I was chatting to my father over the weekend about his experiences of job “interviews” in the 1960’s when he first left college. Morose interviewers firing open questions over an imposing oak desk whilst portraying the demeanor of a disinterested headmaster thinking “why on earth should I bother giving you a job?”.
This kind of arrogant interview style was commonplace where there is a rich choice of candidates to employ; where jobs are few and interviewees are plentiful.
Fast-forward to 2014 and the vast majority of the market sectors we operate in genuinely struggle to identify and recruit the top talent in their sector. A shortage of highly skilled people coupled with an improving economy and falling unemployment makes the battle for talent even more intense.
One of the biggest decisions many professionals take in their career is not just whether to take that great job opportunity, but is it the right thing to do to move lock, stock & barrel to the other part of the country (or continent!) that the new job demands. Here’s the view of top UK headhunter Wynne Consulting.
“On one side – limiting career progression to the commuting distance from your home can be very restrictive to your career in the long-term; whereas a full job relocation often means leaving behind your friends, family and the standard of living you’re accustomed to (whether that’s a good thing or not!). Relocation is a massive step to take but for the brave it significantly increases the scope and volume of job opportunities available.
As autumn begins in earnest, for many of us the summer of 2019 has faded into a distant memory. Now is a good time to reflect on how 2018 has played out upto now. Most of us spend more time at work than with their immediate family; so now’s a good time to reflect on where you are at with your career. This can be looking for new opportunities within your company, changing your location of work or even more dramatic changes such as changing the industry in which you work. You may be on the search for your dream job, or maybe just a “stepping stone” to get you out of university and onto the job market to enable you to work your way up.
Either way, your CV is the first thing that potential employers see, so it has to represent you in the best possible way. The average amount of time an employer spends initially looking at your CV is 30 seconds. Capture their attention in that short time window and they will delve deeper; miss the boat and they will likely move on.
At Wynne Consulting we see hundreds of CV’s every day. The biggest mistake we see is people filling their CV’s with every single activity, skill or job they have ever had onto one page instead of focusing on creating a logical and compelling story of their career. Just recently I was reviewing a 12-page CV that started out with the following:
“My skills include marketing, social media, project management, accounting, tax law, employment law, financial management, sales strategy, 6 Sigma, operational effectiveness, advertising operations and software sales. I’ve also published two novels and took a few months off to write a poetry book in 2018.”
As a specialist search recruiter we are continually asked by clients to recruit highly skilled people with specialist skill-sets throughout the UK and Europe.
The nature of the high technology marketplace is that individual expertise and a collective capability of your people to deliver top quality solutions are the fundamental strengths of all successful businesses.
The critical part of that process is a companies’ ability to hire and retain top quality talent from a competitive marketplace. The other companies that you compete with are all looking to hire the same people so your ability to identify and hire the people you need often is the key difference between success and failure.
As a bit of fun – here’s a quick test to find out whether you need a search company or a recruitment agency. It’s 3 points for “Yes”; 2 points for “Maybe” and 1 point for “No”:
Do you have difficulty recruiting good people?
In your sector – do you perceive the top people never talk to recruitment agencies about career progression?
Did it take more than 2 weeks to find the right person for your last recruitment exercise?
In your experience, do recruitment agencies struggle to understand your business and what your requirements are?
Does it frustrate you that recruitment agencies seem to promise a lot, but deliver little in terms of quality motivated candidates you can interview?
Everyone knows how the process works. You need the right CV to get a job interview. And if the CV isn’t up to scratch – no job interview.
So – you need to build a CV for each individual job? But that’s easier said than done…………………
Top UK search recruiter Wynne Consulting are here to give you some guidance on how to best align your experience with each particular job. So – what if:
I was chatting to a client last week who we’ve worked with for many years and he was telling me about a conversation he had with a recruitment agency. They told him they could find him the people he needed to grow his business. He asked them how they found people to which they replied they use advertising and Internet job boards such as Monster, Jobsite.
The problem is top performing people in any industry don’t need to “look” for a job by posting their CV online, or replying to job ads.
For most of them, career opportunities come to them through their reputation in the industry.
Wynne Consulting has spent many years nurturing and developing our network of contacts in the market sectors we service; so we are able to give our clients access to the top talent in their market sector, so giving them the competitive edge in the most important area of all – the quality of their people.
So. Can your existing recruitment supplier do this? If not, talk to Wynne Consulting today to explore how we can give you the competitive edge.
Failure is the crucial learning tool that everyone needs in order to progress and succeed. If you’re afraid of failure you’ll never progress. You’ve got to fail sometimes to succeed overall.
We love the following quote from US basketball superstar Michael Jordan:
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career.
I’ve lost almost 300 games.
26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed.
I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life.
And that is why I succeed.”
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