Career Coach CV/Resume Writer by Rob Ridout

                                                                                                             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...

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...

Corporate Culture 101   by Rob Ridout Being scrutinised under the microscope whilst going through an interview process is never fun for anybody. But going through an interview process is not a one-sided affair but rather a two-way street. Whilst under scrutiny, one of the facets that many interviewees forget, is to conduct their own interviewing exercise to ensure that the role is right for them as much as it is for the prospective employee. Indeed, many times I think that the interviewing party actually forgets that there are two parties involved in the interviewing process.   One of the key elements that a candidate must screen prospective new employers for, is corporate culture. Microsoft thinks it’s important as they are focusing 50% of their hiring decision on corporate culture. Understanding and developing a more assertive approach to determining your interviewer's corporate culture throughout the interview process is by far the most important el...