At Wynne Consulting we see hundreds of CV’s every day. The biggest mistake preventing you writing a strong cv is if you fill your CV’s with every single activity, skill or job you have ever had onto one page instead of focusing on creating a logical and compelling story of your 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.”

Continue reading Remove half of the stuff on your CV right now

follows the herd

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.

Continue reading Looking to recruit highly skilled people? You need to be flexible…………

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”:

1. Do you have difficulty recruiting good people?
2. In your sector – do you perceive the top people never talk to recruitment agencies about career progression?
3. Did it take more than 2 weeks to find the right person for your last recruitment exercise?
4. In your experience, do recruitment agencies struggle to understand your business and what your requirements are?
5. Does it frustrate you that recruitment agencies seem to promise a lot, but deliver little in terms of quality motivated candidates you can interview?

So? How did you score:

Continue reading Do you need a search recruiter or a recruitment agency? And what’s the difference?

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:

Continue reading How to build a great CV to prove you’re right for the job.

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 CV Website &  job boards.

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.

To be the best that you can be, your organisation systems need to be simple and highly efficient. Continue reading E-mail overload ruining your working day? An amazingly simple inbox management system that gives you back control.

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.”

A major part of our success strategy is ensuring that anyone going for a job interview through Wynne Consulting is prepared as much as possible.

Unusually it’s rare that the absolute best candidate gets the job, it’s usually the candidate that delivers the best interview who is subsequently recruited.

Interview preparation is absolutely key. Our template to success is as follows:

Continue reading Need a successful job interview? The secret is preparation.

“The job market in 1990 was a very different place to what it is today. Every town and city had numerous newspapers with reputable career sections where pages of job adverts appeared. If one caught your eye, common practice was to write a nice covering letter accompanied with a CV posted off to the advertiser. Most of the time you got no response, occasionally a polite company would send you a letter thanking you for your reply. There was the odd Recruitment Agency servicing the local area, but they tended to specialise in temporary workers and office staff………………………………………………………”

The advent of the internet has revolutionized the job market in the last 15-20 years, however another major evolution that has changed the job market has been the growth of the influence of the Recruiter (Recruitment Agency & Headhunter). Although Recruitment service suppliers have been around for many years, it is in the last 20 years that their influence and dominance in the job market has reached significant levels.

Continue reading What you need to do to get the job you want! Secrets on how the job market works.

Having spent over 23 years working in Search Recruitment; the single biggest issue I’ve found is explaining to clients what is it that we actually do? How do we “add value” to their business?

And why does Search work so much better than other “reactive” forms of recruiting? Why does Search Recruitment gets results win in the war for the top talent in your market?

The answer comes in 3 forms:

• Search finds the cream of the crop; we call it the “Hidden Elite” that Recruitment Agencies, advertising and CV Websites can’t find
• Proactive search gives us much better control of the timescales of a search. We are in control; we’re not relying on the right candidates coming to us. We go to them.
• The top companies need the top talent, not just a “bum on a seat” to do a job. Bad hires cost huge amounts of time and negative energy.

So let’s explore the 3 most common questions we are asked by prospective clients:

Surely companies can source the same candidates as a search recruiter?

Although the world is now predominantly “online”; the mechanisms for the job market haven’t really changed with the advent of technology.

In 1990; people who were looking for jobs used to “register” with agencies, read job adverts in the newspaper & ask companies direct whether they had any vacancies. These things still happen, agencies register “active candidates”, job adverts are now online & companies have websites with job vacancies on their “Jobs” page.

But that’s missing the point; companies can only recruit candidates that are actually looking for a job; which is roughly 5% of the working population at any one time. So what about the other 95%? How do we as an employer access them?

Well that’s where a search recruiter comes into play.

We work in very niche, specific industries & we make it our business to know all of the companies in the space we operate; and then find out who the people are that work for those companies.

We spend years forging relationships with the top talent in our chosen market sectors; both to recruit them but also to use their huge network of contacts to unearth the right individual for the right job. This level of network is our secret weapon that allows us to fill even the most difficult of roles.

This unique network is our expert knowledge; and it’s core to the service we provide. Quite simply, we can unearth candidates than nobody else can access.

So when we have an active search we are able to then tap into this “network” to identify the individuals with the right skillset we require. That’s why it’s called “Search”. We truly search for the skillset our client requires.

With Advertising, Agency or posting jobs on an employers website; there is no searching whatsoever – success relies on the right talent being in the right place at the right time. Which is a pretty unlikely set of circumstances.

HR & Internal recruiters can source the same calibre of candidates.

 Search recruiters spend their time doing two things; finding talent that companies cannot find themselves & recruiting that talent into client companies’. That is our reason for existence.

We are experts in “recruitment”; getting the right candidate to take the job.

There are a seemingly endless number of reasons the right candidate rejects a job offer. Salary, package, working hours, job poorly defined, etc.

Finding the right candidate is critical; but the reason we are expert “Search Recruiters” is we know how to work through the interview and offer process to give you the client the best chance of recruiting the talent you need.  Our livelihoods depend on it. Recruitment to us is the ability to actually get the talent to accept the job. Most of the time it’s a mix of managing expectations coupled with strong communication. Specifically, through the inevitably complex negotiation of a salary package.

In our experience; companies themselves (whether it’s hiring managers or HR) tend to be weak in this area and although they have “selected” the talent through the interview process; an amateurish handling of the offer process leads to an eventual rejection of the job offer.

We’ve huge experience in every conceivable eventuality when it comes to managing job offers; and we use our unique 3^rd party position to our advantage – so that we are able to work as a conduit between the 2 parties to facilitate a deal that works for everyone.

Search Recruiters are expensive.

A common objection we hear is that our one-off fees are expensive.

This typically comes from companies that are employing both HR & Internal recruiters on activities to recruit people. As mentioned earlier; HR & Internal Recruiters are primarily talking to and interviewing active candidates; who are either rank average or not suitably qualified for the role. It’s understandable to employ internal recruiters who are hiring large volumes of generically skilled people; but within highly specialised, knowledge based industries paying their people high salaries; it makes no sense to ignore expert recruiters in favour of salaried generalists that simply have to tools to recruit the active job seekers.

It’s the norm in every industry that the top performers never actually “look” for a job. Opportunity seeks them. Whether it’s upward movement within a group of companies; an “old boss/colleague” approached me; or a “Headhunter” approached me. The common theme here is opportunity finds them. Their individual career achievements make peers & management take note; and their reputation gets noticed.

That’s what we look for – people who are “noticed” and then subsequently recommended by others. Referrals are our No1 source of top quality people. It’s what we are all about.

So it makes financial sense to use an expert search recruiter in your market to hire the best talent in your specialist industry.

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