I don’t know about you, but I get Fan Page suggestions sent to me on Facebook every day. From Cheryl Cole to sausage rolls, everyone’s got one nowadays. If you are a job seeker or just take an active interest in your career there are a few good Pages you should consider joining. I have…
Category: Timebound
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Most people don’t realize that a recruiter is not actually working on behalf of them, they are working for their client. Recruiters are sales people and they achieve their targets by placing people in to jobs. Placing people means placing anyone, not you in particular – the commission check will look exactly the same no matter who gets placed.
Do they have mood swings?
One day your best friend, the next day they won’t speak to you. The recruiter can certainly seem like a great friend as long as you are what they are looking for and you are interested in changing jobs. If you are not right or you are not ready to move, you will experience not getting call backs and no email replies. Their interest in you dwindles very rapidly and your ‘friendship’ is out the window before you can spell the word fairweathered.
You gets what you pays for
You don’t pay for the service of being recruited and therefore you cannot expect the recruiter to be loyal to you. If you wanted an agent working on your behalf, the money would have to come out of your pocket – just like celebrities do it. You don’t pay a penny to get recruited, you are simply the product that gets delivered. The employer foots the entire bill so if anywhere, this is where the recruiter is friendly – to their client.
So they must be an evil bunch then?
Recruiters aren’t bad people (apart from the 
Sales people in other industries are just the same, a car dealer has no time for a person that isn’t serious about buying a car. You will get a few brochures and they will swiftly move across the sales floor to hone in whoever is going to buy. The same thing goes for real estate agents, who you first have to convince you are serious about buying before they show you any houses. A lot of professions fall into this bracket, mainly because the commission structure really incentivizes closing a sale and not nurturing interest and new prospects.
So they aren’t loyal friends, what should I do?
Play the game just like they do. They aren’t loyal friends so you don’t have to either. Work with a number of recruiters, no one recruiter was ever going to have all good jobs to offer you. They will have each have signed agreements with a small number of clients that they work with. So by casting your net wider, you are helping yourself and your career. Don’t worry about letting anybody down, your career comes first.
But I have a great relationship with a recruiter
If you do have a good relationship with a recruiter, can you say why it’s good? I would venture to say that it is because you both bring something in to it. This can be the recruiter giving you heads up on new roles, and you giving the recruiter referrals, industry gossip and insider company information. You can have a fruitful relationship with a recruiter but only as long as you both have something to offer.
What do you think, do you have recruiter friends? Share your experiences in the comments.
Image by Lab2112
This resource page contains the best online resources for furthering your career within the Java job world.
The Biggest LinkedIn Groups:
- Java Developers – a global group with 26,000 members
- [url=http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=52795&trk=anetsrch_name&goback=.gdr_1263922190873_1]Java EE Professionals – just south of 18,000 members, plenty of recruiters
- [url=http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=50472&trk=anetsrch_name&goback=.gdr_1263922190873_1″>J Architect – almost 13,000 members
The Biggest Twitter Lists:
- On Java – Some interesting follows for the Java enthusiasts
- Java Twitter Group – large group with Java industry experts
- [url=http://tweepml.org/8fadaf48d08e4ed5be79aaa94f30b26a”>Java Tweeple of India – list for Java folks in India
Blogs:
- Java Blogs – aggregates posts from other Java blogs
- [url=http://javablog.co.uk”>Javablog – development focused blog in the UK
Recruiters:
- Modis – big IT recruitment firm operating across North America and Europe,
currently listing just under a hundred Java positions
The Job Boards Listing the Most Java Jobs
- Monster – world’s largest job board, localized versions in most countries, the American version currently has over 5,000 Java jobs posted
- Indeed.com – aggregates other job boards, also has localized across the world and claims to have 61,000 Java jobs
- [url=http://www.dice.com/”>Dice – the biggest IT job board in North America, 9,900 Java jobs listed
- [url=http://www.careerbuilder.com”>Careerbuilder – the largest online job site in the US, 5,400 Java jobs listed
Please let me know if you have additions to this list!
How are the bad economic times affecting the way employers hire staff? There are a few clear trends that we can see and I have decided to look at the five main ways of hiring people; adverts, recruiters, internal recruiters, networking and referral schemes to see what’s hot and what’s not. Here we go: Advertising…
This resource page contains the best online resources for furthering your career within the SAP world. Feel free to add any resources that have helped you in the comments below. The Job Boards Listing the Most SAP Jobs: Global: Monster – world’s largest job board, localized versions in most countries, the American version currently has over 3,900…
LinkedIn has been adding a great deal of applications lately and my best guess is that they are trying to emulate what Facebook and the iPhone have already achieved on that front. A few of these applications are very useful for all of us but one in particular is handy for job seekers.
We already know that LinkedIn is a temple for job seekers and if the LinkedIn Corporation had its way they would probably put out every job board out of business tomorrow. So instead of being beaten, the job boards are joining up as well.
LinkedIn Jobs Insider
The brilliant little app I am talking about is the Jobs Insider tool on LinkedIn. It comes as a plugin to the LinkedIn browser toolbar, which you may have installed already. You download it to either your Explorer or Mozilla browser and it combines a number of technologies to bring you the best job search experience. The tool works with 7 major job boards at the moment: Monster, CareerBuilder, HotJobs, Craigslist, SimplyHired, Dice, and Vault.
Once you have installed Jobs Insider, your new tool will appear as a pane on your left hand side. Now do some digging around the 7 job boards and search for a few job openings relevant to your experience. LinkedIn will very cleverly indicate which contacts you are connected to at the particular company that is hiring. If you are anything like me, you will have a few connections that you couldn’t say where they are working at the moment. This tool will pick up where your memory gave up and help you.
When you get a few matches, you can go about your sleuthing activites. Contact your connections quietly and try to gather as much background information as possible. I would advise to find out exactly who the hiring manager is and why the job has come about, so that you understand what situation the manager is in. If the best person on the team got up and walked out, the manager will be very motivated to get a good replacement pronto. If it’s a planned expansion with no deadline, you know the manager will take their time and potentially drag their feet.
If you happen to be a recruiter looking for new jobs to work on, it just so happens that this tool will be very useful for you as well. Search away on jobs that you want to work on, find out what connections of yours works for that company, smile and dial.
You will find the link to the Jobs Insider listed under tools at the bottom of your LinkedIn homepage, or click here.
A couple more useful tools for job seekers
MyResume is an application that allows you to post your resume or LinkedIn profile on Facebook. Finally you can convert all those friends on Facebook in to something useful; spreading the word about your skills, experience and what a great hire you would make. The application is available here and also very simple to set up.
If you have a Wordpress blog, you can now syndicate your LinkedIn profile on it and show the world your online resume. This application is called LinkedIn hResume for Wordpress and it grabs the hResume microformat block from your LinkedIn public profile page allowing you to add it to any Wordpress page and apply your own styles to it. The plugin is available here.
What other tools are out there that you can recommend?
Image credit SF Brit
As it’s Friday and it’s snowing in London, I am going off piste a bit and looking at climate summit in Copenhagen (or Cop15 as they say in the industry). It is happening right now and can you honestly say you have any idea what they are really discussing? I sure didn’t so thought I’d look into it for you.
Briefing
The goal of the summit is to agree on a global climate change deal to follow the Kyoto Protocol that expire in 2012, countries have to throw their hats in the ring to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by up to 40%. This is obviously what all the fuss is about, nobody wants to reduce more than the others as it could hurt their national competitiveness. Think the US vs. China vs. cash struck minnow countries vs. conscious Europeans vs. everyone else.
Who’s there?
All the big shots are there, officials from 192 countries are represented and so far the conference has achieved little more than photo opportunities. Apparently Arnold Schwarzenegger has 10 bodyguards (from the California Highway Patrol no less) and the General Secretary of the UN has 2. It seems like every man, woman and dog has given a speech, I suspect the main aim of these speeches is to look statesmanlike to the television audience that is their respective home electorates.
And el Presidente?
President Obama is jetting in today to seal some sort of deal that Hilary Clinton has been busy brokering. The president has to achieve a deal as he got the Nobel Peace Prize on credit and he has to pay up with some sort of benefit to the world.
Apparently Obama is also being accused of ceding the United States’ sovereignty by Fox News for wanting to sign up to carbon emission caps. Wouldn’t it be great if Denmark ruled the world, just like they ruled the North Seas back in the Viking days? Bacon would be the global staple food, unless you don’t eat meat like me and you’ll have to settle for Danish butter cookies.
Where are my snippets?
Now, to make use of all this in your career you can throw some of these facts at your boss and he or she will have no choice but to send you as an all-expenses-paid-for observer to the next summit:
1. COP15 doesn’t actually stand for Copenhagen on the 15th of December, it refers to Conference of the Parties and it’s the 15th meeting they have held.
2. The drinking age in Copenhagen is 16 and there are no laws on to public drinking. As long as you can stand up, you can have another one. If not, crash out anywhere on the street and recover before the next one.
3. Since 1990, Great Britain has seen 9 of the 10 warmest years on record, although it’s snowing at the moment.
4. According to a 2006 UN report, livestock (cows) are responsible for 18 per cent of the greenhouse gases that cause global warming. This is more than cars, planes and all other forms of transport put together.
5. In 2003, the government of New Zealand proposed a cow flatulence tax, which was not adopted because of public protest.
What will happen next?
Let’s hope we get a deal going so that we save the planet and perhaps more importantly that the media can move on to something else for a while. Let’s hope that the Tuborg (Carlsberg’s little sister) can flow freely this weekend in what is now hilariously known as Hopenhagen.
Image credit Noel Zia Lee
Having done recruitment for a long time, I know that most of us have a think over the holidays and come up with revolutionary plans for January and the year ahead. Some of us follow through on these plans, some of us don’t. What are the factors that make for effective resolutions? Well, these are…
As I have not yet got my first book published (any day now), you are reading this online and one can almost assume that you have been invited to join LinkedIn from a friend or coworker. Did you join? If not, read on. If you did, use these reasons to evangelize to everyone that’s not joined up yet – just like I do…
If you are online you cannot have avoided joining one of the social media networks, Facebook with over 350 million users is by far the biggest. Whereas Facebook is great for catching up wth friends and family, LinkedIn focuses on your professional life and even serves as an online resume. LinkedIn currently boast just over 50 million users, which means your boss is probably on there. If you managed to sign up for Facebook, joining LinkedIn will be a walk in the park, albeit a little longer one.
LinkedIn is a networking tool that gives you access to people and companies that can help you and your career grow. By joining up, you can reconnect with current and old colleagues, school mates and other people that you have crossed paths with in life.
Personal Brand
Your Online resume
How many times have you lost your resume and had to trawl through your email accounts for an old copy? By sticking all your career data on LinkedIn, you and everyone else can see exactly what you have done in your working life by simply clicking on your name. By having it online constantly, it’s obviously easier to update it and it can be done from any computer anywhere in the world.
Job Search
If you are considering moving jobs, LinkedIn is the place to be as it gives you a presence in your industry and a visibility to recruiters and HR folks that pull up searches based on key words and location. LinkedIn allows you to be found, as opposed to you searching for a job, a project or the other way around. So whether you are actively looking for a job or passively ‘open for suggestions’ – you can let others do the work for you. If you are happy in your job, don’t worry as LinkedIn is not solely based around changing jobs like for instance Monster is.
Sleuthing for information
LinkedIn is great for finding information on people and organizations. Just like others will spy on you, you can sleuth around LinkedIn and find out what your new boss has done in the past, what they look like and what interests they have. You can gather background information on your suppliers, on prospective customers and anyone else that deserves a scrutiny by you. LinkedIn is not as closed as Facebook for instance, all profiles are open to everyone although you can only contact people direct if you are connected.
Conclusion
LinkedIn will not create your career but it can help to tip the balance. If you are up against one other person with the exact same skill level when going for a job, having 5 recommendations on LinkedIn will certainly be in your favor and could be the deciding factor. Recruiters, headhunters and HR people have long used LinkedIn as a primary resource for finding and looking up people. Line managers are doing the same and so should you. I would venture to say that if you take your career seriously, you cannot afford not to join LinkedIn.
Anybody still not converted? Tell me…
At Link Humans, we love providing LinkedIn training for recruiters, HR and salespeople.
Image credit TheSeaFarer