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It’s always the most awkward point of any job interview; that bit at the end when the interviewer asks you if you have any questions, and you want to broach the subject of how much they’re intending to pay you.

The jobs market in the UK is constantly changing. Back in the 1980s, the main shifts were a change from heavy industry in many parts of the country to service related industries, finance and retail. Since then the pace of change hasn’t slowed, with many more online and digital jobs than ever before.

It’s becoming increasingly common for employers to ask prospective employees to attend interviews in groups, and over the course of a few hours do a variety of tasks such as individual interviews, group exercises and psychometric testing.

Employers want to make sure they get it right when they’re recruiting; getting the wrong person can be expensive and time consuming. For many employers, a straightforward interview and CV screening exercise isn’t enough for them to assess a candidate’s strengths and personality, so many will set additional tasks such as group assessments or asking candidates to give a presentation.

When you’re applying for jobs, you’ll often see salaries advertised as a “package”. It’s fairly obvious that this means that you’ll be getting a basic salary plus perhaps extras such as pension, company car, private health cover or other benefits, but how do you put a value on these extras and work out just how much they are worth to you?

It’s a very standard way of soliciting applications for a position – send a CV and cover letter to the given address. If you’re actively job hunting then you probably have a pile of CV’s ready to send, but how should you construct your cover letter? What do you say, and what should be left off?

Congratulations – you’ve landed an interview for that dream job! There is lots of information and advice out there about what to do and how to answer those tricky questions they throw at you.

Remember the days when applying for a job meant filling in a form in your best handwriting, composing a cover letter than sending it all off in an envelope with a first class stamp? Most companies have now moved to online job applications.

You’ve probably heard the statistic that communication is 93% non-verbal and only 7% verbal. So putting it another way, when you go for interview, it’s only 7% what you say and 93% how you say it.

Sometimes it can seem that job adverts are printed in a foreign language. Stuffed with jargon and buzzwords, it can be almost impossible to decode the advert and get to the bottom of what the job entails, and what sort of person the company is actually looking for. It takes practice to learn what it all means, so here’s a basic guide to some of the most common terms and phrases and what they really mean.