Recruiters look for a range of career skills in applicants for graduate management and administration jobs, but the most important are:

• the ability to set objectives and meet them consistently
• leadership skills, especially the capacity to inspire and motivate
• self-awareness – recognising your own weaknesses and addressing them accordingly
• rapport-building – how well a candidate can foster good relationships with other people
• resilience and flexibility – the ability to persist and adapt in the face of difficult obstacles
• numerical skills and the ability to manage finances.

Interviews for graduate administration and management jobs will often focus on these skills, so be prepared to provide evidence of how you have developed them from extracurricular activities, previous work experience or your degree.

Of course, the context in which managers and administrators work has a huge impact on the nature of their job role – each sector has its own requirements. The experience of managing a call centre, for example, is very different from managing a chain of hotels. Administrators may work in libraries or higher education institutions. However, many of the skills required and the challenges offered are similar.

What do graduate recruiters look for?

Some key graduate recruiters tell us about the skills they look for in their graduate recruits:

Commercial awareness

John Morewood, Senior Manager of Graduate Recruitment and Development at HSBC, explains the importance of business awareness. ’We have a number of graduate schemes and we look for people who could be future general managers of the organisation: so people who can think strategically and broadly and have commercial awareness.

’We would expect people to be versed in what’s going on in the business world. We’d hate for someone to come to us and ask, "what does HSBC do?" – that’s not going to help their case at all. We’re looking for people who have some knowledge of how the economy works, how the financial sector works, and some idea of how this works in the retail environment. That knowledge can be acquired by reading a good-quality newspaper and also through a work environment.’

People skills

Gala Group Ltd looks for people skills in its graduate recruits. Josephine Davis, from the company’s HR department, explains.

’When we test people’s competencies we look at what personal qualities they’ve already got, so we’re looking carefully at their people skills: how they interact with other people and communicate with other people, the way they problem-solve and manage conflict, and the way they view customer service within an organisation.

’So what we would do is first screen application forms and look at people who have had some sort of work experience in the past. If someone came to us and they only had a degree, it would be really difficult in that first screening to pull out any people skills and personal attributes that they may have.’

Enthusiasm and motivation

’Enthusiasm and motivation are the most important skills,’ says Lesley Wotherspoon, Marketing Manager at Pareto Law. ’You can have all of the people skills in the world, you can know everything that’s happening in the financial markets, but if you haven’t got the drive and determination to be successful, it’s never going to happen.

’I actually think business and commercial awareness is not totally relevant. That’s not a skill, and if you’re a bright person it’s something that you learn and you can be taught. You can teach somebody to be communicative, but you can’t teach somebody to have a great personality and you can’t teach them how to be motivated.’

Communication skills

’Communication skills are really important to us,’ says Douglas Hamer, Graduate Recruitment Manager at Lloyds TSB. ’It’s about being able to articulate your views, elicit the opinions of others in an appropriate way, and speak confidently and passionately with a level of knowledge and understanding about the things that you’re talking about, whether that’s in a written form or in a presentation style.

’We don’t expect graduates to be fully polished communicators and presenters when we meet them, but we need to see something there in their potential to learn and develop that skill.’