Season’s greetings!

It’s that time of the year when you realise that, before you can have a decent break over Christmas and New Year, you need to do a lot of work! So, no more blogging for me now until 2011.

I hope you have a great holiday and, if you’re looking for a new role in 2011, that you find time over the break to research your career options on myexecutivecareer.com,  mygraduatecareer.com or newlifenetwork.co.uk. We’ve invested in some great content this year and we hope that it will help you create the future you want in 2011.

Merry Christmas!

Getting on Board!

I knew I should have bought that grit!

Is it really December? It was my birthday this week. I’m not fishing for a flurry of ‘Happy birthday’ messages, I just can’t remember a time when it actually snowed on my birthday. Extraordinary! As usual, the country has ground to a halt and I realise the folly once more of having a rear wheel drive automatic car as my wheels spin uselessly on the ice.

No matter. It’s been a busy few days and I’ve been along to some great events and meetings that I hope will result in extra value and benefits for myexec and mygrad members. I went along to the Russam GMS ‘Interim Women’ event at the Royal Yacht Club last week to hear a presentation on careers as Trustees and Non-Executive Directors. There were some great speakers – Judy Lowe who was the first woman NED appointee through the Institute of Directors, Barry Gamble – NED and Editor at Large for Boardroom magazine (well worth a subscription), Hilary Sears an experienced Headhunter and Board coach, Sue O’Brien – CEO of Norman Broadbent and Sarah Hodgkinson – CEO of ‘Getting on Board’. It was great to hear their honest accounts about how women need to position themselves differently if they are ever to get ‘beyond the boy’s club’ and how best to go about securing a Board post.

Men have a few issues with breaking down the oak ceiling too, but the situation for women is particularly dire. According to new research from Cranfield School of Management there are only 135 female-held directorships (12.5%) out of 1,076 on FTSE 100 boards. This is a small increase over the previous year due to three women joining FTSE 100 boards, bringing the total to 116 women holding 135 positions. However, there was a positive finding – the number of companies with no female directors has fallen to 21 (from 25 in 2009). Burberry was the company in top place this year with three out of eight female board members. In addition, both the Chief Executive and Chief Financial Officer are women. There is also a female non-executive director.

Dr Ruth Sealy, co-author of the report, comments: “There is still too much female talent not making it to the boardroom. 82 of the FTSE 100 companies have women on their executive committees. These women are a rich resource pool for future board directorships.” The report has also identified a significant lack of women on boards in FTSE 250 companies. Just 7.8% of FTSE 250 board directors are women.

Lynne Featherstone, Equalities Minister, adds: “Making boards more diverse is not about political correctness – it’s about making sure companies draw senior staff from the widest possible pool of talent, which is good for business, good for staff and good for customers. That’s why the Government is committed to working with employers to boost the number of women in Britain’s boardrooms.”

At myexecutivecareer.com, we’re looking to see how we can link up to create a series of articles and resources for the site to help people interested in developing their careers along these lines – more in the New Year, however, Premium members can already access useful resources on the MyBoard&NedCareer page.

We’ll also be looking to run a joint workshop on the use of social media in the New Year.  In the meantime, you can see my updated article on Twitter here: What use is Twitter?

Next week, I’ve been invited to be a panel member by The Guardian on their ‘Live Careers Q&A’ – Tuesday December 7th from 12 on how public sector professionals can move into the world of consulting. The link isn’t live yet, however, if this is a topic you’re interested in then do please log in on Tuesday. There’s also an information page on the newlifenetwork.co.uk site here.

On the mygraduatecareer.com front, we will now feature a video clip on the homepage every week of a different graduate employer. This week we have M&S. Emma is also cooking up a new marketing idea that we hope will have graduate talent fair flocking to the site. We’ve also been looking at some interesting ‘employability’ training courses with Graduate Coach – again, more on that over the coming weeks.

Have a great weekend and mind how you go in the snow!

Do I recommend any particular headhunters?

Firstly, apologies for not posting for a couple of weeks. BT managed to successfully mess up our telephone line and internet connection along with it for more or less a whole week! That technology for you – great when it works, disaster when it doesn’t. Nevertheless, via the magic that is the Blackberry, I’ve been able to keep up with life as we have come to know it!

I’ve been asked by a number of senior level execs that are looking for a move if I  recommend any Headhunters in particular. The short answer is that I don’t, but that’s not because I don’t know any good ones, I know plenty, it’s just that it isn’t quite that simple. Just as many other professions such as Lawyers, Accountants and Medics are specialists in their particular fields, Headhunters also come in many guises.  If you wanted advice on your personal tax affairs, you probably wouldn’t choose an accountant who specialises in corporate insolvency. If you’ve got a heart problem, you wouldn’t seek out the services of an obstetrician.

Headhunters specialise in particular sectors too such as Retail, Financial Services or Central Government, at particular levels such as Board appointments, skill sets such as HR, Asset Management and Marketing, or in contract types such as permanent or interim roles. So, there’s no real point in approaching a Headhunter to see if they would be interested in your profile if they, or their firm, don’t handle search assignments for people like you. The big firms like Egon Zehnder are global, have specialists in most industry sectors and handle a lot of assignments every year relatively speaking. A small, boutique specialist may only handle roles for asset managers and, given the high value of the commission they make on a successful placement, don’t really need to work on that many assignments to make a very comfortable living. However, the recession has impacted heavily on the search industry so it’s changing constantly and the old rules of engagement don’t necessarily hold true any more. Just as you, the prospective candidate, need to raise your game in terms of how you market yourself, so too do they.

The law of supply and demand also affects the way the recruitment business is conducted at just about every level. If there are lots of vacancies but relatively few qualified candidates and you happen to be one of them, expect to be courted and cosseted by those whose job it is too woo you away from your current employer. If there are few assignments and many well qualified (and many out of work) candidates (like the current situation) …………well, I think you get the picture!

The other point to remember is that employers pay Headhunters to find the right people not candidates. If they don’t have any assignments, no matter how brilliant you are, they won’t be able to conjure up an opportunity out of nowhere. Neither are they ‘career consultants’ available to give you lots of free advice on what you should do next and how to write your CV (although some will volunteer useful tips and insights). There are organisations that intimate that they can give individuals access to a magical source of ‘unadvertised’ jobs – they are all advertising heavily at the moment. It is true that up to 70% of the top jobs are never publicly advertised, however, there isn’t a secret database anywhere where they get stored either. You cannot pay someone to guarantee that they will get you a job (it’s kind of illegal anyway!). All they can do is give you (hopefully informed) advice on how and where to market yourself most effectively. Firms like this will often charge quite substantial fees; you may well feel that this is what you need and you can and will pay for this type of executive coaching. If not,  you can find pretty much all the resources you need on the myexecutivecareer.com website for a mere £45, sort out your own career move and spend the money you save on a decent interview outfit and several very good dinners!

Whatever the climate, to succeed at securing your next executive role, you must ensure that you are a truly marketable commodity, that you have purpose and focus about what you want in your next career move, that you research your own channels of distribution thoroughly i.e. the right recruiters, in the right sectors and in the right firms, network in the right places and look for opportunities via the right media.

You can find a directory of executive search firms by sector and by specialism, sources of advertised and unadvertised roles and more useful insider tricks of the executive job market trade at myexecutivecareer.com.

Graduate career resources are all featured on mygraduatecareer.com including Emma’s latest download – ‘Ten Top Tips for getting the most out of graduate recruitment fairs‘.

Further free career advice and recruitment resources can be found on newlifenetwork.co.uk.

Have a good weekend!

Knowing ‘when to zip it’ – the essential career competency!

When The Apprentice first burst on to our screens, I watched it religiously. I was running a series of in-company leadership and management courses at the time and I used the show in my classes to bring alive many of the models, theories and techniques we’d studied such as situational leadership, team dynamics and Belbin team styles. As we watched the final (Tim Campbell vs Saira Khan), we scored them on their demonstration of  these ‘best practice’ leadership competencies. Whether Tim Campbell was conscious of it or not, he won in the final because he scored more highly on all the behaviours that the experts tell us are important to be an inclusive and successful leader.

Paloma Vivanco

Unfortunately, the programme has been turned into a freak show, as is often the way, and I can’t bear to watch it regularly anymore. I did happen to catch this week’s episode, however, only to see Paloma Vivanco given her marching orders. Her big mistake? Not knowing when to zip it! Just when ‘Annoying Alex’ or ‘Startled Sandeesh’ seemed a sure thing for the chop, Paloma completely lost it and his Lordship duly decided that she was one viper-like Tall Poppy he could do without in his organisation. I haven’t seen ‘knowing when to zip it!’ explicitly mentioned in any of those core competency lists so beloved of the HR community, but it’s probably worth underlining its importance to one’s future success.  From candidates who don’t know when to stop rambling in an interview, to the outpourings of various political figures (Boris springs to mind!) and CEO’s like BP’s Tony Haywood, knowing ‘when to zip it’ is a career skill well worth mastering.

The NORAS (National Online Recruitment Awards) were announced last night – I’m particularly pleased that many of my tips for the top and favourite career sites were worthy winners in their categories. Congratulations to onlymarketingjobs, careerplayer, guardianjobs, armycareers and jobsite. You can see the full list here.

The Gradjobs NEC graduate recruitment fair was a fun visit last Friday. I took a car load of graduate job hunters with me and it was interesting to hear their ‘mystery shopping’ feedback.

There was a definite ‘thumbs up’ for the recruiters on the stands of HM Prison Service, FDM Academy, Mercedes (true, infectious enthusiasm – very obvious that they love their jobs!), Enterprise-Rent-a-Car, GIST Logistics, Shaw Trust, EURES, Knowledge Transfer Partnerships and SELEX Gallileo. They were all helpful, enthusiastic and welcoming.

‘Could do better’ marks went to Mars (a very popular stand but not enough people on it to take advantage of the interest shown in them, and not very impressive ‘take away’ material),  the Presentation Theatre (too small, too noisy – just couldn’t get in or couldn’t hear a word being said), and a recruiter on a particular bank’s stand – a 2:2 may not be good enough for your entry requirements but rudeness isn’t big or clever either!

Have a great weekend – may your bonfire night burn bright!

The public sector blues….

Not only has the weather turned depressingly cold but the daily trickle of dastardly news about public sector cuts and job losses continues. The private sector have experienced a steady stream of job losses and redundancies as a matter of course ever since I can remember. Every re-engineering effort, outsourcing deal, company take-over or plain old business failure has taken down thousands in its wake. Even before this current recession, roughly 2000 people were being made redundant every day and nobody really gave a monkey’s. There certainly wasn’t much media coverage or help around, unless your employer paid for outplacement support, but people managed to bounce back somehow. They set up their own businesses, moved sideways, backwards – any which way they could. Now, people in the public sector are facing mass redundancies and, according to a number of news reports, are facing difficulty adjusting to looking for work in the private sector. Employment group Hays has reported that, with a predicted 600,000 public sector workers set to enter the job market, more must be done to ensure that the private sector has a clearer understanding of their skills and experience, and public sector workers need support to make the transition.

When I originally set up the newlifenetwork.co.uk website in 2005 to provide free help for those that had been made redundant and wrote my my book ‘Rebuilding your life after redundancy’ (it’s been republished twice and still tops the amazon best seller list in its category), I never envisaged having to provide a kind of ‘public to private sector translation’ but it’s obviously time for a rethink.

Regular readers will know that I’ve been finding out how people can use Twitter to help them with their careers (if you haven’t set up an account yet I urge you to do so) and I’ve been bookmarking and listing feeds that I think you’d find useful. My big find this week was a feed and a blog link from Redundantps@RedundantPS – a suddenly redundant UK public servant and his search for work. It reminded me of Andrew Taylor’s column ‘Aftershock’ in The Sunday Times years ago which inspired me to set up the newlifenetwork site (we subsequently became friends and do double act presentations together from time to time) – it’s well written and witty in a ‘gallows humour’ kind of way and gives great insight into how it feels to be in a totally alien environment – i.e. looking for job when you have absolutely no experience of doing so, nor ever having had the expectation that you would have to do so. It also highlights many of the poor/ridiculous/onerous recruitment practices that come as a shock to the newly jobless. The ‘jobs for life’ culture has realistically been over for years, but whether I’m talking to school leavers or senior executives, I’m always struck by how little people understand about the art of getting and keeping a job. So, I shall follow these stories with interest to see how the current resources on the newlife and myexec sites need to be adapted to the needs of the public sector anyway. If you’ve got any good suggestions please send them to editor@newlifenetwork.co.uk.

On a lighter note, I’m off to the Gradjobs graduate recruitment fair at the NEC tomorrow with two mygraduatecareer.com student volunteers to check out what the talent scouts are looking for in tomorrow’s employee and what they have to offer in return – more on that next week.

Have a good weekend!

“Get on the bus!”, the new “Get on yer bike!” for the jobless

Tickets please!

First it was Norman Tebbit who will be forever infamous for his “Get on yer bike” comment to to the jobless back in 1981 as wing-man for Mrs T (85 this week!), and now Iain Duncan Smith will be forever linked to his “Get on the bus to look for work” comment on Newsnight. The BBC have been running commentary on this all day and I was asked to talk about it on BBC 3 Counties earlier this afternoon. I must confess that I feel a bit sorry for him; I met him in the summer as he was a the guest speaker at a dinner I was invited to and he actually seems like a well meaning and decent chap. Naturally, his comment has been taken wildly out of context by all and sundry because it makes for good media punch-up material, although it did surface some other interesting perspectives on air.

Finding a job isn’t as as easy as getting a bus (the topic of the BC 3 Counties radio piece although that isn’t actually what IDS said!), and many of the long-term unemployed,  lacking skills, confidence and institutionalised by a life on benefits, would be hard pressed to be offered a job even if they found one a bus ride away. However, there are many people who are claiming benefits who do have a history of a solid work ethic, many of whom would have been used to commuting by car, train and bus to work every day for an hour or more – until they were made redundant. These are the people that seemed to be pretty offended by the comment not least because, in the same week, it has been announced that rail fares will be going up by up to 40% over the next few years. Well, that’s really going to help commuters isn’t it? We probably all know highly skilled people who are so keen to be working that they will apply for jobs, even ones that they are overqualified for, wherever they are. A recruiter was brought in to comment on the programme and said that he wouldn’t consider overqualified candidates because employers would be concerned that they’d move on after a few months when something better came along. Well, that was the comment that got my red mist rising! Things aren’t going to be looking up anytime soon so employers and recruiters would do well to reconsider such a negative and unhelpful stance. Why not hire these highly motivated, well qualified people? They’re a bargain and could contribute to raising the bar of an organisation’s performance in a really positive way if handled correctly. Talk about wasting talent. OK, OK, I’m getting down from my soap box now.

On a more positive note, its’ been a busy week. We’ve added another brilliant new guide on mygraduatecareer.com ‘Mind the gap! How to plan a bang tidy gap year’ (an Emma and friends production), great new content on what it takes to be employable in the current graduate market and an updated information page in the Sixth Form Zone on how to choose the right university and degree course.

As part of ‘Visit our Schools and Colleges Week’, I was invited to Thurston Community College on Tuesday and I’m going to be working with their careers team to create some energy and engagement around how their pupils can demonstrate what they have to offer employers ………….more on that as it progresses.

The highlight of my week though was being at Imperial College’s graduation commemoration day at the Royal Albert Hall to see my daughter, Emma and a few other mygraduatecareer.com contributors graduate. Proudest day ever!!!!!!! I also watched over a thousand more students being awarded their degrees and prizes in science, mathematics and medicine. I sincerely hope that none of that talent goes to waste because they’re ‘over qualified’ or can’t get paid enough to cover their bus fare!

Have a good weekend!

Tweet

“Chutney fantasy” or that Friday afternoon feeling….

It’s Friday afternoon. What are you doing? Listening to yet another ‘doom and gloom’ cuts report on the news? Enjoying your work? Or, can’t you wait to escape from the b***y office for the weekend? I’m busy trying to edit Emma’s new ‘Gap Year Guide’ and refereeing an email row about whether students pay council tax in the holidays or not with Hammersmith Council. Meanwhile, the latest batch of my champion chutney (quince and lemon since you ask) is bubbling away dangerously in the background. I don’t eat much chutney, I really just like making it and the more exhausted members of my family and friends who are still holding down killer City jobs, struggling with equally killer mortgages, commutes and demanding small children, really like being on the receiving end of my latest culinary output. “You should go into the food business” they say as they wolf down another fat sausage with a dash of my plum ketchup, or dunk poppadoms into my apricot and coriander chutney “You’d make a fortune”. They, it would appear, are indulging in a “Chutney fantasy” career choice on my behalf.

Chutney anyone?

Don’t know what a “Chutney fantasy” is? Let me enlighten you. John O’Donnell and Jessica Cargill Thompson have written a laugh-out-loud book, ‘The Midlife Manual’, that explains this and many other amusing phenomena and it’s going on my Christmas list. Chutney fantasy, is apparently, a generic term for escape-route dreams, many of which genuinely involve the dramatic quitting of a job in order to make artisan quality chutney – preferably over open fires using copper pans reclaimed from a bygone era.  Other popular chutney fantasies include: opening a B&B, writing a best-seller, being in a band, landscape gardening, teaching, starting a business from home that involves wood turning, knitting or cup cakes, opening a shop of some description or setting up a market stall (I covered the caveats of a few of these in my book Rebuilding your life after redundancy). It’s also a time when you might be entertaining keeping chickens, joining a book group, making bread (in a breadmaker), making your own stock, plenty of country walks, collecting Le Creuset pans in all those nice tasteful colours, wearing a Cath Kidston apron and getting a veg box delivered. Recognise yourself anyone?

Nearly everyone I know has, at some point, moaned about their job; it just isn’t normal not to. However, it doesn’t always mean that you should just chuck it all in or that you’d be happier if you actually did swap your life savings for something in the ‘chutney’ line. Sometimes being faced with losing your job (or maybe when you’ve moved to a new role and realised the grass isn’t anywhere near as green as you were led to believe it might be), you appreciate that, good days or bad days, going to work is about more than just ‘the work’. It’s about the friendships you make, the difference you make (however great or small), the experiences and the drama, the way it feeds your self esteem, and the means to build a home and provide for yourself  and your family. A chutney fantasy isn’t always a dubious sign of ‘midlife’ or career crisis but it can provide a safe and harmless outlet for the day’s frustrations. If you do end up being the next Levi Roots (the Reggae Reggae sauce Dragon’s Den man) though, I’ve got some great recipes I could let you have.

Have a great weekend!

The Midlife Manual by John O’Donnell and Jessica Cargill Thompson is published by Short Books.

Careersite reviews – the NORA finalists

Just when I was wondering which website to review this week, I received an email with a list of all this year’s NORA finalists (National Online Recruitment Awards). Problem solved! You can  get an award for pretty much anything it would appear these days; there are companies who work on a ‘no win no fee’ basis to help companies to scoop up as many as possible. Only this week, nominations are now open for, I kid you not, the British Parking Awards, the International Aperture Awards (for photography since you ask!) and the Local Government Chronicle Awards. Want a Knighthood? No problem, there are companies that can help you get one.

Anyway, back to these website awards………you can see the whole list for yourself if you want to here (most of them are featured on our newlifenetwork.co.uk site) – I’m just going to pick on a few of the more interesting ones. The finalists in the ‘Best Generalist Job Board’ include all the usual suspects such as Jobsite, Monster, Reed, Totaljobs and Fish4Jobs – they are all much of a muchness in terms of what they offer, range of jobs advertised (all with the same quality issues), ‘one size fits all’ career advice pages etc. In the ‘Best Specialist (Niche) Job Board’ category, however, I like Onlymarketingjobs.com. It isn’t the prettiest or most technically advanced, but they get my vote because their founders have worked really hard to build up a real community with excellent and popular networking events and opportunities both on and offline. Good luck in the finals guys. (btw more excellent websites for jobs in marketing, PR and communications can be found here).

When it comes to the ‘Best Major Employer Website’ category, I was surprised to find that it included Claire’s Accessories - popular purveyor of pink paraphernalia to the prepubescent population. What I liked about their site was the clever use of shots of the interiors of their head office location and their stores to give an impression of what it would actually be like to work there. I wish more employers would show the actual working environment as it can be an important decision point for many potential employees. It’s often quite a shock for applicants who have responded to a big brand recruitment campaign when they turn up for an interview at some shabby or unexpected locale. No doubt Innocent Drinks will walk away with the Best Small Employer career site – the quirky and friendly copy and site imagery both engages and amuses and their brand has quickly developed iconic status. Applicants may be disappointed to discover, however, that Fruit Towers HQ is located in a city based industrial estate and not in a leafy orchard. There’s no ‘Claire’s Accessories’ style internal photography available here.

‘Best Online Recruitment by a Consumer Publication’ could only really go to
The Guardian in my humble opinion. They really go to town on engaging younger candidates and graduates, feature very well  written career articles, video and podcasts and are impressive in their use of media like Twitter. I’ve been following them. I’m impressed.

Careerplayer.com

Naturally, I’d love myexecutivecareer.com, mygraduatecareer.com or newlifenetwork.co.uk to be in the running for ‘Best Employment Advice Website’ particularly as when I launched newlife in 2005 it was quite a pioneering force in that regard. However, it does help if you enter in the first place and badger thousands of people to vote for you! Next year, next year. So, my vote? Career Player for graduate jobs and career advice online. The under 25′s are the ‘video generation’ so it makes a lot of sense to offer them valuable career advice and interviews with industry gurus in a format that resonates with them. It helps to have a decent broadband connection or watching the clips buffer gets a bit tedious, nevertheless the quality and range of content is really quite top notch.

The results of the NORAS will be announced on November 4th.

Congratulations by the way to all the team at Veredus for coming top in the service provider performance rankings in the IIM (Institute of Interim Management) 5th annual market survey. Having dealt with them personally on a number of occasions, I can see why they deserved their top spot – they are professional, personable, courteous and give candidates timely feedback on assignments that they have applied for. Certain other providers (you know who you are) please take note! The top 10 companies (as ranked by interim managers themseves) were Veredus, followed by Pilot Interim, Interim Partners, BIE Interim, Odgers Interim, Gatenby Sanderson Interim, Green Park, Methods Consulting, Postern and Alium Partners. You can download the full survey here. (myexecutivecareer.com premium members can find profiles of all the leading interim providers in the executive search directory pages).

Workingmums.co.uk have also announced the winners of their inaugural Top Employer Awards. Apparently Accenture, the overall winner, are leading the way when it comes to  flexible working (nice of their competitor Deloitte to sponsor this award!) and KPMG impressed the judges with their record on transition coaching (is that redundancy management?), maternity coaching and women’s networking. The Top Employers Award for Employee Engagement went to those lovely people at John Lewis. Ahh, if Carlsberg ran department stores, they’d probably do it just like John Lewis!

Employer careersite review – Jaguar Landrover

Recession or no recession, savvy organisations are still very keen to build their reputations as top employers, develop their ‘employer brand’ and attract top talent both off and online. So over the coming weeks, as part of my regular look at topical career issues, I’ll also be putting some leading employer and other career related websites under the spotlight.

The Times published their ‘Top 100 Graduate Employers’ table last week. This list is compiled using research conducted with c16,000 students graduating that year by asking the question “Which employer do you think offers the best opportunities for graduates?” I’m not fully au fait with their methodology, and no offence to the undergrads they asked, but how meaningful is this really? What makes PwC number 1 and the Arcadia Group number 75? The number of places? The perceived quality of their training scheme? Starting salary? Salary progression within 3 years? What they say in their brochure, or on their website? The friendliness of their recruitment fair or campus reps and the quality of their career stand freebies? How much they spend on campus or recruitment advertising? The quality of their hiring process? The retention level of graduates within their first three years of employment? Their record on hiring minorities and women? Their CSR credentials? Brand kudos on your CV? Perhaps someone will write in and let me know if it’s anything more complex than loosely opinion based.

The headlines are always full of the great and the good bemoaning graduate shortages in science, engineering and technology so, for my first review, I decided to start with Jaguar Landrover (87th in the Top 100 list). Their entry in The Times states that they have 135 graduate vacancies in 2010, starting salaries come in at £27,000 with a variety of roles on offer beyond the more obvious ones in engineering such as IT and HR. The stated application deadline is December 31st.

 

Powered by People

 

As soon as you click through to their website, the opening visual and the soundtrack simply blows you away. Their key strapline is ‘Powered by People’ linked with a strong call to action for those interested in ‘visionary engineering roles’. If you’re a proper petrol head, an engineering student and a big fan of two of the most iconic British automotive brands, you won’t be disappointed with the way that they’ve taken their consumer brand appeal and translated that into the ultimate employee talent magnet. It’s quite easy to find your way around the site and there’s a truly sexy video or an engaging and clever visual on pretty much every page – check out the ‘Experience’ section and click on the ‘Sight’ and ‘Sound’ links to see exactly what I mean here. It incorporates information about their experienced hire roles alongside those for graduates, work experience students and apprentices, and features a comprehensive explanation of pretty much every aspect of their company culture, their hiring and development processes, their locations (no pictures though), green credentials and so on. All applications have to be completed online and they have also been quite clever in the way they introduce qualification filters to identify and extract the best candidates.

So far, so good. What is rather disappointing is the way that they have, or rather haven’t integrated with other social media. The main ‘Follow us on Twitter’ button on the home page doesn’t work and similar buttons featured throughout the site either take you to their actual Twitter account JLRCareers, or to a page that hasn’t had an entry posted on it since March 2009. It’s not surprising that they only have 166 followers and many of those are definitely not prospective employees! Another missed opportunity is their corporate LinkedIn profile. There are only just under 700 employee profiles registered and many are poorly completed so it’s hard to tell if the really interesting career intelligence such as University attended and degree type is accurate, or whether you have any relevant connections there already. Coventry University would appear to be the most common University attended (they have a strong list of automotive degree courses) and it would certainly be worth a little more research if you are currently considering your UCAS choices. More importantly, if you’re a graduate and you’ve read their advertisement in The Times, you might struggle to find the important stuff on the website such as exactly when you can apply for one those 135 places (it’s in the FAQs section and cross referenced in the ‘Taste’ link of the ‘Experience’ section), and they suggest that you bookmark the page for further details planned to be announced in October. They could have included a link to sign up to their Twitter feed and use that to announce the opening date of their scheme. It also struck me as odd that so many of their experienced hire opportunities have closing dates that are months away. An open communications manager vacancy is carrying a closing date of Dec 31st 2010.  Most unusual – it made me wonder whether they were real or ghost vacancies.

All in all, this is a pretty good example of online employer brand/talent attraction. A few careful tweaks to make sure that all their links work, that they raise their game on integrating and maintaining their recruitment media channels and create better clarity on the opening and closing dates of vacancies would not only represent a much better return on the investment that they have so obviously made, but also take it from good to great.

To take a look for yourself go to Jaguar Landrover Careers.

 

Ultimate Destination

 

CONTENT UPDATE: 15.10.2010 – I can hardly believe it but Jaguar have replaced this site that I reviewed earlier with a completely different one! The navigation is better and the content for a careers site is fine but very dull visually/brand-wise compared with their old site!

All of a twitter….

Like many people, when social networking tool ‘Twitter’ first burst onto the scene, I signed up for an account to see what all the fuss was about and then promptly forgot all about it (after examining some 300,000 Twitter accounts, a Harvard Business School professor reported that 10 percent of the service’s users account for more than 90 percent of tweets. Media research firm Nielsen also reported that 60 percent of Twitter users do not return from one month to the next suggesting that, thus far, Twitter has been considerably better at signing up users than keeping them). Stephen Fry is probably the most famous UK tweeter/twitterer/twit/member of the twittererati (you see it’s the name that puts me off, it’s all a bit too ‘Finbar Saunders and his double entendres’ or reminiscent of annoying people talking on the train on their mobiles about the square root of b***r all. Am I the only one who hates it?) and claims to be totally addicted to it, as is Sarah Brown (PR and wife of former PM Gordon Brown). Anyway, my recruitment guru friend Keith ‘Robbo’ Robinson is always going on about it and how I should check it out, so I decided it was about time to investigate it again to see if it would be any use from a careers perspective.

Follow me on Twitter

Setting up an account was pathetically easy but I was way too late to get my own (very common it has to be said) name and I didn’t want to set up three website-specific accounts hence you’ll be be able to follow me at https://twitter.com/mycareersadvice. I have to say I was pleasantly surprised at how it’s developed since I last looked at it and I’d recommend  you set up an account if you haven’t tried it already BUT be careful how you use it.

Following……..

There are loads of different kinds of Twitter news feeds you can sign up to and ‘follow’ – feeds from companies, random individuals, journalists, celebrities from the A listers right down to the Zs, universities, news publications and magazines, entrepreneurs, recruiters, job boards and so on. Most websites these days will also include a Twitter symbol that you can use to sign up to their feeds. I decided to have a good root around to find out what could be useful for myexecutivecareer.com and mygraduatecareer.com members (plus a more random and experimental list headed ‘just because’) – you’ll find my latest selections in the right hand menu under ‘Lists’. It will save you a bit of time sorting the gold from the dross at first and get you started anyway. Once you begin building your own groups of favourites, you’ll automatically be served a selection of new ones you might like (based on your previous choices) in the top right hand part of the menu bar. Most of the corporate stuff is fed on an more industrial basis – the latest  job feeds, news on recruitment fairs, events, press releases etc. and it’s great for up to the minute tracking of the things you’re interested in – especially if you’re job hunting. The ones full of personal observations or running commentary of the minutiae of their lives will probably be the ones you can take or leave.

Stephen Fry does indeed have a very interesting life and, whilst you might wonder how he finds time to do all that tweeting, let’s not forget he’s created a ‘one man marketing machine’ for everything he does. Respect. Another person I followed for a few days (before I decided that life was too short to continue and promptly ‘unfollowed’ him -  even if it was in the spirit of research), posted the occasional interesting snippet but it was buried in so much chaff about making tea, what time he was going home and who was in the office that day that I couldn’t helping wondering when he actually did any work. I didn’t know him, he wasn’t famous, fabulous, good looking, interesting, useful or even that funny so he was duly sent to my ‘Twitter Room 101′. My followers may well do the same to me of course! It’s a cruel world. I did have a few dubious spammers and perverts who started to follow me at first. Reader, I blocked them.

Sharing………….

You can share or ‘re-tweet’ tweets you like from feeds you’re following with your own followers (this is PR and viral marketing ‘Tweet Nivarna’ getting lots of followers and re-tweets) with a simple click. Most website carry a bookmark symbol too, so if you find something on a website you like you can automatically add it to your own Twitter feed or your LinkedIn account. S(t)weet.

You can also write your own tweets of course. Your post or message has to stick to a 140 characters or less limit and you can use free websites like http://bit.ly// to shorten your own shared links. The important thing to remember is that your tweets become part of your ‘net-rep’ – the online trail of your reputation or presence on the net. Don’t say or forward anything in a tweet that you wouldn’t want your mother, your employer, the press or your clients to see.

Well, I’m off now to post that I’ve written this brilliant gem on my Twitter profile. Don’t worry, if you decide to follow me on the back of this, I promise that I won’t also share with you that teapigs ‘Skinny caramel’ teabags are the best thing since PG tips, that I had a fantastic lunch at Moro yesterday with my favourite former boss, how I got stuck in a traffic jam on the A14,  that I saved my backpacking daughter’s bacon this morning by texting her the address of the Chinese hostel she  needs because she can’t get online from the train, or that I’m going to saw a small branch off a tree in my garden because it’s blocking my view and annoying me. Or should I? Will it make telling you that I quite like the jobs feed feed from Gradplus and Interim Partners, that The Guardian run great careers articles and HarvardBiz publish cracking leadership stuff more interesting? Let me know – Tweet me!