Job Interview test and presentation

James, a job seeker, asks: I have an interview tomorrow, any advice? I have been unemployed for a while (5 months) finally I have an interview tomorrow (I had three last week but no reply). The job is SEO (search engine optimazation) they also give me a link of a website and asked me to come tomorrow and come with some ideas, what would I do to improve the rankings and overall quality of the website. I checked the website and, to be honest there isn’t much to be done, so what should I say – any advice?

In answer:
Hmm – that’s not the answer to get the job!

What’s the question they are really asking? Is it about on page SEO; or is it about how your brain works and thinks, filters options and communicates the ideas/answers? Simply, its about the later.

This is a brain storming question: what could be done? How extensive is your thought process (hence why its set before rather than within the job interview: this is not a pressure exercise); and how far does your experience extend with the options you come up with? (I did X on XYZ site, and it got % more hits/conversions). Its also a communications exercise (learn to at least SPELL “optimization” correctly!)

When an employer asks you to prepare an answer that they want you to present in a job interview, think: what do they want to see evidence of? Think about the real question they are asking, and the answer becomes clear.

Good Luck!

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UK Unemployment statistics, July 2010

This morning, two things occurred which are of significance to the UK’s employment market:

• The Bank of England quarterly economic report
• The Office of National Statistics unemployment report for July 2010

First the good news: the recovery continues, and employment is up. But again, its due mainly due to workers taking part-time over full time positions.

Now the bad news: recovery is pretty flat, below target, and we still have to face large public sector cut backs from October 2010 (hence why we as an organisation didn’t buy a teacher recruitment company last quarter).

The problem is the debt factor. Firstly, consumers have eased their spending in the second half of the year – high street spending is down. Secondly where the public has spare cash, it is spending it on paying down debt over spending. Thirdly, the banks are still being tight over debt-fuelled growth – they are PRing this as “we (the country) don’t want debt fuelled growth again, do we?” Fourthly the government has its own debt headache, and the coalition has stated its priorities again and again that paying down the debt is its number one priority. Against the economic inputs pre-2008, this is a drop in economic activity, and resultantly jobs. Also, when you consider that the Government during the down turn was creating more jobs than the private sector was losing, that’s now about to come to a complete halt.

There is some good news. Exports are up due to the low value of the pound, but that’s starting to rise mainly thanks to the weakness of the dollar – although the Fed’s “light QE” policy reversed the recent gains. Additionally recruiting in some sectors is starting to pull upwards – IT is one positive area, particularly in interim and contract positions.

So what’s the outlook? Economically poor (read flat), but Mervyn King suggest that the chance of a double-dip recession are now reduced, and most commentators although thinking his is optimistic overall, agree with that conclusion “reduce chance of double-dip” at present. The outlook for jobs is not so bright. The government has been the main driver for the past 24months, and that’s going into reversal, with huge 20%+ cuts in most departments – the unions are getting nervous, Whitehall has started leaking memo’s. Further, universities are having their funds cut-back, and can’t take up the fill level that they could when many in 2008/9 switched to a further education career choice.

I don’t see a jobs recovery until late 2011, early 2012, with recovery in part driven by the Olympics and its British-centric legacy. It is going to be a tough 24months on the jobs market.

Good Luck!

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If you have any questions, call us on 0844 884 2825

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LinkedIn Groups: multi-platform internet experience

One of the things that I do as a recruiter on a daily basis is use LinkedIn. It is the most useful business tool and comprehensive virtual Business White pages that exists today. Like most recruiters, it saves me thousands of pounds per year to find great candidates.

It is much easier to find business professional people on LinkedIn than it is in a telephone directory or via Google. Globally, there are 75million people on the platform (around half in North America, over 2million in the UK), all of whom have noted their contact details and what they would like anyone who sees their profile to contact them about: permission marketing 101.

LinkedIn Groups

Beyond connecting and finding people, the most useful part of LinkedIn is LinkedIn Groups. Groups are where you can find people who have similar interests to yours in either your profession, geography, industry or company. LinkedIn allows you to join 50 groups at any one time, which is more than enough for most people.

There are two immediate gains to joining groups on LinkedIn:

• You can connect to fellow group members
• You can interact with fellow group members

LinkedIn has been undergoing a revamp recently, which has changed a few things about its operation. In the previous version of LinkedIn Groups:

• To start a discussion you simply needed the ability to write a headline and an question or a comment
• There was a second section called News, which allowed you to insert onto the platform either your own blog or website entry url, or material that you found on the web somewhere. You could then add a comment to start the debate

In the revamp, LinkedIn has removed the News tag, but effectively merged Discussions with News. Now you get three boxes to fill out:

1. A headline
2. A piece of discussion text or comment
3. A website url

LinkedIn Groups multi-media!

The result is that LinkedIn is now positively encouraging the engagement of the multi-media web platform into LinkedIn, something which a few years ago would have been unthinkable. To an extent, the discussions in Groups now look more like those at Digg or Mixx or other social bookmarking websites – a quite para dyne shift.

The upside is that the discussion becomes livelier and easier to engage, more like the rest of the current internet.

However, the downside to this is that if you want to start a discussion, LinkedIn is also by default positively encouraging group members to have an external blog or website to be able to import content and create suitable discussion. Its not compulsory, you can still start a discussion with just a headline and a piece of text – but it’s not exactly encouraged in the resultant black text on white background format.

This change was I have to say was some what of a pain initially for our Professional CV Writing Service. Why? Because one of the key elements in it is use of LinkedIn, with an option to start a blog to create more engagement. Now, it seems the best way to engage and be recruited is to start a blog and link it in.

LinkedIn Groups blog

How hard is it to start a blog? Great, easy to operate and well indexed blog platforms are available at WordPress or Google’s own Blogger. If I was making a single choice, I would start with Blogger, which is both simpler to use, indexes quicker and SEO’s better – wonder why?!

Rather than making the name of your blog complex around some fancy keyword centric phrase, just choose your name, which will mean the format will be: tomsmith.blogspot.com. Then write three blog entries, and link it to your LinkedIn profile.

Now each time you write a new blog entry, or want to start a new discussion at LinkedIn, simply:

• Go to your blog
• Write the new entry
• Note the URL
• Then start a suitable discussion at LinkedIn

LinkedIn groups – the new multi-platform internet experience!

Good Luck!

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If you have any questions, call us on 0844 884 2825

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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