Having picking out the strong and weak areas in your job application, it should be possible for you to make an assessment of your chances of success. If you have lots of strong areas, you should be in for a fairly smooth ride. If, however, there are some glaring weaknesses in your application, you need to be prepared to pull out the stops. For instance, you may need to turn your mind to effecting a few pre-emptive strikes.

Expectations
This is a gentle warning. Rating your chances of success is one thing, whereas building up your expectations is another. The modern job market is an unpredictable place where practically anything can happen.

Example
A young woman applicant received a turn-down letter for a job for which she was abundantly well qualified. The reason? The employer decided to put its recruiting plans on hold. They did not think to explain this in their letter to her and she was left wondering where she had gone wrong.

Discouragement
Discouragement is what happens when your job applications keep going nowhere – when your doormat is littered with ‘Sorry, but no thank you,’ letters. You feel you are banging your head against a brick wall and, sooner or later, despair starts to set in. Finally, you stop applying for jobs because you feel you cannot take any more.

What to do about discouragement
We are all human and so discouragement can and does get to us. Here is a five point plan for dealing with it:

1. Stop (take a holiday from your job applications).
2. Take stock of what you are doing and try to see where you are going wrong.
3. Do not be surprised if you cannot find anything that you are doing wrong.
4. Remind yourself that success on the job market means being prepared to take the hard knocks.
5. Do not start again until you are fully recovered, otherwise the feeling of discouragement will soon be back again.

Treat all of your job applications separately and see them in terms of each individual employer’s selection criteria. View your chances of success in terms of the extent to which you meet these criteria. Consider the strong and weak areas in your application and, where there are weaknesses, look for ways of overcoming them.

Whether you are getting help from a Australian recruitment agency or any other recruitment agency from any part of the world, the above tips will definitely help you gauge your chance of getting a new job.

Stan Waldorf is a career consultant in Sydney. He conducts resume workshops yearly and teaches people what to look for in an Australian recruitment agency.