As a growing consultancy, we get quite a few graduate applications and, for my sins, I’m the recipient of some of the generic email addresses, which means I get first eyes on a lot of the job applications that come our way.

As a first foray into making this blog useful for aspirant PRs I thought I’d share some of the most common mistakes made by those applicants, a top 5 “do not do” list if you will.

1. Send email to generic email addresses – our personal addresses are all over the website, it isn’t hard. Even if it is hard, press releases are a good place to get contact details from.

2. Have no reason other than that we’re a PR company for applying. You should want to work somewhere for a reason. Wolfstar has a blog and a social media newsroom, it’s very very easy to find out a bit about what we’ve been up to.

3. Bad spellign, bad grammar  and typos– You won’t get a look in if an employer thinks you are going  to make them look amateurish. Ask a friend to be uber-critical and pick you up on every clumsy sentence.

4. “I have good communication skills and work well in a team or on my own.” It is a phrase that is (in some form or other,) in almost every CV I get and it MEANS NOTHING. firstly, your approach and writing style will tell the employer whether you have good communication skills or not, and working well “in a team or on my own”  just means you work well…

5. Have stuff you aren’t willing to defend anywhere online. I’m not saying don’t use facebook (employers are human and recognise that you have a private life,) but if your approach and CV get past anything more than a cursory glance, the next move will be to find out what isn’t in the CV, and that will involve Googling you.

That’s it for now – if anyone wants to add anything feel free…

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