So a little more detail on what I did for my first application. My cover letter was just under a page long. I started off saying a little bit about myself, and why I wanted to work for Disney but without trying to be too 'beggy' (pick me! pick me!). Then in the next paragraph I talked about my previous work experience and how what I had learnt from that would make be a good Cast Member. So to do that I went on to the Disney site, the Yummy Jobs description and various other sites and places to make sure I'd included all the things they wanted in a CM. I summed up saying how I wanted to learn from Disney (suck up a bit to the company- always helps, although for me I don't need to pretend how much I love Disney!) and then thanked them for the opportunity. Overall, I'd say I tried to make the cover letter more about what I could bring to the company than what I could get out of it and why I wanted to do the program. Oh yeah, and I also put a teeny tiny Mickey next to my signature. Not big enough to be distracting, so it still looked professional but was a little fun as well ;)
For my CV, I just used one of the templates I found online (YJ has one on their site which I didn't discover until later). Even though you can't change your past experience you can still tweak it a bit to make it sound more related, so for example as I'd worked in a shop I used the word 'merchandise' which isn't something we really use here but obviously directly relates to one of the Disney positions. I also made a big deal of the fact that when I worked in a travel agent, we did a lot of Disney based holidays... stuff like that. At the beginning of my CV, I put a few opening lines telling more about me as a person, stuff like I enjoy travelling, I speak french, I've done fundraising activities etc etc. More personality than would have been professional in the cover letter.
There was a bit of confusion on the forums (www.wdwip.com) as to the best way of uploading the CV and cover letter. When you do your profile on YJ, it's essentially your application, except it just sits there until the applications open then you click the 'apply now' button. No-one was really sure what to do with the cover letter, as there's a bit which says 'upload CV' but there's no mention of a cover letter anywhere. There's also a text box labelled 'motivation'. Some people pasted their cover letter into that, which seemed to work fine and as far as I know most of them got phone interviews. I decided to put my cover letter and CV into one word document, uploaded that and then used the motivation box as extra space. I talked a lot more about why I personally wanted to work for Disney, why I loved it and why I wanted to be a part of the program. More personal than the cover letter. So even though it looks like there's not much space to say everything, if you're creative there's more than enough.
The best advice I could give would be to thoroughly research the program, really get a feel for what you think Disney is looking for then tailor your application to show that you have that!
The phone interview itself was good. You get to pick your date and time so you won't be taken by surprise and I had Hannah, who really was lovely. I had a couple of disasters with the phone (note to self: you are rubbish with technology so never try to do anything as sophisticated as using speakerphone again!!) which made the first couple of minutes a little more nerve wracking and difficult. I hope I recovered well and by the end I was in full swing and really enjoying myself, so fingers crossed I did enough!
I'll talk more about what was actually in the phone interview next time, cos otherwise this is gonna be a looooong post!!!
So now it's waiting!! I've already been waiting for over a week and it's already killing me! I want this so badly, but then again so do the other 300 or so people that got phone interviews so we'll have to wait and see! Hopefully they only get rid of about 100 or so that did really badly, and don't only keep those who did amazingly. Cos I think I'm somewhere in the middle!! Don't expect to hear for at least another fortnight yet, so once again crossing fingers, toes and everything else!!
So now I'm going to get out of bed and have some breakfast as it's 1pm. Oh, the joys of being unemployed!! ;) xxxx
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