Resume Tips from Recruiters

Resume Tips from Recruiters

There are many ways to write a resume but nobody is really sure what a recruiter is looking for and a good resume is what sets you apart from the crowd. That’s why you need to stand out, so you can be selected for an interview and eventually get the job you want. Here are some tips to help achieve that goal:

Although some people might tell you that you have to lie on your resume, that’s not the best advice. First of all, if might get you a job that is just not right for you. You’ll find yourself stressed out carrying tasks you are not qualified for. The other alternative is not that great. You might find yourself in a very awkward situation with the recruiter because they might see right through you on the interview and they will realise that you lied on your resume.

Polish your resume. You have to look after the small details because they might make you look bad. For instance, misspellings or grammatical errors might dissuade a recruiter from giving you a chance, no matter how qualified your resume says you are. They think that if you are not able to submit one resume, which is the presentation of your skills, in a neat way, then you are probably going to make sloppy mistakes on the job. You also have to pay close attention when you compose an email and in your cover letter.

Don’t fuss about the objective. It has become common practice to include your ultimate career goal on your resume, but this might have nothing to do with the particular position you are applying for. You might want to give this space a better use than writing down your objective.

You might want to just list relevant experience. Remember that recruiters don’t have much time to view all the CVs they get and they will probably just skim through yours. That is why it is important to only include relevant experience to the position you are applying for on your resume. Otherwise, they might be overwhelmed by all the information on your CV and ignore the relevant experience you’ve had. As to the relevant experience, education is not enough. Recruiters want to see you’ve had unpaid internships, work experience, or volunteer work on your resume.

Apart from your work experience and your education, recruiters also want to see your accomplishments and how you stood out in a particular task.

When it comes to accomplishments and strengths, you don’t have to include your personal skills. Let the recruiter see that for himself/herself on the interview. Focus instead on your work experience, accomplishments, degrees earned, and contact information on your resume.

Regardless of how wonderful your resume is, you also need to submit a cover letter. The cover letter allows you to be more creative and let your personality shine through while you explain your experiences, education, and accomplishments and why they are relevant to the position you are applying for. You also have to take care of the details on your cover letter, avoiding the misspellings, grammar errors, untruths and other common mistakes that could make you like a less-than-ideal candidate.

Make sure you add the phone and email address you use most often, so you don’t miss out on an opportunity by failing to respond to their invitation to an interview on time.

At the top of your CV, add a summary of your experience and include specific experience that is relevant to the job to which you are applying.

Hays, a leading British company providing recruitment and human resources services, also advises you to work backwards from your most recent job and don’t leave any gaps (if you travelled, say so); if you are a graduate without much experience, highlight the relevant skills that you gained in your course; list your highest qualifications by institution, course name and grade achieved; make sure to include any training courses or professional/industry standard qualifications; include any memberships to chartered institutes or relevant organisations.

At the end of the resume, you should state that references are available on request. However, you don’t actually have to include references at that stage, unless asked to do so.

Creative, Marketing and Digital salary survey

Creative, Marketing and Digital salary survey

The Drum has published a survey that sheds light across salaries, bonuses, job satisfaction, job security and gender differences. The study has also found some distinct trends across our key specialisms.

The political turbulence that characterised last year - such as Brexit and the US - has had a minimal impact on recruitment and hiring. Although there was a small setback in the latter part of 2016, confidence in the UK economy has recovered.

There is a high demand for good people across all business types and specialisms, particularly in agencies and for those working in digital and creative. There appears to be a trend in which clients bring teams in-house as well as using agencies.

According to the Financial Times, UK Government’s Strategy Unit has drafted a report which concluded that the creative industries in London are now more important than financial services to the economy. While there is more employment in the creative industries, it is decreasing in financial services.

All disciplines have seen pay rises, either by progression within the same company or by moving jobs. The highest pay rises were witnessed in planning & strategy (14 percent), account handling (38 percent) and tech/UX (37 percent). Every category received a pay rise over 10 percent above the national average of 3 percent.

The study found that the major reason for people wishing to leave their jobs limited career progression in their current role. The second one was remuneration.

The report forecasts a good future for tech companies related to software. Automation, programmatic, AI and continued integration are all areas that are expected to grow.

There is a high satisfaction across creative marketing and digital disciplines, with 70 percent being largely satisfied in their current role. Content, editorial and social report the highest satisfaction levels, followed by PR and marketing.

As to the benefits, the need for a better work-life balance has become increasingly more desirable for all, with flexible working the most sought after benefit. This was favoured even over a bonus, reported The Drum.

Those in the industry are also well-educated, with an average of 84 percent with a degree or Masters.

The industry with the highest budget is digital market. 33 percent of our survey working in digital marketing have a budget of £1m+ stated The Drum.

The survey was put together by Major Players, which used data collected from 3,200 respondents combined with savvy provided by industry experts.

Major players also found certain trends in the industry. For instance, there is a higher proportion of men in the industry at a 65/35 ratio. Also, 25 percent received a pay increase of more than 10 percent, about average across all areas. The study also shows that most 35 percent see their career progressing within a medium-sized agency.

The study also found that workers value flexible hours and a greater holiday allowance more than a bonus.

Another study by Morgan McKinely shows that 2016 was a great year of growth and opportunity for marketing professionals across financial services, technology and retail industries.

Marketing is becoming a higher-priority on C-suite executives’ growth plans, with team sizes increasing up to 50% and budgets becoming healthier. This stands in stark contrast with previous years and moves away from the trend of cost-cutting and redundancies, it states.

There is always an element of seasonality to marketing recruitment, with permanent hires being more prevalent in Q2 and Q3 following bonus season as well as in the lead up to appraisals and salary reviews in Q4, and contract hiring being busier in the first few months of the year, Q2 and Q3. In 2016, due to a lack of predictability in the economic climate there was an element of unpredictability in marketing recruitment trends, with August being the busiest it’s been in a while.

While traditional marketing, branding and event management have been slower areas of recruitment than content marketing and external communications in London. Given that we live in an information-driven society, content and communications have been at the forefront of marketing strategy. As a result, there has been a demand for skilled writers and communicators to lead organisations both digitally and off-line in their marketing communications strategies.

Content writing has been rebranded. What used to be an integral part of a marketer’s responsibility is now seen as a job in its own right.

How to be a better team player at work

How to be a better team player at work

The best coworkers are those who share expertise, give constructive criticism or valuable feedback, or make a project succeed. That all looks good on paper, but in real life, it’s not so easy to become the perfect coworker.

Unfortunately, working well in a team heavily depends on your personality and this becomes particularly hard if you are introvert. When your job requires team work, your career success doesn’t only depend on your skills, but also on your abilities as a team player because we all know there’s no I in team.

Working too much and spending too much time around your colleagues doesn’t guarantee success either. People who are stressed out and burnt out are more likely to perform worse on the job. In fact, research shoes that people who use all their days off are more likely to get raises down the line. Plus, you are not in most your sociable, affable behaviour when you are stressed out and worn out.

Although you might think that the best team players are the ones who work hard and are always there when you need, research shows that people who have many activities after work are the best team players. According to a 2015 paper in Business and Society looking at 347 workers at 80 companies in Canada and China, people who ranked higher in engagement with the community were those more likely to be trusted by their colleagues.

Hiring managers often dismiss volunteer work and community involvement as irrelevant, or even a potential distraction, stated Ilan Vertinsky, one of the paper’s authors. But really, people with busy evening and weekend schedules are exactly who should be getting hired.

Don’t let bullies get you down. Bullying is not a phenomenon restricted to schools. It also takes place in the workplace and more often than you might think. According to a 2015 survey from the staffing company Office Team, 1 in 3 employees reported being bullied at work. Out of those, 13 percent admitted this situation was the catalyst for their resignation, while 17 percent of them took no action after being bullied.

A 2015 study of 327 Spanish employees published in Anxiety, Stress and Coping: An International Journal showed that bullying in the workplace can cause a vicious cycle since people who get bullied are more likely to find themselves in the same situation in the future.

The way to end this vicious cycle is to confront your bullies and stand up to them. If you don’t want confront them, you can simply report this person to hold the bully accountable. However, if someone is highly critical of your work, you can simply ask them what they would have done differently.

Being an endless source of opinions and perspectives can be important, it can also backfire and be bad for teams. Research suggests interfering with projects by pointing out what is wrong with them can frustrate its momentum. If everyone has an opinion on anything, nothing will get done.

So how can you be proactive yet supportive of your colleagues? It all comes down to the way you deliver your message. Research suggests that you need to provide about five times as much positive support for the ideas of others as you provide negative feedback.

Although it might be tricky and time consuming to provide positive feedback when you have a deadline to meet, it does mean that your colleagues will be more appreciative of your alternative plans, goals or benchmarks.

Some of us tend to listen to music on our way to work, but does everyone know that this music can affect your performance and work environment. According to a 2016 study of 266 adults in the Journal of Organisation Behaviour, cheerful music seems to improve people’s moods, helping them to be more cooperative and efficient in decision-making.

Although gossip is frowned upon, research shows that some kinds of gossip can actually bring about numerous psychological benefits and can also help teams work better as a group.

This kind of gossip, however, has to be positive in order to have a good impact in the workplace. If you hear how someone got a promotion, it might help you learn from what they’ve done to make it so you can follow in their footsteps. Therefore, it helps to improve productivity at work.

Time Management Tips and Techniques

Time Management Tips and Techniques

Have you ever heard the phrase, Don’t work hard, work smart? It might be simple but it’s still true. You don’t have to work endless hours to be productive. Staying busy or working hard doesn’t necessarily mean that you are going to be more successful.

Just because you stay extra hours at work, it doesn’t mean you are productive. In fact, the more hours you work, the more likely you are to be less productive because you are tired and your mind is worn out. Staying busy all the time can often lead to mindless productivity, which is a constant need to do something and the habit of wasting time on menial tasks.

Work smarter, not harder is an old adage that signals a simple way to go about work of any kind. Before you start working, you need to take a step back and organise yourself, considering what’s the most efficient way to go about work. You need to simplify your tasks so you can accomplish them faster.

Here are some tips to help you manage your time:

First of all, you need to categorise each task and complete the most important and the most difficult ones first. Once you get those out of the way, it will be easier to focus on the other tasks as you won’t have to stress out about being able to complete those and your mind is sharper in the first hours of work.

Once you’ve completed those tasks, you’ll feel motivated to continue because you have already succeeded at finishing the essential.

You need to learn to say no. Although making various commitments can teach us how to juggle engagements and manage our time, it can also be a trap and you might end up caught up in too many engagements. You should only take on those commitments that you know you have time for and that are important to you.

Get enough sleep. Although you might value the extra time you get when you sleep less, the truth is that some people need to sleep at least 7 hours for their brains to function optimally. If you don’t get enough sleep, that might affect your productivity later on.

Concentrate on the task at hand. Electronic devices can be very distracting, particularly when you need them to work. First of all, you might need to put your phone away as those Instagram notification can be very distracting. Try not to open any unnecessary browser windows and don’t open Facebook under any circumstances. That’s like falling into the rabbit hole. You might want to check one notification and then it drags you into everyone’s news stories and memes that appear on your newsfeed.

If you can’t focus when it’s quiet, you might want to listen to classical music or something that is not too distracting. Immerse yourself in one task at a time and don’t let anything else distract you.

If you want to be productive, you might want to wake up early and start working in the morning. We all know it’s hard to wake up early when you don’t really have to, it’s much less stressful than procrastinating. Plus, you can always look forward to the end of the day when you can finally relax and reward yourself.

Don’t let small obstacles hinder your progress. When you take on a big project, you might find some small details take up too much of your time. This unimportant details might stop your progress and get you stuck. When this happens, you need to focus on getting the bulk done and then revisiting these details you weren’t happy about before.

Turn important tasks into a habit. If you do something hard every day, at some point it will come out naturally. It’s like going to the gym. The first day might seem hard but once you create a habit, it comes naturally. If your job requires you to undertake a key task often, you might want to do it every day, so you don’t dread the day you have to do it. Remember that practice makes the master.

Although taking a break while working can help you be more productive, it can also trap you in. If you need some leisure time or a breather while working, you have to time yourself so you don’t find yourself spending too much time on Twitter or watching TV.

If you are working on your own, you should schedule your day and set a time for each task. That will make you more productive as you know you have a deadline to meet.