Recruitment Process

One of the questions I often ask job seekers when advising them, is do you understand the recruitment process? Often, they look at me quizzically, and think I must have gone mad. Why would they need to understand the recruitment process, it is the same at every company and anyway, the job advert or online job application will guide them through it if the internal recruitment process is different.

To me, as a recruiter and CV Writer, its shows two things:

• They have not undertaken any research on that company. They hence can not tailor their job application
• They do not understand the basic recruitment process, and the criticality of each step. They therefore stand a great chance of rejection

Researching companies before applying is critical to your job application, and I will expand further on this key subject area in later posts. But this weeks posts are all about the recruitment process steps, and how understanding them can vastly improve your job application statistics.

New Jobs

In background, when an operational team needs a new person to fulfil a new job, it will arise for one of two basic reasons:

• Replacement
• Expansion

But the next step which few understand, is how those positions are then fulfilled. Understanding that could double the number of jobs available to you, and quadruple your rates of job application success. But what does quadruple your chances of employment really mean – you want one job, not four? Simply it means you could get a job four times quicker.

Once the positions have been agreed at a business level of being needed, the final job description is agreed, and the job advert signed off: yes, every job has both a job description and a job advert, which may simply be a copy of the job description.

It is at this point, that understanding the recruitment process becomes critical to your job application success. Of all the jobs created in the UK:

• 1/3 are fulfilled internally – they are never advertised on a jobs board, and are fulfilled by internal candidates, mostly via promotion
• 1/3 are fulfilled by people they know – again, most often these jobs are never advertised. They are fulfilled by a combination of internal candidates (whom the employer may not have thought interested in that position), existing contractors, suppliers, customers, employee recommendations, external experts or previous job applicants
• Leaving 1/3 to be fulfilled by job adverts on job boards, newspapers or via recruiters

What should this tell you? Immediately, it should tell you that you can double the number of jobs available to you if you know about the middle third. The first third are nominally unavailable – companies want existing people to be able to know by demonstrate able evidence that advancement is possible.

So, how do you access the middle third of jobs? We will come to some more specific tactics and discussion later in the week, but simply by deploying three tactics:

• Networking
• Targeting companies
• Pull marketing of your expertise

But, the key reasons you should be interested in how the recruitment process works are the end numbers. Simply, apply just for jobs you see via job boards or in newspapers, and your average chance of success is 1 in 20. Where as, find jobs in the middle third, and with a combination of less competition and the employer seeing you as more of a skilled talent, that ratio improves to 1 in 3.

But, lets us think that perhaps you don’t believe that you can access that middle third. How about learning how you could improve your job application success ratio to the same chances of success, through the whole process, just by applying using a defined technique?

I hope this week of information and technique guidance proves successful to your job search. What have you got to lose, except a pile of rejection letters?

Good Luck!

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Multiple Job Application Rejection

photo credit: ben matthews :::

Kate asks: I am currently on redundancy consultancy due to my office relocating and I can not find a job. I have spent the past 5 years working in the construction industry as a PA/Office Manager, most recently in London,  but I can not find anything out there! I have applied for over 70 similar jobs, although not in construction, but due to the fact I come from the wrong sector I am not even being considered. I am registered on almost every internet recruitment / job site there is and I search for new jobs on a daily basis – I am running out of ideas!! Does anyone else have any?

In answer:

Firstly, sorry to hear about your situation Kate – I hope you find work soon.

Getting down to business, what do you want to do? It sounds like it could be three things: TEFL, PA/Office Manager, Construction industry. I am betting that your CV touches all three, and hence hiring managers are thinking you are a jack of many trades but master of none. If you don’t focus your application on that job, hiring managers get confused

Secondly, think about your skills from the HR professionals view point. Those used in the past 3years are deployable, those in the past 5years valid, and before that – rusty/historic! If you want to move back to TEFL, then accept a retrograde step in grade/pay.

If you are applying for jobs, and your interview to application response ratio is less than 1:10, then you are either not applying for the right jobs, or are not communicating your skills in your CV. See our article on Why Was I Rejected

Pick a career you want to do (you are either a PA or an Office Manager or TEFL – don’t confuse the hiring manager), and then focus on applying for jobs in those sectors. Do some research on the companies you are applying to, and rewrite your Cover Letter and intro/personal section of CV before applying for each. If you are applying for more than 1job per hour, then your application is not focused enough, and you are probably suffering from Any Job Will Do syndrome.

Good Luck!

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Jobs Boards

Jobs Boards are great! Monster, Just Jobs, TopJobs: a massed plethora of whole of market and focused sector jobs boards make it so easy to find and apply for a job in any job search.

In the old days – which thanks to the BBC’s revival of “The Sweeney,” rather than being called the 80′s are now called “Ashes to Ashes” – modern technology means that you no longer need to: get up at the crack of dawn to be the first person at the newsagents to make sure you are the first to apply; getting your hands dirty with newsprint; making awkward phone calls; hacking out a CV with your awful typing on granny’s typewriter; and then having to rely on the Post Office or the bus to get your application in that day.

Now with jobs boards, you just: wake up, log in to your eMail, and hit send to the 20 new jobs that take your fancy that the nice online robot search engine has found you. And if you don’t get a phone call today form a desperate employer, you can always let the search engine find you another 20 jobs to apply for again tomorrow. Couldn’t be simpler – why did they ever call it Monster in the first place?

Looking back to the 1980′s, to find a job, the options were: the newspaper (either Thursday in most towns for the local rag, or trying to remember which day the appropriate Times or Guardian supplement for your market came out on); or your network. Most people seem these days to have forgotten their network, so lets dismiss that one? Actually, its still probably the best way of finding a job easily, but that is not the subject of this blog entry.

In the 1980′s, the criteria of “within 20miles of home in the X sector” was not just selected, it was in built. Most of the jobs in the broad sheet supplements meant moving to London and the Southeast, and were really as much as a vanity issue for those buying the supplements as those advertising in them. Most actual jobs found and fulfilled were from the local newspaper, and it is hence no surprise that as big as Job Centres were, the biggest placer of candidates were in fact Newsquest and the regional parts of Trinity Mirror group. Would it hence surprise you today that they are now also some of the largest players in the regional jobs board market?

The disadvantage of the 1980′s system was that if you fancied a job just outside the local newspapers distribution area, then you had to make a trip to the one newsagent in town who stocked the five adjoining regional newspapers – there by multiplying your costs by five fold. Hence not many job seekers did this – and not many employers either, for the same reasons. The advantage with jobs boards is that a 20mile search is as easy as a 35mile search, and hence one of the side benefits of jobs boards is that the available jobs market has become larger for candidates – as well as employers. This resultant increase in market liquidity to both parties means that there is more competition all round – and hence it should not come as a surprise that applicants spend as long looking for jobs now, as they did in the 1980′s. Further, although they can apply for more jobs, they resultantly get more application rejections. Wondering now why they called a jobs board Monster? These things bite hard!

How can candidates and applicants win back the advantage in the job boards driven modern job search?

The first thing any UK applicant should do is take the advice of NORAS – the National Online Recruitment Audience Survey. NORAS use both feedback from real candidates and their own blind-customer surveys to test out the easy and efficiency of using most of the UK’s most popular job boards, using a profile of different candidates and job vacancies. They publish these results , and give free access to anyone who may care to register – also for free. What Noras data should tell the candidate is the type of jobs available on that job board, and the type of experience they are likely to recieve using that job board. There are also commercial jobs board feedback sites, including whatjobsite.com

Why is this so important? Because much as though it is as easy for applicants to apply for jobs, employers find that although the number of applicants has risen through use of job boards, the quality of candidates they want to interview has not changed. Hence the numbers of suitable candidates to interview per job in actual fact differs little between the 1980′s and now. Ease of application has both its advantages as well as disadvantages. Employers hence have driven the market towards specialist job boards, and it is these as well as localised job boards where the greatest expansion in job board population is growing significantly.

If you are seeking a job, and plan on using job boards as part of your approach, then undertake some simple steps:

1. Register with NORAS and see where the typical job you are seeking is to be found
2. Register on the appropriate job boards, and see how many of the type of job you seek actually exist there right now today. No jobs listed means either all the vacancies are full, or your criteria are too tight. Try opening the search area first, before you open the jobs skills criteria
3. If you find suitable jobs, then print out the adverts and use the highlighter pen test to see if you have the right skills – don’t just push the apply button

Jobs boards are a great development to the job seeking market. Just be aware that NORAS and some simple steps can help you greatly in taking the advantage back into your control.

Good Luck!

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Job Search

Just Read the Advert at Least Four Times!

Do I look like Superman? No, but why is it that I, and many other CV/resume writers get called superman – or Wonder Woman for our female more than equals – when none of us wear our red underwear outside our clothing?

Could it be, that all we did was win someone a Job Search who previously didn’t know why they haven’t been able to for the last three + months?

You see, we recruiters and CV/resume writers don’t see it as super-human during a Job Search not to be able to read, and with the materials given – your skills, qualifications and experiences which results in what an HR professional calls competencies – write an answer to the question posed by the Job Advert.

However, many people do. And further, they are hampered by the fact that looking in the mirror is probably the most difficult thing anyone can do. That’s why you either need a friend, a third party, or a CV/resume writer to help you get that perspective.

Employers need skills

Often when I first engage a candidate – either as a recruiter or a CV writer – I get a story:

• I left my old job for (insert a reason)
• I applied for new jobs, which on a majority I made it to interview
• After three months, I widened my search
• I don’t get to interviews any more
• Oh and PS: the savings are running out

• I left my old job for (insert a reason) – yeah I know, great reason!
• I applied for new jobs, which on a majority I made it to interview – you wrote a CV/resume which was poorly constructed, but applied for jobs you were functionally qualified for. Hence, you got interviews. You probably were too ambitious, and got rejected because of that
• After three months, I widened my search – you got too many rejections, hence your ego got realistic at the time your self confidence took a dive
• I don’t get to interviews any more – because you still can’t write a great CV, but now apply for jobs you don’t have the competencies to do. Hence you sound depressed in your Cover Letters, and are not qualified to do any of the jobs
• Oh and PS: the savings are running out – surprise! The average person has around enough savings on which to survive less than tow months. You cut out the Chablis, but cutting out water is proving more difficult – plus job hunting is not cheap

• Their contact details – on which security is now the biggest issue
• Their personal statement
• The Cover Letter

1. Read an advert of interest, cut it out of the newspaper or print it out
2. With your pen highlight the skills, experiences and qualifications to do that job – the competencies
3. Write each of these competencies down on a separate sheet of paper
4. Once you have written your personal statement and Cover Letter, take out your highlighter pen again, and highlight in a draft copy of your Cover Letter and CV/Resume every single one of those competencies

• In selecting the jobs you apply for – picking the jobs which your competencies show you can fit the functional requirements of
• In your CV/resume and Cover Letter in response – communicating that your competencies match+ the jobs functional requirements, and showing that you could fit the team
• In interview – communicating and showing in real example you can apply your competencies in the actual job, and showing you would fit into the team

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