the best investment they’ll ever make in themselves.

Jon Gregory helps people to develop their job-search, application and interview skills so that they can follow career paths that will support them for the long haul, in today's volatile working environment.

His working life started as a car valet at the age of sixteen, cleaning the transport wax off brand new cars. He returned to school for his A levels, went on to university, became an engineer and then began to develop his career in management.

He worked successively in project management, operations management and general management before successfully running a market-leading subsidiary for a FTSE 100 public company through his mid-thirties.

To get there, Jon negotiated his way through a lot of tough interviews. Conversely, he also interviewed many candidates for key roles at the places where he worked. He's experienced both sides of the job-search fence and gained invaluable expertise, as a consequence.

He later founded his own business development consultancy and has since worked internationally with dozens of businesses. Fields of work have included: coaching and mentoring; career development; team development; recruitment training and change management, as well as international business development.

Jon has worked on three successful turnarounds, all involving significant re-organisation and people development. His main focus for the last two years has been on helping people to develop their careers in these challenging times. He has a particular interest in helping young people to get the jobs they want and build the careers they choose to aim at.

The creator of numerous guides, reports and websites over the years, this is Jon's first published book. With it, he is aiming to deliver hard-won, in-depth experience to people in a fast and easy-to-absorb way. He supports his writing with a blog at win-that-job.com and makes regular appearances as an expert panel member on live chats with the Guardian newspaper's online careers section.

Follow Jon on Twitter: @letsfirewalk