Interview Tips
Today I was contacted by HR World to see if I wanted to give my readers a heads up on a cheat sheet, they had compiled for interviewers and interviewees.
After popping over I found it was not so much a cheat sheet but a link to other resources, so at first I thought it was a bit of a cheat itself!
After following the links I did feel that the resource was superb and well researched, both for candidate and consultant. It was not just a list of typical questions but industry specific, with many tips on styles of interviews such as group interviews and Panels etc.
Although American biased most of the tips would sit comfortably in the UK, I particularly liked the illegal interview questions from USAToday.
The Pink Recruit!
It was a few years back when the term “the Pink Pound” was penned, about the same time when Central Manchester was becoming the hip place to live, with the help of urban renewal and the LGBT community moving into the city.
What was obvious is that this new community where generally made up of executives with plenty of disposable income, hence the name.
What is interesting is the launch of www.jobs.pinknews.co.uk part of pinknews, which has taken the governments initiative of Diversity in the work place as an opportunity for employers to attract these highly educated individuals. Apparently “The LGBT community has a higher density of graduates with at least one degree” and therefore are attractive to companies and they can also send a positive message to help them reach these new targets for Diversity.
For me, I wonder if having the ability to advertise specifically within a minority group, in some way precludes the rest of us.
Whatever side of the fence you are on it has to be a positive move and I am sure we will see more job boards, aimed at other community groups in the future.
The Most Expensive IT Director in Banking!!
I think most people have heard all about the Northern Rock crisis, I certainly noticed its effect on the share price for Standard Life.
What made me smile was the editorial by Tom Ilube, on the BBC website entitled “when Online Bank Sites Fail”. It was the last paragraph that did it.
That Northern Rock IT director is the only IT executive in the UK online bank world today who has been at the sharp end of a digital run on the bank.
That direct experience is invaluable - and whatever happens to the rest of Northern Rock’s executives, he will be in high demand to share his experience across the finance sector and make the whole online banking world safer.
So will the headhunters be after the IT director next week, when he is looking for a job or will the openings be few and far between for letting it happen in the first place!
New Feature with Skype
As you may or may not know I am keen on VOIP, although at times quality can drop. Still I couldn’t survive without my skype number for so many reasons. The most obvious of which is, I never miss a call and generally I will know who is calling. You just cannot rely on virtual receptionists these days, as they never seem to want to answer the call!
Still last week I got the latest upgrade and I was finally pleased to see that they had implemented the call transfer feature, an absolute must when you have more than one in your company or you finally have a new recruit.
Recruitment Juice
I have been meaning to write this post for nearly 2 months and since then Louise and Jim have already given them a mention. Still I do have some input, partly because it is Friday and a good recruitment friend of mine recently recommended them, so bugger it I will have my say.
Well, I will let the video do the talking below and you can read the comments from Louise and Jim.
PS you can watch all their clips at Recruitment Juice, easy viewing for a Friday afternoon, and for those of you as old as me, does anyone remember the John Cleese training videos?
More on Video for Recruitment
I have to say I am a bit late with this one and I completely missed Reed’s launch of Jobcast on the 3rd,that’s what happens when you take a holiday I suppose. The only reason I spotted it was thanks to youtube, the beauty of viral marketing.
So having now popped over to Jobcast you cannot help be impressed, their promotional video is excellent and the BBC’s recruitment video appears to be the first to take up their offering, not surprisingly I suppose!
I have to admit that I am not convinced video job portals will succeed, but as it is part of Reed if anyone can make it work they will. I remember many years back when Reed came into the jobboard market, many didn’t think they would succeed and many agencies were skeptical in using them, not only did it work I have even placement the odd candidate from them too, not bad for free a free advert with a competitor.
Advertise for Recruitment Consultants for Free
What I have always tried to do with this blog is help Recruitment Professionals by passing on my experience, which I have gained over the last 20 years and more recently keeping you informed with any new developments that I thought would be of interest or may help you grow your business.
With this in mind I wanted to give Recruitment Companies an alternative to advertising in the Recruitment Magazines, Job Boards, or using Rec2Rec or head hunters for those hard to find Recruitment Consultants, by giving you the ability to advertise on Recruitment Views, to attract from the 1000’s of passive recruiters who read his blog each month. More importantly it is free of charge, well at least in the short term, unless you want to buy me a beer of course!
So if I have caught your attention and the idea of reaching passive candidates interests you, but not for recruitment consultants, then you may want to consider reading my article on using Google Adwords to find candidates, as I have documented my success with my previous company.
Finally I wanted to highlight one of the first vacancies to be advertised on Recruitment Views by CRM Appointments for a Recruitment Consultant in Manchester or you can advertise for free by clicking the banner below.
Time off, whatever next!
I remember the good old bad days of recruitment, the work hard play hard environment. Looking back I loved it we were all in our mid 20’s pushing hard trying to get to the top of the league table, and we would only take a holiday when it was only absolutely necessary, like when getting married.
Well it seems like times are a changing as mentioned by “the chief happiness officer” who reports on IBM’s latest attitude to flexibility at work “take as much vacation time as you want”, “What” I hear you scream!!
Basically the golden rule is, work must get done. In truth I suppose it’s more like having a flexi-time arrangement. In the past the what stopped me from taking time off is the emotional blackmail, my boss used to say, ”your candidates are relying on you”. So I didn’t take many holidays or even days off sick.
Years past and then I joined a more professional company and found that the top performer earned in excess of £100k per year part-time, this certainly made me look at work from a different angle.
I now work from home and can see the benefits of this system, because at the end of the day we are mature enough to know when we can take time off. More importantly technology enables us to have more freedom and I can have a few days off, knowing that if anything critical pops up I can always be contacted. I can access emails on my mobile and if someone phones my home office the call will get redirect to my mobile or a colleague, as a result I can go on that fishing trip knowing that I will not miss the biggest deal of my life or the biggest catch.
How will this effect IBM in the future I do not know, but I am sure it will help them keep their best staff. At the end of the day money isn’t everything, now is it?
Candidate Tracking
Strangely I have never written about this topic before, which is dear to the heart of Dan. With a few recent mentions on various blogs, I thought it was about time I put my ten pence worth in.
One of the reasons I have not mentioned this before is because I always assumed we all tracked our candidates, like any professional sales organisation!
Maybe I was just lucky, as I have been trained to keep records of every candidate since I started in recruitment, and therefore I always knew my cost per candidate. If I remember rightly back then it was around £40, which was a wake up call for consultants who thought candidates were free. These days it’s so much easier to track candidates, as most come by email and have their own digital finger prints.
As a Recruitment Manager keeping records can certainly help your case when it comes to advertising budgets.
Probably the best example I can give is when I persuaded the management to spend £4,000, rather than the £600 we would normally spend. I managed to wing it by getting a client to pay half, which certainly helped.
Back then I would cut out the ad from the paper, stick it into a book and then record all the names of the candidates that applied. Later I was able to confirm that not only did this produce the most candidates, but more importantly they were of a high caliber and therefore we were able to place them more easily. In the end the ad produced the highest amount of placements and revenue of any recruitment advert. Of course the same applies to poorly written adverts too, so over the years you get to know what works and this helps you keep ahead of the competition. These days you can use software to track applicants with the likes of Broadbean (A free ad for you there Dan), which makes it all a tad easier to manage.
So if you are not doing it already I suggest you start by keeping a copy of each advert you place,the name of each candidate that applies, the media you used, the date and its position and this will result in better written ads, less wasted advertising budgets, your cost per candidate will drop and higher profits, and of course you will be able to get the management to spend another £4,000 in advertising!
-
-
Subscribe
