We ran a survey with sales professionals to find out what they found most frustrating about their job hunt.
Over 200 sales professionals completed the survey, which revealed some very interesting results.
We asked jobseekers in the sales industry the following questions:
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What do you find more frustrating about searching for jobs?
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What’s the most frustrating part of writing your CV?
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What’s the most frustrating question you’ve been asked in an interview?
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What’s the most frustrating part of applying for jobs online?
Here are the results:
What do you find more frustrating about searching for jobs?
43% of those surveyed said not hearing back from an employer about a job was the most frustrating part when searching for jobs.
21% said applying for jobs online was frustrating, while 13% said they were frustrated by creating a CV.
9% of those surveyed said preparing for an interview was the most frustrating, while another 9% said the waiting period after completing an interview.
Finally, 5% said a poor recruitment process was the most frustrating part of their entire job search.
What’s the most frustrating part of writing your CV?
When asked what was most frustrating about writing a CV, 35% of sales professionals surveyed said the time it takes to write one was most problematic.
27% said formatting, while 22% said writing their personal summary.
12% said writing about their work experience was most frustrating, and finally 4% said writing the skills section was frustrating.
What’s the most frustrating question you’ve been asked in an interview?
We also wanted to hear more about the interview questions that frustrated jobseekers the most.
Questions that cropped up the most from this included:
- What are your strengths and weaknesses
- Tell us about yourself
- What is your salary expectation?
- Why should we offer you this position?
- Where do you want to be in five years’ time?
- Why do you want this job?
What’s the most frustrating part of applying for jobs online?
This was the final question we asked sales professionals on the Simply Sales Jobs website. The results were as follows:
26% of sales professionals surveyed said a huge lists of minimum requirements was the most frustrating when applying for jobs online.
24% of those surveyed said a job advert with no salary band was most frustrating, while 17% said a job advert with a lack of information regarding the role.
12% said not enough information about the company on a job advert was frustrating, and the remaining three options all matched at 7%, which included a huge emphasis on past presence, spelling errors/grammatical errors and other.
As we can see from our survey, there are a number of different aspects of a job search that sales professionals find frustrating. Writing a CV, for example can be stressful, and frankly time consuming. Having plenty of available tips and advice about writing your CV can be a big help.
Not hearing back from an employer about a job you really want can be annoying – the only advice we could give here is to be persistent for a short period of time to try and gain as much feedback about the process as you can e.g. did you not answer your interview questions correctly?
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