Job Application: employer direct

As a recruiter, of course I would always prefer that as a job seeker you come to me over going to an employer to find a job. I get paid a fee for vetting out the unsuitable job applications, and reduce the time an employer takes to fill a job.

But I actually make more money in hard to fill positions, and employers are making more use of new Social Media. So more job seekers and potential employees are going direct: our are they?

Job application: jobs boards

Many job seekers find that the job they thought they were ideally qualified for in actual fact is advertised by a recruiter. In fact, in a recent straw poll, I found over 60% of the jobs on a well known jobs board were recruiter advertised over employer direct.

As I have said before, recruiters have tighter tolerances and a different view to an employer over who could fulfil a position. While both have the same core brief and view:

• Employers – are happy to accept less than ideal qualified candidates who could become a long term employee
• Recruiters – think as much about their future income as they do about the ability for the candidate to deliver results from day1.

Hence, many job seekers find if they apply via job boards to what are often recruiter advertised posts, they are rejected.

Job Application: quick

How do you solve this job seeking problem? Go direct, and try to avoid the jobs boards! One reason that so many jobs end up advertised on jobs boards is the cost of collecting CV’s for future roles, or those skills which know the market is short off. Jobs boards don’t do themselves any favours by competing on price, and hence the cost of that ideal job advert you see could be as low as zero to the recruiter/employer! Job boards often offer special deals for either new clients or repeat posts, and hence the effective cost of advertising could be zero.

When the cost is zero, you can see how 60% of jobs on a jobs board end up as recruiter adverts.

Job Application: employer direct

In example:
David, a part-qualified financial planner, asks: How do I find jobs direct with employers without going through recruitment agencies? I am fed up with being rejected. can you tell me where I can find many finance jobs where I do not have to go through recruitment agencies and can submit my CV for jobs directly to the employer?

In answer:
The key here is to make a direct job application to the employer and have a conversation, over using an anonymous internet process in which you will will be rejected.

Firstly, do some research. Define the job you want/are skilled for, and the geography in which you wish to work. Then – and here’s the useful use for job boards in a job search – see how many of those types of jobs you can find posted. less than 20, and you need to widen your job specification or geography.

Once you find your job search is possible, now make a list of target employers. Use free resources like Yell.com, Kelly’s Directory and your local newspaper: spot for the job adverts or read the business section. From this you need a list of around 50 potential employers.

Now go to the websites of each listed employer and see if they have an employment section. If they have posts advertised, then don’t fall back into the anonymous job seekers trap, by applying online. Either call first using a Telephone Interview technique called the Informational Interview, or even better attend some local networking events for the local professional society, in your case an IFA society or group.

If you can not make contact this way, either because you are remote, then see if you can use Social Media to make an online inside contact via a website like LinkedIn.

Going direct to employers make a lot of sense.

Good Luck!

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Career planning: pregnancy, maternity and children

I have answered the question a number of times with female friends about Career planning, and how they should address the issues of pregnancy, maternity and children. So it seemed about time to put my thoughts into public.

Most women when asking the question are concerned more about the impact on their immediate career, and less about the pregnancy. Never have I listened to a question being asked, when the thought “how would a man answer this if he should have the ability to bare children” been more apt.

Career planning: choice

There is no simple answer to the immediacy of the career planning question, as something has to given up for something else to come into your life. Simply, there are 24hours in a day, and unless you can manage to squeeze another few in there somehow to make a 26hour or greater day, then you have to make a choice.

But, what is so wrong about making a choice? Secondly, what are you losing and what are you gaining?

Choice means change, and the reason you are probably asking the question is because you really, really, really want children. You like what you think they will bring into your life, and will add to it. And if you are really honest with yourself, you want and like children more than your current life because you think they will improve it.

So the only thing you are potentially giving up is this grand “you can have it all” vision: the career, the Porsche, the happy man and the doe eyed kids. Power to you girl, you go!

But there is a problem. The delivery of this vision requires a 26hour day, and that is not possible. Accepting a 24hour day, then the choice is as any manager will tell you: don’t do, delegate!

Simply choose the stuff you want to do more of, and the stuff you want to do less of delegate. It is proven by psychologists that women can multi-task, but why put yourself through all that stress? Set your priorities and then build a suitably skilled team to do all that you want, and then you could have much if not all that you desire. If you then have to make a choice, then you know where your priorities lie.

With modern equal opportunities employment law and a shortage of skilled key staff, managing a career and children has never been easier. If you set the right vision in knowing what makes you happy, then you can have what you want: a happy life!

Career planning: children

The reason this blog entry was prompted was through answering this question:

Elizabeth, an analysts in investment banking, asks: Do you think a woman that chooses to expand her family by having children is jeopardizing her career in the investment banking industry?

In answer:
Simply, yes. Because it is your choice to divide your time and focus some of it elsewhere, than mainly or wholly on your career.

But, on the other hand, why should you worry? If you look back at your life in 20 years time, and on the one hand have a happy family that loves you, and on the other a career which supports your family and makes you happy, what’s the problem?

Life is a choice of time usage. Choose the stuff which makes you most fulfilled, and you will have a happy life.

Outside the you, if we are going to get into the ethics of corporate policy, the actuality of maternity leave and how it affects careers, then the best advice I can give you is to speak to someone who went through your choice 12+ months ago, and see what their experience was.

Companies can’t afford to chuck away valuable trained resource, when the number of new babies being born 10+ years ago will result in staff shortages from 2013/15 onwards. Plus, as every HR person knows, mothers with children tend to stay loyal twice/three times as much as average employees. The only hassle will be childcare issues adding to any personal illness, but that can be easily handled by flexible working.

If you make the choice to have/more children, then stay in your existing “big corporate” job, and take the benefits.

Good Luck, and hope congratulations are in order soon!

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Job Search: qualifications transfer

Tauraz asks: I am a Overseas Qualified Pharmacist, but due to regulations in the UK, I cant practice as a Pharmacist. I completed a Masters degree in Business from a very reputed UK University and I have 3 months experience as a Territory Manager selling Speciality products (Vaccines-Hormones). I presently work as a Butcher in a supermarket because I am not getting a job as a Medical Sales professional. I get numerous calls from consultancies saying that my CV is good, but they say I don’t have any experience in the UK Pharmaceutical industry and hence they turn down my application. I tried to get a shadowing experience, but nobody is ready to allow me shadow them as they say their companies do not encourage this practice. How I can get somebody to allow me to work shadow them and use their name in my CV, so that I can land a job as a Pharmaceutical Sales professional?

In answer:
As an overseas individual, you are not in a unique position. It is the same if a UK resident qualified professional decides to move overseas, then they have to localise their qualifications for recognition.

There are two reasons why localisation takes place. Firstly the standards of training, and secondly the standards and methods of operation. The first is a quality issue, the second is a local practises and regulation issue. Hence even if your qualifications are accepted, most have to spend between 12months and three years under some form of training/supervision. The process is the same for every professional, from electricians to surgeons.

Hence, at present you are not solving the employers problem, you are creating a bigger unknown one. Employers don’t like unknowns, hence they reject you!

Job Search: qualifications

The first thing to do is to register with the local regulating professional body. In the UK that is the Royal Pharmaceutical Society. Each society has a standards and qualifications board, which you will need to take advice from re transferring your qualifications to local recognition. At some point, you will also need to register with the NHS as a pharmacist, but let the BPS tell you when. The BPS will advise you on the acceptance of your Masters degree locally, and may tell you that additional or transference training is required. Secondly they will advise on local procedures and methods acceptance, and how best to gain those.

Part of the solution is finding a professional society (ie: BPS pharmacist) mentor to supervise your localisation, which is the quickest route to a job. You will have access to a locally based and qualified professional in your area, who is a working in the profession. There should also be local groups who meet regularly, which I suggest you start attending: again, great networking/job opportunities.

No local employer in pharmacy will accept you until you have started localisation. When you apply, and can’t tell them what you have to do to localise your qualifications, they will see that as a problem/cost, and with lots of other unemployed people out there they will look elsewhere.

Secondly, as you don’t suggest in your answer that you have any form of sales training, the same reason for rejection will presently occur with sales posts. Further, if your accent is hard to understand over the telephone, and you have no apparent localised pharmacy connections, then again you will be rejected.

Job Search: transfer plan

I suggest as a plan forward, you contact the BPS and understand what you need to do to localise your qualifications. In three months time, once you have registered with the BPS, attended a few meetings, have a BPS mentor and a master plan on when you will qualify, then look again at jobs in the Pharma sector.

On last thought: very few medical professionals hang around Social Media. LinkedIn would be the best place to start, if you don’t know where the professionals for that body locally congregate on the internet. I have a few BPS friends over there who register for networking, although they tend to go elsewhere for pharma chat – LI is not secure enough.

Good Luck, and if you think I could help – just ask!

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Career Management: Borders Books

From me personally, to the near 2000 employees at Borders Books UK, a company now in administration, a heart felt: good luck!

For the rest of us, is there a career management lesson in their plight? Certainly, I think for those looking to manage long term career prospects, there is. The lesson is called – beware the long term business model!

Regulation changes

Borders came to the UK post the 1997 decision by the Monopolies and Mergers Commission to allow publishers to sell books at different rates to different bookshops. Coverage of the opening of their first London shop just off Trafalgar Square gained high media exposure, with books, newspapers, televisions and coffee all allowing you to browse and fell at home, over look through was in effect a commercial library mode up to that point in the UK. Pile em high, let you relax, and sell em cheap was the Borders Books model.

And then came Amazon. Add on top of that the explosion in UK supermarket retailing, and the result today is that the largest sellers in the UK book market are either Amazon (19%), Waterstones (19%) or the supermarkets (combined: 50%). Which leaves Borders Books and all those nice little high street independents struggling to compete for 12% of the £1.9Billion market. £1billion is still a lot, but not a lot when your business model is busted.

Career management competition

Jeff Bezos founded Amazon on the principle that if of all the available book titles in print at that moment, even the worlds biggest book store could only stock one copy of 5% of them. Hence, you needed a bigger footprint to be able to offer every possible book. Amazon does that, even the out of print books which it lets third party retailers and individuals sell through their portal: a model which clearly steps on the toes of services like Advanced Book Exchange and eBay!

Terry Leahy’s model at Tesco in the UK now is simply that Tesco is a brand, and that – copying Virgin – they take a product or service, strip it back to the bare essentials, and having excellent customer service (Virgin benchmark customer service on a product by product basis; Tesco just assume that if you buy there already, CS is good enough), sell it. With books, they just go back to the old Jack Cohen formula and pile it high to sell it cheap. They therefore just take the top ten sellers, and add in a few select own-brand titles aping the most popular trends at that moment. I was in my local Asda’s the other week, and noticed that the top sellers were always placed next to own brand books in the same category at almost the same price. I have heard all the leading retailers comment that they barely make money on the best sellers, but huge margins on the own-brand books – its the model now copied by Mike Ashley at SportsDirect. The result of this model is that the best sellers – shifting between a quarter and a third of book sales – make hardly any money for anyone in the book trade.

Career management – employer questions

If one third of your stock turns over quickly and makes no margin, while in the other two thirds of your stock is low turning, and if you don’t have it you lose the sale, your business model is busted. That means the writing is on the wall, and at some point costs or infrastructure will be cut, and hence jobs lost.

If you are looking at long term employment prospects with either your existing, but especially a potential new employer, then know the answer to the following three questions, all based on Michael Porters market forces model:

• largest competitor + sell to market model differences
• buying or selling company
• new products

If the answer is negative in one area, be cautious; if in two, start looking soon; if in all three, watch out for the redundancy notice.

Good Luck!

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Best Job Application method?

Daisy, an HR Specialist, asks: I saw a temp job advertised on a job board by a specialist (HR industry) recruitment agency. They’d changed the title slightly, but by looking at the skills being asked for / doing a bit of detective work, I was able to locate what was obviously the same job on the website of the client company (a very big one) only on a permanent basis. I assume they must be looking for someone as a temp until they fill the slot? I’d actually be interested in either as I was recently made redundant. I know that many companies in my sector, and especially in London, prefer to use recruitment agents, despite there being a fee (ironic given I’m in HR). My question is, were I to post my CV directly to the company’s website, is it less likely to be looked at than if a recruitment consultant put me forward? Do companies genuinely use their own recruitment sites at all or are they there “for show”? I’ve only ever made career moves with agencies to date and it seems the only way to get a job in London …

In answer:
I’m a recruiter, and I am going to tell you to that the Best Job Application method is – Go Direct!

Firstly, accept that recruiters and companies have different agendas. Recruiters want placements, because that equals money; companies want employees, because that means competitive advantage.

Secondly, accept that recruiters have tighter standards than employers. If I send you into my client, you represent you and my brand. If you are awful, I might lose a position on the PSL (Preferred Supplier List). Hence, recruiters will always be cautious and only send in people who will represent their brand well.

Thirdly, much as though the agency may be good, the recruiter may not – and visa versa. Go direct and you cut-out the risky/unknown middle man and speak right to the people who you would have spoken to anyway at some point in the future had you been successful getting past the recruiter.

Finally, this job is in HR. If you were applying for an operational job, I would be advising you to go direct to the head of operations for that department. As this job is in HR, ringing directly and applying means you are there already.

The reason I am in the recruitment business is because there are so many bad recruiters: it creates a huge opportunity. Do yourself a favour and go in directly.

Good Luck!

Supplemental:
Thanks for your honesty Ian! Recruiters are usually keen to put me forward for roles after meeting/talking to me: I come across well at interview, so they expand on my CV. However,I had a bad experience with one last year, hence my trepidation: this guy found my CV online, called me at work (he clearly googled it and called reception – very bad practice) then submitted my CV, which was a near perfect match for quite a niche HR role. After a couple of weeks he told me that I hadn’t got through for interview. However, in the interim I had a couple of very professional agents, who I’d met, signed up with formally and trusted, call me re: the same role. Both were surprised to hear I hadn’t got through, and suspected that this guy might not be on said company’s contracted agencies list. She explained that as I’d already been put forward by this guy, I wouldn’t be able to get the job unless it was through him, as he’d introduced me.

Further answer:
The competitive nature of recruiting means, that if a recruiter sees a great candidate or one with skills they know are short in their market, that they know would fit an actual or perceived employers brief – be they on the PSL or not – will often grab that CV and send it off, without talking to the candidate first. Hence you end up with situations like you did, where you are barred from applying for a job because an entrepreneurial shark has blocked your application through their ambition. They don’t care, because next week they will have another “ideal” candidate, but in the mean time you are blocked from application to that job.

You need to keep control of your CV. Don’t openly post it to numerous job boards, keep your key details off of the it, and always keep security high to ensure that anyone – employer or recruiter – needs your permission FIRST and an actual position BEFORE they can download a full version. You have to be careful.

Good Luck!

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Quality Job Applicant

As an engineer, it always annoys me when scientific words are miss-used, particularly in marketing applications. For instance, the word quality. As a recruiter, I often hear employer clients say “Thank you. That was a quality job applicant.” Where as actually, if they said anything else, I would see that as failure to fulfil my role – failure, to be a quality recruiter, and do my job.

What is quality?

The word quality today in common language usage means better or best. How often have you heard the phrase “this is a high quality item” used by a sales person or advert?

If you look up the word quality in a dictionary, then it says: “Quality: conformance to specification.” Note, there is a complete lack of reference to good, bad or indifferent; it is purely a relative to measurement, not an as high/good as measurement.

Hence, anything can be a good or bad quality item. Both a Rolls Royce and a Moskvitch are quality cars if they perform in the way in which they were designed and marketed. The fact that one may breakdown more than the other doesn’t make it a bad quality car, it just makes it a lower specification vehicle.

Be a quality job applicant

To be a quality job applicant is quite simple and easy: you just have to read the job advert! Try the following test from our Why Was I Rejected test:

1. Print out the first page of your CV/Resume – no need for the rest of it
2. Fold it in half along the long side of the A4 sheet of paper. Now tear it in half, so you have two separate pieces of paper for the top and bottom halves
3. Take the advert for the job you are applying for, and using a highlighter pen mark out the key skill requirements – no more than five, if in doubt the first five they list
4. Take the top half of the first page of your CV/Resume (much like the rest of it – no need for the bottom half) and using the advert as a template, find the same five skills in the top half page of your CV/Resume
5. Now see if you can find your name, telephone number and eMail address on the same marked top half

If you can’t find the skill requirements from the job advert, and can’t find your contact details, then you will never be a quality job applicant for that job.

The fact you also have a cover letter which doesn’t address these points may mean even that half sheet of paper is never seen by anything more than a temp secretary tasked with reviewing a whole pile of similar applicants, to “find those who meet the job’s basic criteria.” Even if the review process is undertaken by me/any other recruiter or a professional HR manager, then if it doesn’t pass that test in our minds – rejected, not a quality job applicant.

Quality Job Application

If you want more job interviews, and be seen as a quality job applicant that employers want to interview, simply: read the job advert.

Good Luck!

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Serious CV advice

James asks: I’ve got quite a serious problem regarding my last place of employment on my CV, because I was dismissed. I worked at a bank from November 2008 to March 2009. This is the first job listed on my CV. Previous to that, I worked for a marketing firm from May 2008 to June 2008, which was temporary. I think I’m going to have to delete the bank job from my CV, but then how do I explain what I was doing from June 2008 all the way to now? It will look as though I haven’t been doing anything for 6 months. Could I say that I went travelling for 6 months? I have been to university, so this wouldn’t seem an unlikely thing to do. There is defiantly no way I can keep my last job on my CV when i was dismissed. I can’t lie and say I was made redundant, and I cant say I left when I didn’t. I have tried telling employers that I left, but they look at me suspiciously as if I’m mad leaving a job during the recession. I’m not sure how to get out of this mess. HELP!

In answer:
Firstly, never ever lie on your CV. A background check cost from £25 will reveal all about your exam results and previous employment, and once your new employer gets your P62 National Insurance form, they will see your last employer listed.

There are three things going for you with your career history, that you may not realise:

1. You can list the temporary job. Just list its status as temporary, via XYZ agency. That gives you two points of reference
2. You left the bank within 6months, which is before the end of your trial period. Trial periods can legally last up to a maximum of 12months. Around 15% of new employees leave a position during the first 6months of trial, because it just wasn’t the right opportunity for them. You don’t state the reasons you were dismissed (you weren’t dismissed unless you did something very wrong – probably your trial was terminated). As long as you were on time and reliable, and it was just that you didn’t fit and have learnt what does suit you, there is no problem
3. The current recession means that many people are in unemployment. So the fact you have a period of unemployment on your CV won’t count against you.

Include the bank job, but be prepared to be grilled on it in interview: what went wrong; what did you learn; what are you now seeking? You could still use it as a reference, as unless you defrauded or stole from them, the only thing they will state is start and end dates of employment.

Lying is never worth it on a CV, and legally an offence when placed on a job application. Don’t do it, as all that would seem is happened is that you didn’t get on in a new work environment.

Good Luck!

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Job Search: Employment in 24hrs

Is it possible, in a job search, to get a job and be employed in less than 24hrs? Simply yes – here is how to do it in 8steps or less!

A friend of mine rang me a few weeks back, and asked if I could help him. We both worked together a few years back at his and my first positions in a recruitment company, and while he had moved back into IT, I has stayed in recruitment.

My friend had spotted a job opportunity a week before……

• Step1: have a profile in your market, and know who in that market is employing or where to find their jobs posted

He had found via LinkedIn that an old work colleague of his was now employed at the company……

• Step2: if you want to get employed consistently or quickly, find an insider. You might not know someone, so find someone using Social Networking on sites like LinkedIn

Having been assured that the job was available, that he had the skills to do the job, and that the company was good for him…..

• Step3: Do your research. Too little research = risk, and that increases your chances of not being hired

He knew he needed help: a new Professional CV!

• Step4: be very honest with yourself, in knowing what you are good at, and what you are not. If you think you are good at something, and not getting the results, then stop doing it

So, he rang me, with the opening business line after a quick catch-up: “Ian, you always love writing, and I need a favour – in 24hours or less!”

• Step5: If you are going to employ someone, find someone who is both enthusiastic about the task, and busy

Unfortunately for me, he picked the right person. Now much as though many recruiters look down on recruiters who do more than pure recruiting, I do love the employment market, and I do love writing. I also enjoy learning, and having a view of both the applicants and employer side of the market means quicker learning – which results in our Professional CV clients getting an interview on average once in every three job applications. I enjoy being a CV Writer, although I still do the recruiting because I enjoy it as much and it pays a lot more. Plus, as he wanted it done quickly, and as I knew him, he trusted me to do the job

• Step6: once you have outsourced something, trust the expert and let them get on with it. You may not like the result, but you employed them because they are the expert who gets results for others. If you don’t like something, ask for an explanation as to why they did it that way, rather than later removing or changing it

8hours later, we had a conversation as he travelled home on the train with his new CV in hand. “There is just on thing I want to change, and its one letter” was his comment. What’s next I asked?

• Step7: Know the companies employment process front to back, ideally before but at latest just after you have placed a job application, and the time scales of each step

He rolled off a set of steps and dates, the next of which was sending in his CV that evening. He was expecting an interview in a few weeks

The following afternoon, I got a call: as a result of his internal recommendation and his impressive CV, he just had his first, second and third interviews, and was now walking away from the building with a job offer. His basic was £5000 more than the job was advertised with

• Step8: If it flows quickly through the process, and you gain confidence, then you will get employed

If you look at these steps, three of the eight are about researching the company and finding internal confirmation that they are right for you, and you for them. Much as though these particular steps are about taking action to make a job application, they are not actually involved in responding to job adverts placed in newspapers or on job boards. If there is one thing in my experience that successful job seekers do very well, and unsuccessful job seekers do poorly, it is focusing their efforts on jobs they can do and win, and less about applying for any job they can click to apply for.

Good Luck!

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Reject Job Applications

When I first came into the world of recruitment and employment full time, two things suddenly struck me:

1. That, on average in the typical job search, we were dismissing half of the job applications at the first stage: sifting
2. That, to a great extent, the dismissed applications were dealt with as irrelevant and time wasting. They were, actually just pieces of paper we pushed around a desk

As someone who came from an operational background, although having recruited people for 15 years, most of my managerial training was about developing skill and talent, and not dismissing it.

This whole concept of dismissing talented people irked and disappointed me: seemed then, as it does now, such a waste!

Job Applications Process

So one day, I sat down with one of the researchers handling a position I was recruiting for, and asked her to take me fully through the process and the reasoning for rejecting half of all job applications.

Do you want to do this the easy way, or the hard way Ian she asked?

OK, the easy way then said I. She picked up a CV. As a CV Writer I could already see, without even reading the words, that it was: lazy and scruffy; spaced poorly horizontally; using a large font to create a 2page over a 1page effect. Even back then, having written CV’s since 1991, I was still writing around six Professional CV’s a month for friends – CV layout is key!

Now, in my old corporate employer, due to various pieces of equality legislation and working inside a heavily regulated industry, as the hiring manager you had to come up with at least three good reasons why a specific job applicant was unsuitable for that position. If you got it wrong, then they had the right of appeal. Where as, this researcher had dismissed the applicant in less than a minute, and was on to the next.

Why get rid of that one I asked?

Well she said, as her eyes rolled, and looked at me over the top of her glasses. We could read the whole thing, but if the skills are not in the top half of the first page, then mining for them through the rest of it is not going to get the job done. Plus, it will mean that the CV needs rewriting, and that means taking time out, and honestly – I know there are better candidates here.

How do you know that I asked?

Because, they called me and asked about the job.

Best Job Applications

That was my first clue to how the best job applications got those job seekers employed quicker. The best job applicants never applied for a job without making human contact first. Once they had, they had an inside track – they were through the sifting exercise and on to the real job application.

I wondered if this were true of both recruiters and employers, but on spending time with employers it was exactly the same set of processes, attitudes – and hence statistics. The only difference with a large employer could be that even the poor CV’s got stored electronically for later positions. But often I found that was pointless, as the HR person’s calculation was the same as our researchers: spend time re-writing the CV, so its quicker/easier to find better job applicants.

As an trained engineer, I like measurement and improvement; so I decided to measure the outcomes of each stage of the job application process. The outcome I wanted was: what worked better, and what didn’t. I wanted both sides of the learning experience.

It didn’t take me long or much data to compile a best job application process, or set of tactics that Job seekers should deploy to get employed. But the scariest thing was, the following Christmas holidays I was tidying up in the loft at home, and found some old papers relating to hiring in my old corporate employer for positions in my old team. On comparison of the data in the same format, the answer was – there was a less than 3% variance across the entire hiring process of the tactics each candidate applied then, to what I saw and measured in the recruitment office. In other words, the process, and the resultant best result practices, had hardly changed in 15+ years. The average job seeker needs to apply on average for 10 jobs to get one job interview

Should this come as a surprise? Surely now, with internet job search driven by tools like job boards, there were better systems and methods to deploy? It was a question I contemplated that New Years period for a couple of nights over a favourite glass or two of Glenmorangie: in fact, I went through a whole bottle in six nights! When I tell you it normally takes me a couple of years to finish a bottle of whisky at home, you can see how my mind was stirring.

The answer was simple: the job application process was the same two millennia ago, as it is today – people hire people. The best practises don’t change, but adapt to the latest available tools. The result is that they allow us to undertake the job search process quicker, over a wider geography – and in a less human way. The best lesson I learnt was that looking at the job search process one step at a time – such as having the best CV – was not improving job applicants success much beyond the average.

Hence why, the only key variance I have seen since starting this exercise is the rising rate of candidate dismissal at the sifting stage. Job boards make it both easier to apply, create more competition through addressing a larger geography – and therefore makes it easier to dismiss job applicants.

What is the difference of applying these best job search tactics and best job search techniques to the average job seeker? In measurement: four times as many jobs, with eight times the success ratio.

Presently, while the average job applicant is apparently quite happy to be told by their CV writer that every 20 job applications should result in 1 job interview, we are getting our Professional CV clients one interview every 2.973 job applications – rain or shine, good or bad economy. I don’t think we can get much better than 1 every 2.5 until we understand human chemistry, and that might take a few thousand years. But 1 in 20 to 1 in 2.973 can be achieved in less than a week.

Tomorrow I will explain how easy this ratio is to achieve

Good Luck!

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If you want to check the suitability of your existing CV, then get a FREE CV review

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How to search for a job?

If you were undertaking a job search, one of the actions you could take to improve your chances and speed employment would be to go and ask the experts: employers, recruiters, other job seekers.

I mean, surely, they must know how to search for a job, right?

However, the problem you will find is the diversity of answers – this works, that doesn’t, etc. To separate the good from the not so useful, you could think: what are they trying to sell to me? You could also ask how much experience they have? Finally, you could ask if they have measured their results?

I decided as part of my own on going research of the world of employment – as one of my mentors says, you never stop learning – I thought I would ask a couple of questions at LinkedIn. The two questions were:

• If you were to submit your perfect CV/resume to your ideal job, and wanted to stand the best chance of getting the position, which method would you choose and why?
• If or when, on seeing a job advert, should job seekers make a telephone call to the recruiter/employer?

You can click thorough on the above links to read the diversity of answers to the questions, but here is what struck me:

• That each answer is focused more around their area of expertise, than that of the job seeker
• That age has a relevance in the answer, and hence use of old versus internet based methods
• That few of those answering had actually measured their results

One last point. Accepting I am a recruiter, I have always said when advising job seekers we have written a Professional CV for, to choose approaching employers over recruiters. Recruiters are both remote from their clients to some extent, as well as more demanding of the quality of their candidates. Asking these two questions just confirmed that this was best-practise advice!

The outcome of asking these two questions confirmed my own measured results: that few advisers on job search have actually mapped out the process, let alone measured their or their clients results.

Have we done that – or more specifically, have I done that? Yes……..

Over the rest of this week I will show you through the evidence, and hence how to dramatically improve your job search results.

Good Luck!

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If you need an interview winning solution, sign-up for our Professional CV service

If you want to check the suitability of your existing CV, then get a FREE CV review

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