Category Archives: Blog
Hinkley PSG- Membership update June 2023
The attached link, is a useful read for businesses interested in working on HPC and future nuclear new builds. Membership to thew group is currently open.Hinkley PSG – Membership update | Hinkley PSG – Membership update (brownejacobson-updates.com)
Challenging times for recruitment
Successfully landing the people that will make a difference to your business.
Post Covid, recruiting is harder than ever. It is widely recognised, that there is a genuine shortage of good candidates. They are also cautious about moving, in a changeable and volatile economic climate, preferring to stay in a known environment. Conversely, there are more applications for advertised jobs, as it has never been easier to apply. Once registered on a Job Board, you can comfortably send in 20 online applications in an hour, whilst watching your favourite TV programme. Employers find themselves deluged by unsuitable candidates. Any good candidates can be missed in the avalanche of applications. This is unproductive and demoralising for your resourcing teams.
Businesses that are successfully finding the right candidates, have revised their strategy to capture the good ones in a timely manner, before some-one else does. This requires quick and effective reviewing of applications and the ability to act decisively with the candidates you want to progress. Successful resourcing teams will take the initiative to speak to candidates (direct phone contact, not another email!) out of office hours, diligent working candidates are unlikely to want to discuss applications in their workplace.
Advertising and staff time are expensive resources that you should be optimising. Plan your recruitment campaigns to provide sufficient applicants of the right quality. Equally important is having the recruitment and interview process ready to progress good applicants through to offer stage without any delays. For this you will need your line managers to be committed to the process and to have set aside time to review the requirements of the candidates, interview them and provide timely feedback.
Just trying to be a better recruiter.
In the last two weeks I have been rewarded for going the “extra mile” with clients and reminded of the reasons why I enjoy doing the job I do.
Conversely, the experience of trying to sell our house has reminded why going the “extra mile” is key in a service industry and why when you do not deliver you not only lose your customer but damage future relationships and business opportunities. Continue reading
Six Degrees of Separation.
Recently I was finding it hard to find the right candidates for a role, despite many hours of CV searching, advertising on various forums and scouring Linkedin, still no success. Pondering this, I was reminded of the theory of Six Degrees of Separation and started to think of people I might know, who might know somebody, who might know somebody, you get the picture. Continue reading
You’ve been Skyped
Skype interviews becoming more common during hiring, not being prepared can easily keep you out of the running. While meeting via video is time saver, getting past the technological barriers of not speaking face-to-face can be difficult. Continue reading
The competency based interview.
In many ways, competency based interviews are a lot easier to prepare for than a general interview.
Competency-based interviews are designed to test how well you perform in certain areas. In other words, the interviewer is trying to figure whether you’ve got the right skills and strengths to do the job.
The competencies they’ll cover depend on the job you’re going for but some common ones include oral and written communication, personal motivation, planning and organisation, and problem-solving and analysis. Continue reading
Receive A Job Counter-Offer? Don’t Take It
Pitting your employer against another in a bidding war for you is often career suicide.
A few years ago, I recruited an executive to run a mid-level company. The night before he was supposed to start his new job, the executive called to say he was staying put. The board of directors at his current company–a major multinational retailer–had offered to name him CEO in one year’s time.
I was aghast, but my former candidate could hardly envision a better scenario. He had leveraged an offer to run a mid-sized company and used it to land the coveted top spot at a retailing giant. No greater career coup exists, right?
5 tips to surviving interview panels
It’s bad enough making a fool of yourself in front of one interviewer – but in front of two, three or four? Unthinkable. If you are faced with a panel interview, here’s how to avoid that unflattering rabbit-caught-in-headlights expression.
First impressions count
As an active recruiter I see 70-100 CV’s every day. We all know that within 30 seconds of meeting somebody we form an impression, it is no different when you open a CV.
So why do candidates, many of whom are out of work, still allow a poor quality CV to damage their chances of being noticed and landing that job they are after?
Poorly written, out of date CV’s get passed over for two reasons:
- If it is not immediately obvious what job you are currently in, how long you have been there, what your duties are and how you are measured, we cannot match your experience to the role we are trying to fill.
- A casual lack of attention to detail, when preparing and presenting your CV, implies you may be casual with a lack of attention to detail in the workplace and also suggests apathy in searching for a new job.