Affiliates Toolkit

The Importance of Maintaining your LinkedIn Profile

Your LinkedIn profile should resemble your base-resume or CV. If your base-resume is very detailed (which it should be), you can simplify it for your LinkedIn profile. Your employment history, present and past job titles, skills, prime responsibilities, qualifications and education on your LinkedIn profile must be in line with your base-resume. Always!

What about your Tailored Resume?

Let’s do a quick recap of tailoring. Tailoring your resume is adapting your base-resume or CV to align with jobs that you want to apply for. Working from your base-resume, you will extract the skills and experience that you have that are critical to the job. Extracted skills and experience will be highlighted on your tailored resume and submitted in application. You might also choose certain pertinent qualifications, achievements or recommendations to submit with your application.

Your tailored resume must still be in line with your base-resume because past employers and employment dates do not get tailored, ever! Misrepresentation on your resume amounts to CV fraud.

If a recruiter has read your tailored resume and does some online research on you before calling you, the first site they will go to is LinkedIn. Almost all recruiters do online research before calling a potential candidate.

If your tailored resume is out of kilter with your LinkedIn profile, your application will almost certainly get binned. That is fact!

No recruiter, neither agency nor from an employer directly, is going to call you to find out why your LinkedIn profile does not match your resume. Keeping your LinkedIn profile updated is your responsibility if you are serious about job hunting.

Don’t Forget about LinkedIn

The secret to successful job hunting is planning and organisation.

Your planning is in compiling your base-resume and collating all documentation that is relevant to your resume. That is your foundation.
After you have compiled your base-resume, you must either update your existing LinkedIn profile or create a LinkedIn profile for yourself.
This done, you can apply for jobs in a calm, professional and organised manner.

As time passes you will update your base-resume and all tailored resumes that follow will be in line. Even if your document control system is working well for you and you are controlling all job applications well, you must not forget to update your LinkedIn profile.

Become Active on LinkedIn

Keeping active on LinkedIn counts! Join groups that are relevant to your skills and participate in discussions. Connect with people in your industry or with past work colleagues and managers. Post business-related information on your timeline (read the business section of the newspapers to get those). There is a lot that you can learn from people on LinkedIn if you are serious about your career.

One big no-no on LinkedIn is to send connection requests to all and any recruiter and when they accept your request bombard them with mail to help you find a job. It’s unprofessional. That is what job boards are for!

LinkedIn is not Facebook, so images of you and your family, your dinner or lunch, etc. are inappropriate. An image of you receiving an award at work, or an educational qualification, etc. will enhance your profile. Sharing posts about the industry you work in, or your line of work also enhances your profile.

Recruiters do scroll through your LinkedIn timeline. An active timeline (a few posts/shares in a week) adds credibility. Once you are active on LinkedIn and visiting the site a few times a week, you will remember to update your profile if there are any updates on your base-resume.
If you create a LinkedIn profile only to get a new job, it won’t work for you. A dormant LinkedIn profile is immediately obvious to anyone who looks at it.

If you are unwilling to become active on LinkedIn to develop a professional timeline and maintain your profile, your LinkedIn profile could work against you rather than for you.

Finding the job you want may not be as simple a process as it once was. Social media, digital marketing techniques, mobile hiring apps, candidate-matching algorithms, Big Data talent analytics… the recruitment practices and language used by employers are evolving more rapidly than ever. As a job hunter, when all you want is the next step on your career path, just the jargon can be daunting…
So, surely it’s good that there is so much online help available, in the form of ebooks, webinars, and endless individual services such as resume writing and career counselling; all stages of the job hunt process are covered. But is there such a thing as too much help?
Maybe… but there’s definitely such a thing as too much choice. And the unwritten law of any marketplace is that the more choice, the more overpriced ‘under-quality’ options there are available…

The current situation

Simon Ward, resourcing and recruitment consultant and founder of I Got Hired™ sees three major problems with what’s available for today’s job hunter.

The Good Stuff Is Too Expensive

First is the high cost of advice and guidance. As Simon says, “It’s an abused – and abusive – market. How can people justify charging what they do?”
Browse a few sites such as livecareer, jobhuntersbible, gorillamarketingFJH and careerconfidential, and you’ll find career coaches asking hundreds of dollars per hour, and pre-packaged generalized interview advice easily carrying a three-figure price tag, even a quick review of your resume can come at the same cost. If you consider just the basic fundamentals of any job search – resume, application, interview, negotiation – you could easily spend thousands on so-called expert advice and techniques.

What Is Out There Is Fragmented

One apparent benefit all this choice is that you can shop around, pick and choose… But there’s nothing more frustrating than paying for conflicting advice. Google the phrase “interview tips” watch as more 120,000,000 results pop up. Even if you do find the best advisor for assessment centers there’s no guarantee that their input will agree with the webinar on resume-writing you bought last week. As IGH’s Operations Director Chris Ponder, says, “People tend to lose sight of the fact that a job hunt is a single organic process.” Perspective is important. Forget about trying to ‘find a job’ and focus on trying to ‘sell yourself’. When you think of you and your experience as product you’re pitching, it’s obvious that you need to run a consistent campaign and not change advisor at each stage.

Its Not Always Clear What You Get From Resume Writers

Finally, it’s not necessarily clear what you’re getting sometimes. For example, if you’re take the advert at face value and submit your resume for dissection, you might reasonably assume that a human being is poring over your documents and offering suggestions for improvement. However, some services actually do it all with software. (Top Tip: always apply the Turing Test to recruitment coaches!)

How to find the best online advice

If you want expert help that won’t trip you up somewhere down the line then you have to narrow down the endless search results by sharpening your criteria. You’re looking for:

A comprehensive package.

Relevant help for each stage of finding your dream job.

That is consistent in the advice it offers (making you look professional and together).

Openness about the person or team of people providing the advice.

A deal you don’t need to mortgage your firstborn to pay for.

It’s exactly these principles that inspired Simon to set up I Got Hired and offer the whole package to job hunters for a single, reasonable price. To give the final word to Chris Ponder, “Everyone’s job search is different and we aim to offer a toolkit that contains something for everyone.”

If you’re looking for a new job, you’ve never had it so good, or at least, so the recruitment industry would have you believe.Job candidates are constantly told that with social media, the dominance of LinkedIn, and the rise of the so-called ‘passive candidate’ the balance of power during the hiring process has shifted in their favor. Yet if you’re a job seeker, struggling to navigate digital strategies, talent pipelines or just simply work out how employers and hiring managers are playing the recruitment game these days, you could be forgiven for holding a very different view.

No More Recruitment Agencies?

The recruitment market has changed and is continuing to change, but the biggest change for candidates is rarely mentioned: we know employers are cutting costs by relying less and less on professional recruitment agencies and are looking to engage more and more with candidate communities directly, but what does that mean for the job seeker?

Simon Ward, founder of I Got Hired™ says,
“For the last ten years organizations have been building recruitment functions targeted at hiring ‘direct candidates’ – candidates directly attracted without the services of a recruitment agency .”

So what, you might ask? But in 15 years of recruitment practice, Simon sees this seemingly innocuous trend
actually having the biggest effect on the candidate experience. And it’s telling that in both the 2015 and 2016 Global Recruiting Trends reports from LinkedIn Talent Solutions, there’s no mention of recruitment agencies as a source of job candidates.

Increasing The Challenge, and the Workload of Job Seekers

The fundamental shift here is that job seekers are now expected to represent themselves to prospective employers. As Simon Ward sums up,

“Candidates need to become their own recruitment agent with their own sales process and sales toolkit to compete with other candidates and impress employers.”

Effectively, candidates now have to do the job a recruitment agent would have been paid tens of thousands of dollars to do.

This means being well-informed about both the employer and the market, readily available to employers, and be capable of demonstrating process management, stakeholder management, negotiation and various other skills usually fulfilled by a full time recruitment agent, while juggling that role, their job search and quite probably a current job at the same time.
And yet, if a candidate is less than agent-like in their expertise or organization, there’s little slack cut by the prospective employer. Fair or not, if a recruitment agent were to mess up and start talking to an employer about the wrong vacancy, it’s just an error. If a candidate were to do the same, it’s taken as a sign they’re disorganised, not really interested or an idiot!
What’s more, if a candidate actually does engage in some agent-like practices, they risk creating a very different – unfavorable – impression with the employer. For example, after a job offer is received, an agent can negotiate hard on their candidate’s behalf, and it won’t negatively affect how that candidate is viewed on their first day at work. A candidate negotiating their own deal has to tread more carefully for fear of damaging that future relationship. Nobody said life was fair.

Some Advice Is Available – But Is It Really Worth $100s

It’s not so much that there is a lack of guidance and support for job seekers, more the case that it’s rarely cohesive or complementary, with one person offering resume writing services, the next LinkedIn networking tips, another providing interview advice.

Put simply, the ‘find a job’ market is in its infancy. It’s disorganized and often the advice-givers lack experience or skills themselves. It’s also low-tech. Employers have their applicant tracking systems (ATSs) and leading edge assessment, social media and communications tools but other than a few ‘partial process’ mobile apps, there’s no equivalent technology platform for candidates to help them manage complicated and demanding processes.

The advice market can also be expensive. A candidate could pay up to $1,000 for a set of audio books on job hunting techniques, maybe $500 to have someone write and polish their resume, another $100 to join a 1-hour interview preparation webinar, and so on. As a result, an employer often hires the candidate who can afford the best advice and preparation, and not necessarily the candidate who’ll do the best job. In other words, the situation isn’t really good for anyone.

Better Help Is Needed

What’s missing is a joined up, end to end job seeker support package, which is what I Got Hired™ aims to provide: books, guidance, templates, downloadable apps, an online support community… all available at a price affordable to all. Simon Ward is committed to giving candidates what they need, when they need it with them getting to have their say:

“Everyone’s job search is different and we aim to offer a toolkit that contains something for everyone – and thanks to collaboration with the IGH community through our suggestion box system, we’re constantly adding new materials, broadening the help we can offer.”

In the recruitment market of today, candidates are expected to be more and more self-reliant, actively managing their own job search campaigns. The most successful candidates can show a particular skillset, often as a result of accessing coherent and practical guidance. Right now, that guidance is highly variable in quality and cost.

I Got Hired™ is leveling the playing field, making a comprehensive range of tools and techniques, backed by real expertise, a proven process and intuitive technology, affordable for all.

Never before has it been more important for candidates to understand the importance of how they interact with prospective employers.
Whether you are setting up an appointment for an interview, receiving post-interview feedback, or making that dreaded ice-breaking call to apply for a role or introduce yourself and your skills, you must always be in top form.
How do you achieve that?

Preparing for the Call

Don’t ever rely on your memory when preparing to call an employer. There is nothing like finding yourself in the spotlight to erase everything from your mind and leave you stuttering.

Before you make any call to a prospective employer, consider what you want to achieve. Once you are clear on that, figure out what you are going to say to reach your objective.

A call without a plan is a waste of time.

Do it this way:

• Research – if it is an ice-breaking call, familiarise yourself with the employer and the details of the role before you call. If it is a follow-up call, recap on your past research and on the interview or conversations that took place previously.
• Purpose – know what you want to achieve and target your intended conversation around that. Write it down. Read it over and over until you are familiar with it. Then put it aside because you don’t want to be reading a script over the phone.
• Ansafone – or voicemail. Up to 73% of calls into internal recruitment teams go to unsafe, so prepare for that. Prepare a voice message that includes your name, a brief reason for your call, and most importantly a valid contact number.

Making the Call

Before calling make sure that you are relaxed and familiar with what you want to say. If you feel very nervous, take a few deep breaths, close your eyes and briefly change your focus. Disconnecting for even a few second will recharge you. It’s like restarting your computer. After a short break, everything works again.

Don’t put off making the call, especially if you are responding to a job advert or calling to introduce yourself to see if the employer has any requirements.

There is plenty of competition out there, and opportunities that you don’t take will be snapped up by someone else. The call that is bound to fail is the call that you don’t make.

Take a deep breath, stand up, smile and dial!

Now it’s make or break:

• Remember courtesy at all times. If the call is not handled well on the receiving end, stay calm and stay friendly. You won’t get anywhere by being rude to reception and trying to court internal recruitment. People talk.
• Be clear and transparent in your communication. Don’t try to dominate or coerce, and don’t be a smart-Alec. It’s off-putting.
• Control your voice. Speak at a steady and even tone. Make sure that your voice is clear and audible. Don’t mumble. You don’t want anyone asking you to speak up or speak clearly.
• After a polite greeting, open your conversation with the question “is this a good time to talk?” before you say anything else. You could be unintentionally imposing on someone.
• If it’s not a good time, ask when will be a good time, immediately diarise the time and day. Make sure you call at that time.
  State the reason for your call and your desired outcome upfront. Keep to your call plan and don’t go into long-winded explanations. You could be keeping someone away from pressing matters.
• If your call is answered by someone who says they can’t help you, ask when the relevant person will be available and call again at that time. If the relevant person isn’t available don’t try to coerce someone else into helping you.
• If your call immediately goes to ansafone, leave a clear and concise message. Make sure that you read your name and contact number slowly. Break your contact number into sections and repeat it at the end of the message.

Closing the Call

End your call professionally by asking what the next steps in the process will be. Never be afraid to ask for feedback or advice if the call doesn’t go the way you had hoped.
If you are unclear or unsatisfied with the outcome, don’t be afraid to question or contest the situation in a polite and friendly manner. Don’t allow yourself to be fobbed-off unnecessarily.
Whatever the outcome, always say thank you! There is never a reason for you to be rude.

If The Call Went Badly

If you really mess the call up – don’t worry!

Leave it for 48 hours and make the call again. There is an 87% chance that the receiver will have forgotten the previous call. If they do remember you, be honest and admit that you messed up your last call and would like a second chance to get it right.