We keep reading about the difficulties facing graduates.  “Graduate jobs” are in short supply.  Starting salaries are down.

“Careers” don’t exist any more.

Well, we’ve got news for you: There are some brilliant and inspiring careers being carved out in Recruiting.

As we emerge from the economic armageddon and survey the new landscape, Recruiting is starting to shake off the shackles of the old era and is emerging as a seriously exciting place to work.

We’re about to go on tour around the country, speaking at various Universities about the joys of recruiting.  For those who we’ll be seeing – here’s a sneak preview of what you can expect. For those who we won’t be seeing – stick around and we’ll give you the lowdown over the next few weeks.

10 Reasons for Recruiting

1. The new economy places a high value on multi-skilled, self-motivated, driven people.  Specialism can be restrictive.  Good recruiters have a very broad range of skills and an impressive depth of knowledge.

2. The new world places a high value on the strength of your network.  Search engines don’t win you business; reputation does.  It’s not what you know, it’s who you know. Good recruiters are some of the best-connected people on the planet.

3. No-one else is going to guarantee you a pay-rise anymore.  Good recruiters control their own earnings.  Work harder, work smarter, develop new skills, build new relationships = make your own payrise.

4. Technology is driving change. The old image of recruiting is disappearing.  In the age of social technology, good recruiters have become research experts, skilled marketers, social media leaders, negotiators extraordinaire, psychologists,  strategic whizzes, selection experts and value-adders.  No other career can teach you how to be all of things and more, all at once.

5. Recruiters are the givers of help, advice and good news.  Recruiters change lives.  Recruiting is good for the soul.

6. Good recruiters are challenged every day.  One day you could be solving the problems of a CEO of a multinational company, the next day you could be interviewing candidates for a high-level strategic position.  In between, you will be looking for needles in haystacks, creating entirely new boxes to think outside of and managing an increasingly complicated process.

7. Recruiting is the most entrepreneurial sector in the world.  Now you can’t rely on pensions, banks, savings, mortgages or in fact any formerly useful way of securing your own future, you’ll need to know how to build your own empire.  There is no better career than recruiting for this.

8. Good recruiters don’t sit around in suits all day.  They do get to look important on trains though.

9. Good recruiters talk to interesting people – and learn something new – every day.

10. Good recruiters have job security for life.  They rely on no-one but themselves.  What other career path actually rewards constant growth towards complete autonomy from the corporate culture?

To find out more about working in recruitment, visit: http://www.idealpeople.net/about/jobs.html or drop us an e-mail to contact@idealpeople.net.

If you’re a recruiter and you want to join us in our Let’s Get Talent into Recruiting campaign, then we’d love to hear from you.  Get in touch.

In the meantime, happy hunting and we hope to see you on the road real soon.

People of the job-hunting-o-sphere, we want to give you some free stuff.  Specifically, we’d like to give you some free advice…in return for just a few minutes of your time.

We’ve got a short set of questions we’d like to ask you about your search, about the market, about the challenges you’ve faced, about the things that have worked and the things that haven’t.  Nothing too taxing, we promise.

Because we know your time is precious, if you can give us a little bit of it we’ll give you a bit of ours in return, in the form of a free CV review.  We’ve been looking at, talking about and advising on CVs every day for years.  We’ve written endlessly on the art of the CV and we’ll tell you – candidly – what’s hot and what’s not about your number one marketing tool.  For free, and with no strings.  You won’t even need to leave the comfort of your own home, and we’ll work entirely around your schedule.

It doesn’t matter what your background is or where your expertise lies, the offer still stands.

To take the questionnaire, please visit: http://www.idealpeople.net/candidates/questionnaire.html and follow the instructions.  Once you’ve completed the questionnaire, we’ll get in touch within 48 to arrange your CV review.

If you have any problems, please get in touch by:

E-mail: contact@idealpeople.net
Phone: Nick Gallimore – 01908 575153
Twitter: @idealpeople

Happy hunting!

We’re not boasting folks, but we think we might have gone global.  As regular readers will know, we’ve been working hard on behalf of customers in many different climes over the past few years, and we figured it was probably about time we told you a little more about it.

Pretty soon, we’re going to tell you about some of the differences we’ve found from working in mainland Europe (specifically Italy), but for today we’re off to our home from home: Beijing.

Since entering the market in mid-2008, we’ve learned an awful lot about the specific nuances of working in the APAC marketplace.  It’s certainly a lot different to the UK market.  Here’s Tao Jiang from Idealpeople Beijing to tell you about the Black Market for Telephone Lists in China….

The black market for phone lists has been running underground for years in China, particularly since the internet became popular and people started sharing information on forums.

This has been quite common since China’s headhunting industry started in 90s,and works in a similar way to an insurance broker selling customers’ private information or a bank account executive selling customer lists for profit. In the past, there were not so many people caring about personal information being leaked – that was until they got hurt and started to be aware of the potential risk.

But what can they do? There’s no law to protect the rights of the people whose details are sold, and it’s hard to track and find who’s responsible. Even in the instances where they can, many people still can’t take the long process of a lawsuit.

This is how the forum works. It’s very simple: you can upload a name list onto a forum to earn “money” to pay for the list you want, and you can pay “money” you’ve “earned” (or you buy with real money) to download a name list. So HR and headhunters are able to exchange name lists using these forums, and search firm may also pay a high price to the founder of these forums for all these name lists.

These forums have become so popular that it’s become the most convenient way for hunters to find the best candidates in China.

One of the factors that influenced the growth of these forums was that most companies in China (even large MNCs) were using Excel or Word to keep records of employees’ contact information.  Enterprise applications were expensive, hard to deploy and difficult to learn. I’m not sure if there were similar things happening in the EU or US. Maybe not.

These days, most companies are getting smarter on information security. They have started to use applications to store employee data. When the contact information is not easily collected, the source is limited.

As the number of updated name lists people can get easily has reduced, the way people collaborate on these forums evolved.

Over the years, forum members had already collected a lot of resources and they have lots of customers in the headhunting industry. Gradually, they became a platform. Any headhunter or company can outsource their recruiting project onto the platform, any member of this platform can pick up the vacancy and provide CVs if they have expertise in the specific industry or they already know people who’s qualified.

The forum (platform) itself takes a small amount of the trading fee if any of position is filled. This model can support a lot of recruiting firms when they are not expert in the industry or they don’t have the capacity to deliver when they have higher priority jobs to work on.

This model sounds very exciting and innovative, but these companies are still running underground. Trading personal information or CVs is still a grey area. As security increases, there’s little potential for this business model to be successful in the future. But there’s life in them yet because the legislation around personal security will be very time consuming and will spend years to be executed.

In the future, I believe people will find other ways to get in touch with the people they want. The fight over information security never ends. We can’t foresee the future of the talent search business because of the fast-moving technology. People are getting closer, and everyone can be easily exposed because we will all have identities online which can be searchable. We can see more and more companies are using Linkedin, Twitter, any social networking tools to search talents by themselves. Not only search firms, but all agencies must strive to add more value rather than being the information keeper, or else the new technology and evolving internet will eventually kick them out of the game.

Let’s start 2010 with a slightly belated (we’re blaming the mysterious but brilliant snowman that appeared in our car park) but nevertheless heartfelt thanks to everyone we worked with in 2009.  Like the vast majority of our clients and candidates, the past 12 months were tricky for us.  In fact, for a while back there it was downright scary.

It's a snowman, it's weird, it's in our carpark, it wasn't us but it IS to blame.

Throughout it all we tried hard to keep up the advice, help and information for job-seekers via this blog; we know that we could have done more and that we could have posted more frequently and that we could have posted on a wider range of subjects.  We do have some interesting ideas lined up for 2010, and we hope you’ll keep coming back to find out about them.

So what of 2010?  If 2009 was the year of the apocalypse, then 2010 is a sort of job-seeking apocalyptia.  Much as Cormac McCarthy describes a barren, ravaged land in his utterly brilliant The Road (about to become a film, we believe), the tech job-seeking landscape is much, much changed from what it was 18 months ago.

Unlike The Road however, the situation is improving.  Successive rises in vacancy numbers over the last 5 months of 2009 have raised hopes that the worst is over (that’s if we just paper over the 20% drop in December, which we suppose is to be expected, given both the natural, seasonal variations and the weather conditions in the week in which we collected the data).

But what do we – from the frontline – expect to see in 2010?

Early Promise, Later Doubt
There’s no reason to expect anything other than a short-term continuation of the recent upturn.  Hiring still remains pretty much the exception rather than the rule, although there is absolutely no doubt that there is more confidence floating around the market.  More and more companies are revealing hiring plans which involve, well, hiring.  Don’t expect to see a return to the days of 2006 and 2007, but if you’re looking for something at the moment, you should see the volumes of new jobs growing over the next three months.

The second half of the year (or at least the bit after the General Election, whensoever that may be) is a lot less clear.  A number of things could happen at the macroeconomic level which will/could/maybe/might impact tech businesses significantly.  A hung parliament, a debt/gilt crisis, inflation, deflation, stagflation, double drop – these are all things that you’ll find people are talking about, and all are possible and potentially problematic for the prospects of tech job-hunters in 2010.  In all honesty, it’s probably worth worrying about none of them (unless you’re a politician, in which case we’d like to know what you’re doing about it please!) until and if any of them happen, but the main message we’re trying to get across is don’t assume that all is well forever and finding a new job (or even finding new staff) is going to be easy, because it’s not.

Competition means Differentiation
The hiring landscape in 2010 will continue to place very different demands on job-seekers.  If you’re using ineffective marketing strategies, being sloppy in your applications and not making enough noise in the market you’re going to struggle.  If you’re overly-reliant on one or two job-seeking strategies then you NEED to re-think.

It’s absolutely vital that you engage in a multi-stream job-seeking approach.  It’s even more vital that you make every single possible effort to differentiate yourself.  Clicking a few buttons on a job-site and attaching a generic CV isn’t enough in the economic wastelands folks, it really isn’t.  For a reminder of some key a strategies, take a look at a post we made a couple of months ago: http://idealpeopleblog.com/2009/10/29/tech-job-seeking-in-the-post-apocalyptic-economy/

Over the coming weeks we’ll be bringing you more on how to succeed in your job-search in 2010.   In the meantime, our offer of a free CV review still stands.

Take care out there folks!

People of the job-hunting-o-sphere, we want to give you some free stuff.  Specifically, we’d like to give you some free advice…in return for just a few minutes of your time.

We’re looking to speak to 100 job-seekers.

We’ve got a short set of questions we’d like to ask you about your search, about the market, about the challenges you’ve faced, about the things that have worked and the things that haven’t.  Nothing too taxing, we promise.

Because we know your time is precious, if you can give us a little bit of it we’ll give you a bit of ours in return, in the form of a free CV review.  We’ve been looking at, talking about and advising on CVs every day for years.  We’ve written endlessly on the art of the CV and we’ll tell you – candidly – what’s hot and what’s not about your number one marketing tool.  For free, and with no strings.  You won’t even need to leave the comfort of your own home, and we’ll work entirely around your schedule.

It doesn’t matter what your background is or where your expertise lies, the offer still stands.

To express your interest, get in touch with us by:

E-mail: contact@idealpeople.net
Phone: Nick Gallimore – 01908 575153
Twitter: @idealpeople

We’ll arrange the rest.

Happy hunting!

There was a massive 15% increase in the number of tech jobs being advertised over the month of November, according to our measurements – meaning that tech job vacancy numbers have gone up by 30% since August.  This is all impressive-sounding stuff, especially given that this time of year is typically quieter than most.

In light of a slightly more sobering report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, which states that EU unemployment is likely to continue rising into 2011 in the EU (although our Chinese readers will be interested to note the strong predictions for growth of employment in their country), we hope these figures bring a little optimism to tech job-seekers out there.  As ever, we remain interested in your own personal experiences.

We collect data every month from a number of leading UK recruitment and social networking websites and use information about the number of jobs being advertised to generate a picture of the volume of hiring going on. We think that this gives us a fair reflection of the employment market, although please bear in mind when using or quoting these statistics that we don’t have access to definitive data

We love LinkedIn.  We particularly love LinkedIn Groups – for all sorts of reasons, although if we’re being honest (which we will), then it’s primarily because Groups allow us to reach out and say “hello” to lots of people we wouldn’t otherwise be able to reach out to.

There are of course a whole bunch of problems with LinkedIn Groups, and we came across a particularly interesting example just the other day when one of our Consultants received notification that one particular group was being closed because it had become “polluted with recruiters”, which had caused it to lose its initial value as a group for sharing ideas and information amongst people in a particular industry.

Presumably, the owner of the group was referring to the common practice amongst recruiters of jumping into Groups and advertising jobs.

We’ve seen many a group ruined by this: a group originally aimed at a particular industry which is initially welcoming to any new member but eventually becomes populated primarily be recruiters posting endless amounts of jobs.  Left unchecked, members become tired of the volume of job “spam” and leave. The core membership declines, often until it’s just the recruiters left and eventually a group which could have been a good one vanishes.

So what can be done?  Well, we’ve run a few LinkedIn groups – some successfully and some not so successfully, and here’s our advice.

1 Be clear about your group’s purpose
When you form the group, be clear about what you’re looking to achieve.  If your group is intended as a place where people doing similar jobs (or having similar challenges/problems to solve) can meet each other, then you’ll want to make sure that people are clear about this from day one and that they are constantly reminded of it.  Perhaps the best way to do this is to send each new member a message outlining what the group is for, and to keep a “sticky” thread about the mission/purpose of the Group at the top of the “discussion” part of the Group.

2 Vet your membership
When you set the group up, make use of the option which demands that all requests to join must be approved by the Group Owner or a Group Manager.  This is the most effective way to ensure that the balance of your group is right.  If you feel that an applicant to join doesn’t fit the criteria you have for membership, deny them entry (politely, of course).

3 Set some guidelines
Clear guidelines – particularly in your “jobs” section – are a must.  The most successful groups we’ve seen have clear guidelines limiting the number of jobs that can be posted by an individual in any given day, complete with details of what to expect should the guidelines not be adhered to.

4 Set a good example
As Group Manager, you need to be setting a good example when it comes to content – so post every day, make sure your content is relevant and don’t break your own rules.

5 Police
Be willing (along with your fellow group managers) to police rule breakers.  Start by warning people who break the rules, and follow up by removing them from the group.  It’s also important to ensure that any additional group managers you add have the same passion for keeping the group as balanced and well-behaved as possible.

Running a LinkedIn Group has so many benefits when done right – but doing so can be time-consuming.  It can be tempting to start a group and let it grow naturally – but doing so vastly decreases your chances of running a successful group.

We’re absolutely delighted that Computer Weekly have shortlisted us for their Blog Awards in the SME Corporate category.

Vote for us!

We’ve had an interesting time in 2009 but through it all we’ve tried to keep providing free insight, information and discussion for people to navigate the unpredictable world of tech job-seeking and hiring through our blog.

If you’ve enjoyed reading it, or if you’ve gained anything from it, then we’d really love it if you voted for us by clicking here and following the instructions.

We’ve had a peek through the other shortlisted blogs and there’s some great work going on out there – we’ll let you know how we get on!