Plain sailing?

 

Plain sailing?

Was it plain sailing?

This week we asked one of our candidates to detail the processes involved into finally getting the job they were looking for.

Our candidate, James, came to us three months into the process of looking for a new job. Not unhappy in his current role but in need of a new challenge.

James had subscribed to totaljobs, reed, monster, fish4jobs and  cvlibrary. Initially enthused by the quantity of roles seemingly on offer James duly completed his details and waited for the jobs to come rolling in, and waited, and waited. What James found was all to frustratingly common, the parameters he’d set did not actually convert to real jobs available. He received job alerts for jobs too far away from the desired location, very loosely matching his requirement and he received up to forty a day. James agreed when he completed the online reg forms he should have been more careful and selective with his requirements – 1st lesson learnt – be very prescriptive about your requirements.  The next stage involved applying for the jobs once he’d narrowed down what he was searching for and here lay the most frustrating part – not enough job description or  remuneration details.  James applied for jobs not certain whether he was applying for jobs at the appropriate level because the descriptions available were too loose. On three occasions James turned down roles he was offered interviews for – 2nd lesson  – contact the recruitment company or employer and ask for more details. James found that phoning to turn down jobs was very difficult, “letting employers down when they’d filtered me out of probably hundreds of applicants was not good, but attending for interview when I had no intention of taking the job would have been worse, I can see that a few years ago in a very tough job market I could have decided to take these jobs, continued on my job hunt, letting employers down along the way”. Whilst employers had posted the majority of these jobs it is a lesson for anyone involved in the recruitment process to supply more comprehensive job descriptions in order to filter out candidates not appropriate for the role at the outset.

After three months without success James came to Cork Griffiths directly to ask to be ‘kept on our database’. At the outset we advised James to do two things 1) CV needed some minor alterations such as a more ‘punchy’ personal statement and 2) we advised him to speak to his current employer to see if the company could provide what he was looking for. James did this with little success, and so he was going to leave and it was only a matter of time.

James has now got a new position, he got this through his own efforts (but with help from our CV advice), and he will be starting in a few weeks, delighted with the outcome.

 

He has not found the process of job hunting ‘plain sailing’. plain sailing

 

If you are looking for a change, do you answer yes to some of these questions? You can contact Cork Griffiths, complete these 5 tasks , this article in the Guardian might help and did we mention …contact Cork Griffiths! For some of of our candidate testimonials why not have a look at these… they did find it plain sailing.