Career Coach CV/Resume Writer by Rob Ridout

BECOME AN INTERVIEW DETECTIVE USING LINKEDIN by Rob Ridout   One of the most vital aspects of any job interview is your ability to successfully interpret the job specification. For many, this elusive document often carries with it very little information, which in turn provides no insight into the vacant role and therefore impacts your chances of a successful interview.   This is where your detective skills are needed.   Finding the exiting incumbents profile There is a part of the job specification that is always left out and is vitally important - who was the incumbent in the role? This is the starting point of investigating your alignment with the vacant role.   My tip First, find the previous incumbents profile on LinkedIn. By simply inserting the job description title and choosing the company name in your search fields you have a good chance of finding the profile(that’s if it's not a new role). You can also use google this may also take you to re...

Interview and Hiring Statistics  (suggested read by Rob Ridout) What great info. I am always trying to give my coaching clients perspective into what happens in the job recruitment market and this article really provides the reader with a great perspective of what happens in the world of hiring and some of the stats are quite unbelievable.  https://zety.com/blog/hr-statistics?gclid=CjwKCAiAuqHwBRAQEiwAD-zr3TZb78EWx6w4kpScOs9HRjytfbR9fMdwWnMp07qDP5S5_GdOYM6BxoClEsQAvD_BwE

I am constantly asked questions about the interview and its many variations and complexities. This all too common topic has become a major fear factor for most candidates moving through the recruitment process. Actually, the interview is simply one party trying to understand if the other party can do the job or has the potential to do the job and most importantly is not enhancing the truth in any way.  An oversimplification I know.  In the defense of the interviewer, this screening process is a critical part of ensuring that the incorrect candidate is not hired. The candidate, however, moves into the interview process blissfully unaware of the interrogation that is about to follow and many times not well informed of the key issues around the company corporate culture and hidden key details that have not been included in the specification such as why the previous candidate left.  When I coach my clients I place massive emphasis on telling a story when you intervi...

When searching for work on LinkedIn of jobs many candidates tend to choose for the lazy option and use the automated job email notification tool to find work. I cannot emphasize enough that as an active candidate in the market you utilize  the search function to search for jobs. You really need to adopt an aggressive approach to finding ideal roles rather than sitting around on your rear end waiting for the work to come your way.  Use this tool efficiently is actually a little bit of a science. Most people I coach tend to plug in their own title, conduct the search, find a few roles and they satisfy themselves that they have done a hard days job of being a proactive individual. Others tend to thrash the living daylights out of the search by searching and applying to everything that moves apply for everything and then give up when nobody returns their emails in a record-breaking turnaround time and all of this with a poor CV and not so great LinkedIn profile.  ...

                                                                                                             Whether an executive, blue collar worker, black or white - retrenchment seems to know no boundaries.  No company or industry sector remains immune to this intervention. With trade unions putting pressure on the government to impose a moratorium it seems that 2009 has already been brandished a year to remember.   Psychologists say that people who go through a retrenchment exercise have mixed feels of depression followed by anger, but then e...

Most business schools today coach their business leaders how to develop and launch successful business plans. We are told and correctly so, that great businesses have even greater business plans. But what about job seekers?  Shouldn’t individuals that look for opportunities in the marketplace also have a business plan and pursue an organized form of managing their career plan? In complete contrast companies offering jobs to job seekers are becoming more organized. The majority of candidates don’t understand the inner workings and legislation pertaining to how internal recruitment processes work and affect the job seeker. But enough about the problem lets examine the solution. What components make up a successful recruitment strategy? Like any business plan, certain proponents prevail as being important. If I were to choose the three most important items of a personal recruitment strategy it would be the following; setting goals, identifying and managing your recruitment pa...

The latest peer pressure fad or a permanent cure to our “just too busy to have friends” blues?   From politicians to your parents, internet social networking has in some become small way touched everybody’s lives. You just have to go to Barak Obama’s Facebook profile to see how this cool new tool is being used to its maximum potential. With approximately over 700 000 Facebook users in South Africa today, mainly from the generation x group, its no wonder businesses are starting to pay attention to this new phenomenon. And of course, has head hunter what I am interested in is the fact that Facebook is also fast becoming one of South Africa’s newest weapons of choice in the war for talent. It was certainly just a matter of time before some opportunistic recruiter realised that using a Facebook profile was going to be an easy way of searching out talent fast. The debate, however, rages over the use of a social networking tool such as Facebook to promote products and serv...

Interactive recruitment – E-recruitment – Web recruitment all are claiming to be the new phenomenon in the recruitment showground. As our telecommunications environment improves in South Africa will we see these new technological buzzwords become a greater force in our industry?  Maybe the question we need to ask ourselves, as participants of this booming economy, is how this influences and even maybe improve our businesses acquisition of talent from an ever decreasing pool of talent. Have we not forgotten the cornerstone of our marketing strategy – OUR BRAND? The trend in South Africa has been for companies to outsource the recruitment of talent, on an interactive level, to web-based companies that can centralize mass candidates in an outsourced database. Candidates are therefore given license to search huge amounts of opportunities all centralized in one location. Every time a business goes to the market to attract staff in whatever format, the business sells its brand an...

For a great site with all the top Head hunters in Africa - go to this link.  https://headhuntersinafrica.com All Headhunters offers you the best up-to-date overview of Headhunters and Executive Search Firms. Globally, we have currently set up more than 30 directories, in which you can see available executive search firms per country or region. Since 2007, we have been collecting information on headhunters: company profiles, contact details, industries, track records, success, and fees: we know the executive search industry and its players. We have also been collecting candidate reviews on headhunters in collaboration with Lintberg, our partner for € 100k+ positions. By combining all the available data, we can match companies to the best headhunter for them and offer candidates an excellent starting page when it comes to headhunters.

With the prospect of finding work in an ever decreasing pool of opportunities, the emphasis on creating a good impression, to the recruiter and hiring company is becoming of vital importance. Key to creating this good impression is having good referees and references. Companies today are still placing a lot of emphasis on the good old fashion telephonic reference. Going to an interview with a recruiter or a company without preparing your reference checks puts you at risk of not being considered for that opportunity. Even the recruiter has the right to not forward you to a role if he or she feels your background checks are not in order. Pressure is mounting on recruiters now than ever before to ensure that their candidates are trustworthy and can provide proof of their previous accomplishments. Technology is also starting to play an important part, with fingerprint technology being introduced later this year and many companies also internally starting to use security che...