Shamini Mustoe's placement at Xerox & tips for prospective students

This is a guest post from Royal Holloway Management student, Shamini Mustoe, who is currently doing a placement year with Xerox. I very much enjoyed making a visit to the Uxbridge Xerox offices recently to meet Shamini and her manager and we will soon be welcoming Shamini to a Call Back afternoon at the University.

Watch Shamini's video about her placement here: http://yibprofile.blogspot.com/2019/03/shamini-xerox-sales-operations.html

Xerox is an American global corporation that helps businesses and governments improve the flow of work to enable greater performance, agility and transformation through print and digital document solutions. Whilst you may not have heard of the brand before, they have contributed major elements to personal computing such as the mouse and desktop computing. 

I work at the UK Head Office in Uxbridge as the Sales Operations Excellence Executive, initially just for Europe but now part of the Global Demand Team. I have worked on major data analytic projects which have assisted in pivotal decision making for sales operations processes, maximizing ROI and lead-to-sale successes. 

Whilst I am enjoying my role and what it has enabled me to accomplish, looking back a year ago, I had no intention to go into Sales Operations. I was picky with applications and only applied to companies that had a lot of ‘perks’, my CV was generic, and I got very little responses. Even if I progressed to online tests, I would often fail or be faced with a video interview which I hated. 

The Royal Holloway Programme Officer informed us of a fast-track session happening at the library- no online application and an almost instant response – it was a no-brainer. I was invited to the assessment centre after a short interview the same day, whilst I wasn’t keen on the role I used it as practice for future centres. I wasn’t offered the job, but it taught me vital skills that I could take forward:

1.       Try not to ‘fan-girl’

I’m not sure why but I went into flatter mode, I talked too much about how I was so proud to be able to apply to this company and how great it was that I was invited to the assessment centre.  The company you applied to know it’s good, they want to know why YOU are good.  

Talk about how you would be a good fit by researching the company’s values and thinking of examples of how you’ve demonstrated these traits.

2.       Capitalise on your experience or get some!

There is a limit to the amount of times you can say ‘I contributed to a group project at university’- the best way to tackle this is to get as much experience as possible! I started with a part-time job working for Events and Conferencing on campus, which I got from applying at the careers fair. Then I applied to a summer placement for a small family-run tuition company, which I found after Katharine sent an email to the Year in Business distribution list (pay attention to these!) and worked there beyond the summer and into the next year.

I had all the content to make a solid and successful interview, these experiences had given me countless examples to mention. That’s the best preparation you can do, which is why you need to use first or second year summer productively- not the whole time but at least a month building up experience.

3.       Group tasks are important

Some people may find this daunting; sitting around a table with people you’ve never met before and being asked to work together whilst being watched. Understandable. But this is what it will be like for your first few weeks in the organization when you join, they want to see how you interact with other people. Voice your opinion and reason with others in the group while asking quiet members to give their view, suggest a compromise on disagreements and keep the group focused by reminding them of the brief. This will ensure you can be pointed out as a key member of the group when assessors come to reflect later.

4.       Don’t be picky

Of course, to a certain extent you may know what area you would like to do your placement year in, but don’t let that stop you from applying to other functions or industries. It opens your options up and increases the chance that you will get a placement before the deadline. Most importantly, any placement you can get will provide with transferrable skills that would look great on your CV – the fact you were able to adapt is commendable and can provide a conversation point in future interviews for graduate jobs. Likewise, most companies will teach you want you need to know from scratch as many students from different disciplines obtain placements as well.

After learning all of this, I attended the assessment centre for Xerox and was offered a role from two out of the four managers I interviewed with. While it may not happen the same way for you, it’s important not to give up but to keep going and applying frequently – customizing your CV to each application is longwinded but it is the best way to progress to the next stage as well prepare for an interview. Look into the job specification and use the keywords in your own CV, this immediately checks the boxes for recruiters.  The Careers Service can help with this! Use them for mock interviews as well, they are really helpful and free!

That’s all I can think of, but I wish you all best of luck for your applications!