The Undercover Recruiter

What You Can Expect at #truLondon this Year [Video]

tru london unconference

It’s conference season again… London is gearing up for LinkedIn Talent Connect, Amsterdam for HR Tech Europe, Paris for the RMS Conference (run by our French Link Humans brethren).

But you know what, if you have seen enough slideshows and technology pitches in your day, why don’t you come down to truLondon on 22-23 Oct instead!

What exactly is truLondon?

Nobody knows. Well, the organiser (or un-organiser as he is hilariously labelled) Bill Boorman would say something like:

“An unconference is a gathering of minds, experiences and opinions where the attendees (or active participants) lead the conversation. We don’t have Powerpoint presentations because we want the eyes to meet in the middle and everyone to have the floor. Each track (session), has leaders with a background in the topic, but their job is to start the conversation. No name badges because we believe that if you don’t know who someone is you should introduce yourself and start talking”.

None the wiser? Good.

Expect this

Lots of people in the industry gossiping about other people in the industry
The tracks you want to attend will all be running at the same time
Your track (surely you are a track leader?) will be hijacked by someone going off on a tangent
You’ll have a lunch at a curry house on Brick Lane and come back reeking of cumin and tumeric
Andy Headworth making sci-fi analogies to social recruiting
Bill Boorman wearing dodgy hats & t-shirts
Americans going on about resumes, until someone says ‘I thought this was the CV track?’
The world’s best sourcing specialists (geeks that is) in lab coats (see them here already)
Expect to have a full-0n experience and it’ll take you a few days to digest everything you learned

Expect the unexpected

What I like about truLondon and truAnywhereElse is that you never know what to expect (apart from the bullets above of course). For instance this year, I am apparently talking about blogging which sounds like fun actually.

Here’s what else Bill has to say to the dear readers of The Undercover Recruiter:

Hope to see you at the un-conference and be sure to say hello!

And we’re happy to have Bill Boorman as our speaker at the upcoming Social Media London meetup ‘Twitter Eve with @BillBoorman‘ on 23 Nov.

Jorgen Sundberg

The original Undercover Recruiter, after 7 years in tech recruiting Jorgen now runs Link Humans, a social media marketing agency in London.

Filed Under: Events, London, Video Tagged With: #truLondon, Bill Boorman, Conference, unconference, video

INFOGRAPHIC: Where To Find UK Tech and Start-Up Jobs

London Tech City is booming again as the job fair for graduate technology Ninjas, Gurus and even the occasional Jedi is back this weekend with the latest Silicon Milkroundabout. The event will see 100s of the UK’s top start-ups offering more than 800 jobs to the UK’s brightest and best Tech and Engineering graduates. Big names like Twitter, Songkick, Moo, Wonga, Mozilla and Moshi Monsters will all be there. There are 1,500 tickets for each day of the event. Saturday is for Product Management and Design and Sunday is dedicated to Engineering.

Key Graduate Recruitment Stats from Adzuna:

There are 4,167 Graduate technical jobs currently available in the UK, up 33% since the last Silicon Milkroundabout just 6 months ago. Of these jobs, 31% are in London.
Over 7,000 Computer Scientists will graduate this summer from University in the UK, meaning just under 2 applicants for every graduate tech vacancy. Compare this to the UK average number of applicants to graduate positions of 50, and it’s clear there is a massive supply demand imbalance in Tech.
There will be well over 100 companies hiring at SiliconMilkRoundabout this weekend including Songkick, Mozllia, Twitter and Shazam with over 800 technical jobs up for grabs for the attendees. Positions on offer start at £21k (Junior Dev, undisclosed company) and range all the way up to £60k (Perl Developer, undisclosed company)
25% of start ups currently hiring in London are offering stock to graduate tech employees – 0% of banks hiring graduates are offering stock.
The average Banking IT salary is £51,158k which is 22% higher than the average tech start up salary. The highest paying Graduate Tech position in the City is an eye watering £75k. This is what the start-up hiring community is up against.
Mobile developers are in hot demand in 2012 with the number of job vacancies up 65% year on year for Android developers and up over 100% for iPhone and iPad developers. Graduate Objective-C developers are able to demand starting salaries of £41,327, 23% higher than the average technical graduate job.
Appetite for HTML5, Hadoop, Android jobs continue to grow with search volume for these languages up an average of 82% year on year.
Despite what appears to be an abundance of tech jobs in the UK, 1 in 10 Computer Science graduates remain unemployed. (source: Higher Education Statistics Authority)
2012 is seeing massive growth in new “tech terminology” in job ads. Graduates looking to get a head start should be clued up on – “Big Data” (1,300 ad mentions), “Social Discovery” (112 ad mentions), “Augmented Reality” (186 ad mentions), “Mobile Payments” (920 ad mentions) and the “OpenGraph” (88 ad mentions)
Key Battle – Android and iOS Developers are duking it out for best mobile Graduate salary, with Android devs on average getting paid £1k more P/A than iPhone developers.
There are currently 596 UK employers looking for “Gurus”, over 70 “Ninjas” in hot demand and even one Tech employer looking for a “Coding Jedi”. Tech giants Google, Apple and Facebook appear to be leading the charge with these new stylistic superlatives

Jorgen Sundberg

The original Undercover Recruiter, after 7 years in tech recruiting Jorgen now runs Link Humans, a social media marketing agency in London.

Filed Under: Job Search, London, Tech, UK Tagged With: Job Hunting, London

How To Get a Cool Job in Social Media [Slides & Video]

One of the hottest job markets at the moment is the world of social media. At the most recent Cloud Nine Recruitment speaking. He recruits people to do social media marketing for both agencies and companies around the UK and internationally, and he is always happy to share his best ideas to candidates. Here are some of the tips from the evening:

What defines a good career search…?

Steve listed a number of elements to a good career search and some of them are: standing out, being relevant, staying creative, having the right knowledge, being communicative, have the adequate experience and be suitable for the role and the company.

Really creative case studies of successful social media candidates

• Laura Tosney – YouTube campaign
• Gareth Cash – YouTube campaign
• Sean Fraser – Lego CV on YouTube
• Celine Cavaillerie – dedicated job search site
• Ulrike Schultz – Twitter campaign @TheLondonJob
• Employ Kyle – most creative site ever, got 15 offers. Took a job in New York.

4 common denominators of successful job searches:

Creativity – how is your social backbone? Blog, Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook profiles, what do they say? Are they effective and is the message loud and clear?

Connectivity – who do you need to be connected to? Listen, talk, read, connect, ask, meet, coffees, find industry leaders, comment and share.

Communication – are you talking with the right people effectively? Don’t be afraid, communicate positively, become intately visible, be generous.

Authenticity – be transparent, be honest, be enthusiastic and above all be YOU!

Steve’s slides from the evening:

Social Media London is a commnity and and monthly meetup featuring expert social media speakers, proudly powered by Link Humans.

Jorgen Sundberg

The original Undercover Recruiter, after 7 years in tech recruiting Jorgen now runs Link Humans, a social media marketing agency in London.

Filed Under: Events, Job Search, London, Social Media London Tagged With: Events, Job Hunting, London, Social Media

Calling All Recruiters & HR Folks: #truLondon is in Town Again!

A quick update from our friend Bill ‘the brand’ Boorman on his upcoming flagship recruitment unconference #truLondon on 22-23 of February. If you are based anywhere near to London and you do recruitment, HR or simillar, this is a great event to network and share information with industry leaders.

There are no less than 40 track leaders lined up, coming from around the globe including South Africa, America and right across Europe. Participants are already booked from 12 countries. There’s plenty of new conversations, livestream, new for 2012 is a live lab that is going to feature a surprise hack to be announced on the day, the #TruGrads, a minimum of 6 case study’s and much more.

The deal with an unconference is that you won’t have to sit through any dull presentations, in fact PowerPoint is banned completely from the premises. There are no pitches, nobody is flogging their wares (unless you ask them to of course). If you have never attended one of these events you’re in for a treat.

Bill has also teamed up again with Rob Van Elburg and #RIDE for “The Recruitment Industry Dance Event,” on the 22nd (it’s unclear whether there are any dance track leaders).

Be sure to check out Bill Boorman’s Top Social Media Tips here on the blog as well.

Jorgen Sundberg

The original Undercover Recruiter, after 7 years in tech recruiting Jorgen now runs Link Humans, a social media marketing agency in London.

Filed Under: Events, London, Video Tagged With: Conference, Events, video