There isn't a business we know which is totally recruiterproof. Getting your people 'stolen', 'poached', 'pinched' or otherwise taken by a competitor, or even a non-competitor, really really sucks.
This is possibly a strange set of tips for a Recruitment Company to give away. We aren't here to make excuses for what we do, or even re-bottle and perfume it as 'Executive Search'. We are here because we feel business often fail to recognise and implement simple steps to stop people from soliciting away your top performing, A-player people.
Why are you telling us this?
Well, even we get headhunted - the shortage of good recruiters is a serious one. But we also have a *unique* insight into how to stop Headhunters from taking people away.
Estimates from the likes of the CIPD (That's the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) are that it costs a whole bundle of money to replace someone, and we aren't just talking about the Recruiter Fee to replace (typically 25% of base salary component) but also the Management time spent devising the new job specification, screening CVs and interviewing - all of which adds up to lost productivity. Then there's the intangibles such as 'emotional attrition' - AKA blows to morale - from key or popular people leaving. Some estimates suggest that when really key people leave, the loss can be as high as 150% of a candidate's base salary component. Think about a seriously high-performing salesperson who manages your major accounts and 'owns' the relationship, a CIO or even a CEO. And let's be honest - the majority of Headhunters and Recruiters won't be chasing your average or lacklustre performers, they will be after the top 25% - the people who are most aligned to your profit margins and who drive your success. Worse still, the more visible your business is, either through great PR, Reputation or just plain old size, the more open you are to approaches from the Poachers, Recruiters, Headhunters, or believe it or not Staffing or Recruiting Managers at Competitors who are under instruction to "go and find the best".
With this in mind, welcome to our tips on how to avoid Headhunters.
Train the Gatekeeper
Sounds obvious, but training the receptionist to act as a true gatekeeper against Sourcing Consultants isn't often done properly. A good Sleuth will be smart enough to use clever, vague, and even downright deceptive techniques to hurdle over the person who picks up the main switchboard. Many companies, perhaps the majority, already have no-names policies, no direct-line, no-email policies - but this alone isn't enough.
Train your receptionist to be smart and vigilant. Train them to do all of these things:
- No names policy (In defence to "what's the name of your X Manager")
- No email policy (In defence of "I have an important email for Ms X but I don't think I have written down her mail right...can you please tell me what it is")
No direct lines policy (In defence of "what's the direct line for Ms X?" )
- Tell them to maintain their apparently pleasant demeanour to all callers but be inwardly wary that they might not be all they appear to be.
- To be resistant to angry people, and always be calm, sticking to protocol. (It's not unheard of for a recruiter to call under such pretexts as acting like a customer or potential customer).
- To be on the lookout for the same person calling, say, more than 3 times in an hour and asking for more than 5-7 names.
- To be especially suspicious of people who call for people who used to work for your company years ago.
- To always, even when the board is lighting up with calls, ask the name of the person, and the reason for their call before putting them through. An inexperienced recruiter may lose bottle and look for an alternative method.
Engage with your People
Employee Engagement is a favourite HR buzzword of recent years. However, it's the most important means of keeping your people motivated, and IN your business. Engagement is achieved by managing people in an inclusive fashion, aligning your business drivers and objectives with their own aspirations and goals.
It sounds like an impossible vision, but many companies (look at any of those with very low attrition and/or unusually high profits) do manage it. This issue will be discussed in more fitting space, as it's a heavy topic, but even if you think it's unrealistic or simply aspirational to achieve, think again, and make your first priority being an 'inclusive', 'enjoyable' and 'engaging' business.
People who are bought into your business, who are treated fairly, who know you care, who are well managed, developed, empowered and challenged usually won't be tempted to leave.
Find out why people are quitting - and listen
It makes me ashamed to say that a only a slight majority of businesses conduct even the most basic of exit interviews. It's not just sensible from a legal perspective - it's pretty damn important. So do them.
Dig deeper into why they are quitting and you have a means to address the problem. Further still, if appropriate - get the leaver to give you the name of the firm who bought the person, the name of the company they are joining, what they will be doing etc. Find out the name of the Headhunter and the name of their Company.
OK, so they won't always tell you but it doesn't hurt to ask, now that they are leaving they might feel they have little to lose by talking, especially if they have some residual loyalty. I have read about a company who did this, and saw a pattern of people leaving via a staffing firm one manager in this FTSE company was actually using! Now, we are certain this was an isolated case of disgusting malpractice, but had they not asked the question of the leaver, recording the results - they might never have known.
Get to know the Headhunters in your Sector
We're not talking about the ones you already give work to. We are talking about the bad ones with your business in their sights and a laser beam, telescopic, infra-red, super megapixel image renderer attached for 100% accuracy. You won't ever know all of them, but Search people tend to work specific (sometimes niche) markets and by knowing the names, and firms, you can at least 'be prepared'.
Don't make counter-offers - pay people what they are worth
Making a counter offer might seem like a good idea in some business-critical situations involving a key member of staff. With only rare exception, the best policy is never to make a counter offer. They only breed resentment from staff who feel abridged that they weren't paid that before, and colleagues who hear gossip that X has had a payrise will spread like wildfire. Soon lots of people will threaten to leave, with silent demands for a hike in salary. Paying people what they are worth might also sound like a tough, although noble objective, but there are ways and means of ensuring you are competitive payers.
Create an environment of confidentiality - beware the insider
The best headhunters obtain qualified referrals, and not always from people outside of the company, but sometimes from within. This is very dangerous and can lead to poaching of entire teams in the worst cases. This can spell disaster - so to prevent this, don't just contractually bind them to keep company secrets and identities of individuals from headhunters - emotionally bind them by reinforcing the notion that the competitiveness of the business - and ultimately this influences their take home pay, career prospects, training budgets lies within the loyalty and ultimately discretion of all the staff. Ensure that discretion is a norm in your business. Keeping secrets is good. It's not enough to just create a policy document, it's important to keep it's visibility high to both existing staff and new starters.
Incentive Schemes - "Report the Headhunter"
One tactic to try is the "report the headhunter" incentive scheme. This involves offering some sort of incentive to anyone who reports names of Headhunters who have been calling them back to HR. We came across one company who offered money for every confirmed contact (they set it up so that the employee would have to provide e-mail or other written proof of the contact) with a Headhunter. The found out quite a lot about what was going on - and managed to identify a number of their own suppliers who were trying to Headhunt people out.
Be aware of - but don't ban, Social Networks
Facebook, Bebo, MySpace, and perhaps most significantly Linkedin, are regularly harnessed by Headhunters looking for talent. Be aware that they exist and are a very real channel for losing staff who are 'extra visible'.
Ask them not to do it
Despite some of the prevailing negative assumptions about the ethics of Headhunters, the majority are just people at the end of the day, and may respond positively to a request to "Just leave us alone" - especially if the request is a call to the Headhunter. We suggest that the majority would simply stop after a letter or a polite phone call from a senior manager at your company.
Voicemail & "Out Of Office" logic
Don't get people to leave their mobile numbers on their voicemail. Even more importantly is not to give too much away on bounce 'out of office reply' on emails.
Sunday, October 7, 2007
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Meet The Candidate Part Three: Successful Leadership: Focused, not Blinkered
Welcome to the latest installment in Idealpeople's Meet the Candidate series.
We'd like to introduce you to Scott, whose background is primarily in Software Development/R&D Management and whose expertise is in driving increased productivity and efficiency across Development / R&D teams, and delivering high quantities of releases to tight timescales. Having gained experience with market-leading companies in the DRM, Security and Storage fields, Scott is now looking for his next challenge to build upon his strong business-focussed and customer-facing expertise.
To highlight Scott's expertise at leading Development Teams, we asked him to come up with an article outlining his approach. Here's the result of his hard work:
Successful Leadership: Focused, not Blinkered
by Scott Marshall
In business today, there is ever-increasing pressure to be more competitive, which in turn leads to the need for organisations to be more efficient, and staff to be more productive. The high-tech nature of many industries requires specialised experts, able to focus on very specific tasks and goals necessary to achieve the business objectives. The organisation should obviously be motivated to provide the resources to achieve these goals, and to remove, or prevent, impediments to staff productivity.
Or so the theory says. In reality, organisations are replete with institutionalised obstacles that hinder, or even completely prevent, employees from performing their jobs effectively. This is obviously not what senior management wants, so how and why does this situation arise, over and over again?
Part of the problem is the growing need for specialisation: expert staff focused on narrow areas of the business. This focus is good; it allows highly-skilled staff to perform well in their area, without being distracted by other parts of the organisation. But this focus cannot exist in isolation. There need to be other staff managing the bigger picture - the interactions between the individually focused groups. A business achieves its objectives by the coordinated action of all its separate parts, and if that coordination is missing or inadequate, the business will fail.
To take one typical (but real and genuine) example: a large company had a large, in-house Facilities department. It provided excellent service to all the employees, allowing them to focus on their own jobs rather than worry about whether their telephones worked or the drains were leaking. But this company decided its Facilities department cost too much, and shut it down, outsourcing Facilities management to a third-party supplier. This supplier did its job well, and the company was happy that it had improved efficiency and reduced costs. But that was only the superficial picture: it turned out the third-party supplier's contract only covered a fraction of the useful services the in-house team had provided. The company's staff found they were spending more and more time pursuing trivial Facilities issues, and therefore their own productivity and ability to achieve their business objectives dwindled.
The immense hidden cost to the company of having its own, specialised, highly-paid staff changing light bulbs, calling telecoms providers to fix network problems, etc, was never adequately considered. The management focus on reducing facilities costs had become a blinkered view of Facilities in isolation. No-one was looking at the bigger picture. The new structure of Facilities provision started to control the rest of the business, by the adverse impact it had on all staff, which is patently ridiculous. Facilities (or any business function) must serve the overall needs of the business; it is not a business goal in its own right. Instead of asking the question "how can we reduce Facilities costs?" management should have asked "how can we best provide a Facilities service that enables the organisation to function most productively?"
This example is not to pillory Facilities departments specifically; exactly the same story could be told for any business function in an organisation, and its interactions with other parts of the business (see the further examples below). But it is easy to see how this type of problem arises. A particular senior manager is always under pressure from his or her management (and usually rightly so!) to reduce costs and improve efficiency within the domain controlled by that manager. This is the issue: the need for specialisation in today's complex organisations extends up the management tree. Managers have their own business objectives on which they must focus, and cannot possibly be expected to understand, or even know about, all the complexities elsewhere in the organisation.
Of necessity, senior managers (along with, in fact, all employees at every level) are forced to make decisions with imperfect information. If they did not, the business would freeze with inactivity waiting for the perfect information that will never come. So making such decisions is not a bad thing; what is bad is not recognising the imperfection of the situation and allowing for it: that is, a focus on one issue makes people blinkered to the related issues. The difficulty is that senior managers often aren't given the opportunity to see these other issues. Once a decision has been taken, the rest of the workforce, including other managers, will correctly feel it is their duty to support the decision and to do their jobs as effectively as possible given that decision.
If someone finds that the consequences of a decision actually hinder their ability to do their job, they will often with the best intentions try and creatively find a way around the obstacle - and for isolated cases this is exactly the correct solution. But if many people are hindered by the same obstacle, and all of them are repeatedly seeking spot solutions, this is obviously a great inefficiency. What is required is a mechanism for highlighting these obstacles, reducing the imperfection of the available information, so that the higher-level decisions can be modified to remove the obstacle: in short, a process improvement feedback loop.
Such feedback loops exist in many small-scale (department-level) processes, but they are rare at the organisation level, and this is a critical omission. The reasons for this omission are varied. Often it is simply the case that there is no mechanism for reporting and collating obstacles. In some organisational cultures, there may be fear of reporting problems, in case it is seen as "whinging" or inappropriate questioning of a senior decision. That is unfortunate, as almost always the issue has been raised by someone with the genuine desire to improve both organisational productivity, and their own ability to achieve the goals the company has set them. It is important to recognise this and permit and encourage constructive suggestions at any level. The setting of any goal or objective should automatically come with the follow-up "...does this serve or hinder the overall organisational goals?" If it hinders, stop. If it serves, the further follow up is then "...and what else does the organisation now need to do to support the achievement of that goal?"
An example of this occurs frequently in organisations adopting the Agile project management methodology Scrum. One feature of Scrum is that it provides explicit daily visibility of any impediments to successful project completion. For Scrum to work, it expects these impediments to be removed (which can include such things as changing an objective to render the impediment irrelevant, etc). This requires commitment from the organisation: it is a two-way contract. If an organisation wants a project to adapt and use Scrum, and obtain all the benefits Scrum provides, the organisation must also recognise that all business functions interacting with that project may need to change their behaviour too. It is very rare that one business function can make any substantial productivity improvements in isolation, without support from other parts of the organisation.
This can be very difficult to achieve. Those other business functions weren't asked to use Scrum. They have their own objectives and constraints; they are focused on their own goals, as specified to them by their senior management. They are unlikely to respond to requests from another project - and it would be wrong for them to do so, otherwise they would be forever thrashing between conflicting requests from across the organisation. This is why organisational-level feedback is so important: it provides a controlled mechanism for highlighting the critical interdependencies, and allows the organisation to evolve and adapt to remove any obstacles amongst those dependencies. Without this, a well-intentioned focussing on one set of goals quickly becomes a blinkered ignorance of the overall objectives, and an organisation quickly degenerates into a set of competing silos, rather than a cooperating whole. Staff are put under increasing pressure to perform and deliver, in an environment that increasingly prevents them from doing so!
The best leaders are those who prevent this happening, and who most effectively balance the cooperation needed across the whole organisation, with the focus required for individual tasks. These leaders will expect high performance and productivity, and will provide the means to achieve this efficiently and effectively. By doing so, they will ensure success for their staff, their organisation, and themselves.
And finally, an example which highlights some of the key points discussed above.
In another company, technical staff needed specialised computer equipment, for the work they were doing implementing a large project. Towards the end of this project, some of this equipment failed during critical system testing and needed to be replaced. The project manager began using the organisation's procurement process. The first obstacle was that the necessary equipment wasn't part of the corporate standard, so needed special additional approvals that would take extra time. The second obstacle was the the procurement department had a backlog of work, so wouldn't be able to process the order for several days. When the project manager then learnt that the preferred supplier would take a further fortnight to deliver, he gave up. This all meant his project would miss its critical deadline.
He went to his own computer, looked up an internet supplier, and in less than a minute had ordered the necessary parts using his own credit card. The parts were delivered the next day, work continued and the project completed on schedule. When he claimed back his expenditure, he was formally chided for not using the procurement process, with only a vague, informal acknowledgement that his action had actually saved the project. How demoralising! Worse, the company did nothing to address the obvious defects in its systems that were hindering its employees' ability to deliver.
First, the idea of corporate standards for purchasing wasn't working; the standard was set so narrow that almost all requirements fell outside it. The standard had been set by IT management; it was their goal to have standard equipment configurations to reduce costs. They had achieved their goal, but at the expense of the wider business. Second, the procurement department had its goals of service delivery for purchasing requests; by servicing all requests in strict order, it was able to meet its goal - but this inflexibility made it completely unable to help other departments meet critical business objectives. Finally, the restriction on using only preferred suppliers helped the purchasing team meet their goal of maximising discounts, even if that meant other parts of the business would suffer as a result.
The mentality in many organisations are that these rigid, blinkered controls are in fact necessary to prevent chaos. While there is obviously a need to have controls, the point here is that those controls must be constructed to support and serve the business - not control it. Staff should not have to be put in the position of taking risky, heroic actions (such as buying critical company equipment on their own credit card - unless of course that is the agreed process!). At the very least, it gives staff a demoralising dilemma: should they follow the system, and be chastised for failing to meet the goal set them by the company; or should they cause trouble by ignoring the system in order to meet their goal? Either way, frustration, productivity losses and demoralisation are the result.
We'd like to introduce you to Scott, whose background is primarily in Software Development/R&D Management and whose expertise is in driving increased productivity and efficiency across Development / R&D teams, and delivering high quantities of releases to tight timescales. Having gained experience with market-leading companies in the DRM, Security and Storage fields, Scott is now looking for his next challenge to build upon his strong business-focussed and customer-facing expertise.
To highlight Scott's expertise at leading Development Teams, we asked him to come up with an article outlining his approach. Here's the result of his hard work:
Successful Leadership: Focused, not Blinkered
by Scott Marshall
In business today, there is ever-increasing pressure to be more competitive, which in turn leads to the need for organisations to be more efficient, and staff to be more productive. The high-tech nature of many industries requires specialised experts, able to focus on very specific tasks and goals necessary to achieve the business objectives. The organisation should obviously be motivated to provide the resources to achieve these goals, and to remove, or prevent, impediments to staff productivity.
Or so the theory says. In reality, organisations are replete with institutionalised obstacles that hinder, or even completely prevent, employees from performing their jobs effectively. This is obviously not what senior management wants, so how and why does this situation arise, over and over again?
Part of the problem is the growing need for specialisation: expert staff focused on narrow areas of the business. This focus is good; it allows highly-skilled staff to perform well in their area, without being distracted by other parts of the organisation. But this focus cannot exist in isolation. There need to be other staff managing the bigger picture - the interactions between the individually focused groups. A business achieves its objectives by the coordinated action of all its separate parts, and if that coordination is missing or inadequate, the business will fail.
To take one typical (but real and genuine) example: a large company had a large, in-house Facilities department. It provided excellent service to all the employees, allowing them to focus on their own jobs rather than worry about whether their telephones worked or the drains were leaking. But this company decided its Facilities department cost too much, and shut it down, outsourcing Facilities management to a third-party supplier. This supplier did its job well, and the company was happy that it had improved efficiency and reduced costs. But that was only the superficial picture: it turned out the third-party supplier's contract only covered a fraction of the useful services the in-house team had provided. The company's staff found they were spending more and more time pursuing trivial Facilities issues, and therefore their own productivity and ability to achieve their business objectives dwindled.
The immense hidden cost to the company of having its own, specialised, highly-paid staff changing light bulbs, calling telecoms providers to fix network problems, etc, was never adequately considered. The management focus on reducing facilities costs had become a blinkered view of Facilities in isolation. No-one was looking at the bigger picture. The new structure of Facilities provision started to control the rest of the business, by the adverse impact it had on all staff, which is patently ridiculous. Facilities (or any business function) must serve the overall needs of the business; it is not a business goal in its own right. Instead of asking the question "how can we reduce Facilities costs?" management should have asked "how can we best provide a Facilities service that enables the organisation to function most productively?"
This example is not to pillory Facilities departments specifically; exactly the same story could be told for any business function in an organisation, and its interactions with other parts of the business (see the further examples below). But it is easy to see how this type of problem arises. A particular senior manager is always under pressure from his or her management (and usually rightly so!) to reduce costs and improve efficiency within the domain controlled by that manager. This is the issue: the need for specialisation in today's complex organisations extends up the management tree. Managers have their own business objectives on which they must focus, and cannot possibly be expected to understand, or even know about, all the complexities elsewhere in the organisation.
Of necessity, senior managers (along with, in fact, all employees at every level) are forced to make decisions with imperfect information. If they did not, the business would freeze with inactivity waiting for the perfect information that will never come. So making such decisions is not a bad thing; what is bad is not recognising the imperfection of the situation and allowing for it: that is, a focus on one issue makes people blinkered to the related issues. The difficulty is that senior managers often aren't given the opportunity to see these other issues. Once a decision has been taken, the rest of the workforce, including other managers, will correctly feel it is their duty to support the decision and to do their jobs as effectively as possible given that decision.
If someone finds that the consequences of a decision actually hinder their ability to do their job, they will often with the best intentions try and creatively find a way around the obstacle - and for isolated cases this is exactly the correct solution. But if many people are hindered by the same obstacle, and all of them are repeatedly seeking spot solutions, this is obviously a great inefficiency. What is required is a mechanism for highlighting these obstacles, reducing the imperfection of the available information, so that the higher-level decisions can be modified to remove the obstacle: in short, a process improvement feedback loop.
Such feedback loops exist in many small-scale (department-level) processes, but they are rare at the organisation level, and this is a critical omission. The reasons for this omission are varied. Often it is simply the case that there is no mechanism for reporting and collating obstacles. In some organisational cultures, there may be fear of reporting problems, in case it is seen as "whinging" or inappropriate questioning of a senior decision. That is unfortunate, as almost always the issue has been raised by someone with the genuine desire to improve both organisational productivity, and their own ability to achieve the goals the company has set them. It is important to recognise this and permit and encourage constructive suggestions at any level. The setting of any goal or objective should automatically come with the follow-up "...does this serve or hinder the overall organisational goals?" If it hinders, stop. If it serves, the further follow up is then "...and what else does the organisation now need to do to support the achievement of that goal?"
An example of this occurs frequently in organisations adopting the Agile project management methodology Scrum. One feature of Scrum is that it provides explicit daily visibility of any impediments to successful project completion. For Scrum to work, it expects these impediments to be removed (which can include such things as changing an objective to render the impediment irrelevant, etc). This requires commitment from the organisation: it is a two-way contract. If an organisation wants a project to adapt and use Scrum, and obtain all the benefits Scrum provides, the organisation must also recognise that all business functions interacting with that project may need to change their behaviour too. It is very rare that one business function can make any substantial productivity improvements in isolation, without support from other parts of the organisation.
This can be very difficult to achieve. Those other business functions weren't asked to use Scrum. They have their own objectives and constraints; they are focused on their own goals, as specified to them by their senior management. They are unlikely to respond to requests from another project - and it would be wrong for them to do so, otherwise they would be forever thrashing between conflicting requests from across the organisation. This is why organisational-level feedback is so important: it provides a controlled mechanism for highlighting the critical interdependencies, and allows the organisation to evolve and adapt to remove any obstacles amongst those dependencies. Without this, a well-intentioned focussing on one set of goals quickly becomes a blinkered ignorance of the overall objectives, and an organisation quickly degenerates into a set of competing silos, rather than a cooperating whole. Staff are put under increasing pressure to perform and deliver, in an environment that increasingly prevents them from doing so!
The best leaders are those who prevent this happening, and who most effectively balance the cooperation needed across the whole organisation, with the focus required for individual tasks. These leaders will expect high performance and productivity, and will provide the means to achieve this efficiently and effectively. By doing so, they will ensure success for their staff, their organisation, and themselves.
And finally, an example which highlights some of the key points discussed above.
In another company, technical staff needed specialised computer equipment, for the work they were doing implementing a large project. Towards the end of this project, some of this equipment failed during critical system testing and needed to be replaced. The project manager began using the organisation's procurement process. The first obstacle was that the necessary equipment wasn't part of the corporate standard, so needed special additional approvals that would take extra time. The second obstacle was the the procurement department had a backlog of work, so wouldn't be able to process the order for several days. When the project manager then learnt that the preferred supplier would take a further fortnight to deliver, he gave up. This all meant his project would miss its critical deadline.
He went to his own computer, looked up an internet supplier, and in less than a minute had ordered the necessary parts using his own credit card. The parts were delivered the next day, work continued and the project completed on schedule. When he claimed back his expenditure, he was formally chided for not using the procurement process, with only a vague, informal acknowledgement that his action had actually saved the project. How demoralising! Worse, the company did nothing to address the obvious defects in its systems that were hindering its employees' ability to deliver.
First, the idea of corporate standards for purchasing wasn't working; the standard was set so narrow that almost all requirements fell outside it. The standard had been set by IT management; it was their goal to have standard equipment configurations to reduce costs. They had achieved their goal, but at the expense of the wider business. Second, the procurement department had its goals of service delivery for purchasing requests; by servicing all requests in strict order, it was able to meet its goal - but this inflexibility made it completely unable to help other departments meet critical business objectives. Finally, the restriction on using only preferred suppliers helped the purchasing team meet their goal of maximising discounts, even if that meant other parts of the business would suffer as a result.
The mentality in many organisations are that these rigid, blinkered controls are in fact necessary to prevent chaos. While there is obviously a need to have controls, the point here is that those controls must be constructed to support and serve the business - not control it. Staff should not have to be put in the position of taking risky, heroic actions (such as buying critical company equipment on their own credit card - unless of course that is the agreed process!). At the very least, it gives staff a demoralising dilemma: should they follow the system, and be chastised for failing to meet the goal set them by the company; or should they cause trouble by ignoring the system in order to meet their goal? Either way, frustration, productivity losses and demoralisation are the result.
Wednesday, October 3, 2007
Video CVs: The Future of Job-Seeking?
Building on something we mentioned in the first instalment of our CV tips - in which we made a point about how CVs are taking a little bit of stick for being unfit for their purpose, we thought we'd open some dialogue on Video CVs. To the unitiated, a Video CV is a presentation of your skills using Video, and not a traditional paper-based medium, as the format.
According to some commentators, the Video CV could well be the future.
So, true to form, here's our viewpoint.
First, we'd stress that to date, we've not yet seen what we would term a true Video CV. So, to form a truer opinion, we had to do some digging. Thanks to the wonder that is Youtube, we were able to sit down and watch some.
Looking through some of the examples, there appears to be a common structure, and that is people standing in front of a camera, reading their paper CV. There are some more creative efforts, but the "evolving format" seems to be one of adding a name and a voice to a CV.
We found this a bit surprising. We have seen some brilliant video-based presentations as extras to CVs: presentations, showreels, portfolios - and we have seen the benefits that these extras can make to an application.
We decided we needed to know the benefits that Video CV's are supposed to give candidates. So we did some more research, and here you go:
- More chance to get noticed: the central premise is that a Video CV is different, and creates an impression, giving you a higher chance of sticking in the mind of the person reviewing the application.
- Offers a unique chance to really put forward your personality, abilities, talents and motivation.
- Demonstrate your personality, experience and communication skills far better than you can do on paper.
- Give yourself a competitive edge over rival candidates.
All of these are fair enough as differentiators in support of Video CVs, but we think that unless people are careful about how they create their Video CVs, then all of these will be missed. Video as a media format was created to deliver content in a different way. Newspapers portray their content in a different way to Television News. Written newspapers allow depth of information, and they allow people to digest information in whatever order they please, and at whatever pace they decide on. TV on the other hand has to portray information differently: the ordering of the information is fixed - but the visual element of television allows for information to be presented differently.
You wouldn't see the value in a TV newsreader sitting in front of the camera reading the newspaper, so where's the value in a Video CV consisting of a candidate reading their CV?
If this is as far as the Video CV ever goes, then there are other problems with the format in general. These are:
- It takes longer to watch a two minute video CV than it does to read a CV. As crass as this sounds, most CV readers are able to review a CV very quickly: they're looking for specific information which indicates the suitability of someone's background. Irrelevant applications can be screened out quickly. With Video CVs, you'll have to keep watching until the end.
- Video CVs aren't searchable. Technology already means that if you put your written CV on-line, Recruiters can find it and get in touch. A Video CV can't do this.
- It potentially opens a candidate up to discrimination. Just imagine if the hiring manager doesn't like your haircut or the clothes you wear.
We fully support the use of Video CVs. But we do so with a bit of a plea added on: if you're going to produce one, make it something more than just you, stood in front of a camera. Make it something which showcases what you've done and what you've achieved - but take it completely away from the traditional CV format. Think if I were asked to make a TV show about me, what would I do? not If I were asked to read my CV out loud, how would I do it?
We look forward to seeing some examples....
According to some commentators, the Video CV could well be the future.
So, true to form, here's our viewpoint.
First, we'd stress that to date, we've not yet seen what we would term a true Video CV. So, to form a truer opinion, we had to do some digging. Thanks to the wonder that is Youtube, we were able to sit down and watch some.
Looking through some of the examples, there appears to be a common structure, and that is people standing in front of a camera, reading their paper CV. There are some more creative efforts, but the "evolving format" seems to be one of adding a name and a voice to a CV.
We found this a bit surprising. We have seen some brilliant video-based presentations as extras to CVs: presentations, showreels, portfolios - and we have seen the benefits that these extras can make to an application.
We decided we needed to know the benefits that Video CV's are supposed to give candidates. So we did some more research, and here you go:
- More chance to get noticed: the central premise is that a Video CV is different, and creates an impression, giving you a higher chance of sticking in the mind of the person reviewing the application.
- Offers a unique chance to really put forward your personality, abilities, talents and motivation.
- Demonstrate your personality, experience and communication skills far better than you can do on paper.
- Give yourself a competitive edge over rival candidates.
All of these are fair enough as differentiators in support of Video CVs, but we think that unless people are careful about how they create their Video CVs, then all of these will be missed. Video as a media format was created to deliver content in a different way. Newspapers portray their content in a different way to Television News. Written newspapers allow depth of information, and they allow people to digest information in whatever order they please, and at whatever pace they decide on. TV on the other hand has to portray information differently: the ordering of the information is fixed - but the visual element of television allows for information to be presented differently.
You wouldn't see the value in a TV newsreader sitting in front of the camera reading the newspaper, so where's the value in a Video CV consisting of a candidate reading their CV?
If this is as far as the Video CV ever goes, then there are other problems with the format in general. These are:
- It takes longer to watch a two minute video CV than it does to read a CV. As crass as this sounds, most CV readers are able to review a CV very quickly: they're looking for specific information which indicates the suitability of someone's background. Irrelevant applications can be screened out quickly. With Video CVs, you'll have to keep watching until the end.
- Video CVs aren't searchable. Technology already means that if you put your written CV on-line, Recruiters can find it and get in touch. A Video CV can't do this.
- It potentially opens a candidate up to discrimination. Just imagine if the hiring manager doesn't like your haircut or the clothes you wear.
We fully support the use of Video CVs. But we do so with a bit of a plea added on: if you're going to produce one, make it something more than just you, stood in front of a camera. Make it something which showcases what you've done and what you've achieved - but take it completely away from the traditional CV format. Think if I were asked to make a TV show about me, what would I do? not If I were asked to read my CV out loud, how would I do it?
We look forward to seeing some examples....
Wednesday, September 26, 2007
Employer Branding - Simple Tips
Idealpeople are evangelical about Employer Branding (AKA Recruitment Branding). We help businesses who don't know why or how to get it right, and we have been fortunate enough to work with worldwide winners who are already doing it right. It's this combined learning and advisory experience which has helped us to develop pretty hot skills in the whole subject area.
So, here are our first in a series of several tips, targetting employers who lack the time or resources to undertake a large scale, multi-channel recruitment branding excersise.
Do you actually know WHY people joined your firm, despite countless offers from your competition at the time of joining up?
How about what makes them STAY despite the stress, the grind of commuting, long hours, headhunter calls....?
What makes employer branding different to product branding (or your other related marketing/corporate literature) is that it's about something much more intangible, dynamic, and harder to fathom. Yep - That'll be Your People. Positioning your company as an employer of choice in the context of this global war for talent is absolutely key to get right if you want to compete. Seriously.
Recruitment Branding (Employer Branding) is hard to initiate, manage and develop, as very often, HR, Line Managers, Board Directors are "too busy to contribute" to what they may see as pointless, cheezy, or unrelated to core business activity.
What's everybody else doing?
The purpose of this is not to plagarise. Employer Brand should be an individual thing, and it's important that you don't just steal the good bits of someone elses external PR. If you do, you will have loads of people happily sign up contracts of employment and then quickly leave as they discover your 'commitment to personal development and training' brand-bite, actually means that you get to sit next to someone more senior than you who just says "watch me do this, and don't let me have to explain it twice" There's loads of training, but it's all on the job - our external budget was shot in 2002..."
Start With Your Starters
When you next hire someone, for any post - ask them WHY they joined your business rather than another.
You may think you know, but the chances are you will be surprised. Make sure this information is documented, and refreshed every time you have a new starter.
Get the Story from the Staff
Ask your existing staff the same question. Identify what it was that they identified with, whether it was about company mission, values, people, tech stack, whatever. Again, I can garuantee that it was nothing to do with your Marketing Brochures, and probably very little to do with the Coffee they had at the interview, your big logo stuck to the side of the building, and very often, not even the money that sealed the deal. Make it a priority to find out why they stay with you (Especially the long serving/suffering - the 'lifers', if you have any who have been constant performers or resilient to change. Once you know why your current staff joined and stay, document, and keep.
Buy-In
Surprisingly, so few businesses make the time to do this. Aside from providing you with a very basic/simplistic overview of the qualities you aleready have which make you desirable as an employer, this will also make the staff feel involved. Involvement is key to staff engagement, motivation... or so a wise HR pro' once told me. So, before you ask them, explain the purpose of your questioning.
Explain that you are trying to take some steps to refresh the image of the company to prospective employees in order that you can continue to hire people as talented and brilliant as those you already have. This garuantees to make them feel all warm and cosy inside, and they will then (over 10 mins or so) be able to give you tangible reasons for them being happily stuck with you. Patterns will emerge.
Stay tuned for further actionable ideas on how to take your company forward through employer branding.
So, here are our first in a series of several tips, targetting employers who lack the time or resources to undertake a large scale, multi-channel recruitment branding excersise.
Do you actually know WHY people joined your firm, despite countless offers from your competition at the time of joining up?
How about what makes them STAY despite the stress, the grind of commuting, long hours, headhunter calls....?
What makes employer branding different to product branding (or your other related marketing/corporate literature) is that it's about something much more intangible, dynamic, and harder to fathom. Yep - That'll be Your People. Positioning your company as an employer of choice in the context of this global war for talent is absolutely key to get right if you want to compete. Seriously.
Recruitment Branding (Employer Branding) is hard to initiate, manage and develop, as very often, HR, Line Managers, Board Directors are "too busy to contribute" to what they may see as pointless, cheezy, or unrelated to core business activity.
What's everybody else doing?
The purpose of this is not to plagarise. Employer Brand should be an individual thing, and it's important that you don't just steal the good bits of someone elses external PR. If you do, you will have loads of people happily sign up contracts of employment and then quickly leave as they discover your 'commitment to personal development and training' brand-bite, actually means that you get to sit next to someone more senior than you who just says "watch me do this, and don't let me have to explain it twice" There's loads of training, but it's all on the job - our external budget was shot in 2002..."
Start With Your Starters
When you next hire someone, for any post - ask them WHY they joined your business rather than another.
You may think you know, but the chances are you will be surprised. Make sure this information is documented, and refreshed every time you have a new starter.
Get the Story from the Staff
Ask your existing staff the same question. Identify what it was that they identified with, whether it was about company mission, values, people, tech stack, whatever. Again, I can garuantee that it was nothing to do with your Marketing Brochures, and probably very little to do with the Coffee they had at the interview, your big logo stuck to the side of the building, and very often, not even the money that sealed the deal. Make it a priority to find out why they stay with you (Especially the long serving/suffering - the 'lifers', if you have any who have been constant performers or resilient to change. Once you know why your current staff joined and stay, document, and keep.
Buy-In
Surprisingly, so few businesses make the time to do this. Aside from providing you with a very basic/simplistic overview of the qualities you aleready have which make you desirable as an employer, this will also make the staff feel involved. Involvement is key to staff engagement, motivation... or so a wise HR pro' once told me. So, before you ask them, explain the purpose of your questioning.
Explain that you are trying to take some steps to refresh the image of the company to prospective employees in order that you can continue to hire people as talented and brilliant as those you already have. This garuantees to make them feel all warm and cosy inside, and they will then (over 10 mins or so) be able to give you tangible reasons for them being happily stuck with you. Patterns will emerge.
Stay tuned for further actionable ideas on how to take your company forward through employer branding.
Monday, September 24, 2007
The Sad Demise of an old Foe
We were saddened to hear the news this week that Veritas-IT (www.veritas-it.co.uk) have gone into administration.
Whilst they were a technology recruitment firm based not too far from us, we haven't ever really considered them to be a competitor, although in many senses they weren't too dissimilar to us in terms of the types of companies they were looking to work with. It came as something of a shock to us that they had gone under.
This might, to the casual observer, sound like pretty uninteresting news. However, the ramifications of any recruitment business going under are far-reaching: particularly so when, like Veritas, a lot of your business is Contract business.
As a bit of background to non-industry readers, Contract IT recruitment is big business, and it works a little like this. Technology companies often have need to hire someone to work on a particular project for a relatively short time. This normally happens when they win a new project themselves, but don't have the internal skill resource to do the work. The solution is to hire a contractor, pay them a daily (or hourly) rate for a fixed period, and then - when the project is complete - not have trouble getting that person off the payroll. Agencies supply these contractors, and pay them for the work completed on the back of timesheets submitted. The agency will then invoice the company in question, by adding their charge onto the money owed to the contractor.
So, when a company like Veritas - who had hundreds of contractors working for them on various client sites, do go out of business, the major problem is that, generally, contractors are owed money. According to some who have been commenting on Contractor UK's bulletin board, some in this particular instance are owed as much as £10,000. What we've seen in other recruitment companies going bust is that most of those with money outstanding will be lucky to ever see even half of what they're owed - a truly sad situation. The problem for many is that, ultimately, they'll be treated as unsecured creditors, who are well down the liquidators' list when it comes to paying the debt they are owed (behind the liquidators' own fees, the staff and the secured creditors - i.e the banks). We have heard some horror stories down the years, and we cross our fingers that we don't hear any more in the fall-out of this.
According to this, Veritas were a £14million turnover business at the start of the year. They moved into new (bigger) offices, and went on a recruitment drive internally. This was, it appears, in spite of losing over £750K in 2006 (see here), and making an acquisition (also see here). Whilst outwardly they seemed a successful company, inwardly they were losing money, working to unmanageable margins and, unfortunately, it's the contractors who are set to lose out the most.
Veritas aren't the first and won't be the last recruitment company to go out of business, but it does beg a question - as a contractor, what steps can you take to stop this from happening to you?
There is a real need to check out the financial stability of the agency who are going to be responsible for paying you. Companies House is a good start, and cheap financial information can be easily and quickly obtained from UK Data Ltd (www.ukdata.com) or from Dunn & Bradstreet (www.dnb.com). You don't need to be an accounting expert to understand these reports, and it's well worth the investment before you sign anything. If a bank were to lend a company money, they'd be doing their homework - it's imperative that you protect yourself the best you can.
Of course, to all those candidates looking for a permanent job, none of this is relevant - an agency going bust won't affect your chances of getting a new job.
Whilst they were a technology recruitment firm based not too far from us, we haven't ever really considered them to be a competitor, although in many senses they weren't too dissimilar to us in terms of the types of companies they were looking to work with. It came as something of a shock to us that they had gone under.
This might, to the casual observer, sound like pretty uninteresting news. However, the ramifications of any recruitment business going under are far-reaching: particularly so when, like Veritas, a lot of your business is Contract business.
As a bit of background to non-industry readers, Contract IT recruitment is big business, and it works a little like this. Technology companies often have need to hire someone to work on a particular project for a relatively short time. This normally happens when they win a new project themselves, but don't have the internal skill resource to do the work. The solution is to hire a contractor, pay them a daily (or hourly) rate for a fixed period, and then - when the project is complete - not have trouble getting that person off the payroll. Agencies supply these contractors, and pay them for the work completed on the back of timesheets submitted. The agency will then invoice the company in question, by adding their charge onto the money owed to the contractor.
So, when a company like Veritas - who had hundreds of contractors working for them on various client sites, do go out of business, the major problem is that, generally, contractors are owed money. According to some who have been commenting on Contractor UK's bulletin board, some in this particular instance are owed as much as £10,000. What we've seen in other recruitment companies going bust is that most of those with money outstanding will be lucky to ever see even half of what they're owed - a truly sad situation. The problem for many is that, ultimately, they'll be treated as unsecured creditors, who are well down the liquidators' list when it comes to paying the debt they are owed (behind the liquidators' own fees, the staff and the secured creditors - i.e the banks). We have heard some horror stories down the years, and we cross our fingers that we don't hear any more in the fall-out of this.
According to this, Veritas were a £14million turnover business at the start of the year. They moved into new (bigger) offices, and went on a recruitment drive internally. This was, it appears, in spite of losing over £750K in 2006 (see here), and making an acquisition (also see here). Whilst outwardly they seemed a successful company, inwardly they were losing money, working to unmanageable margins and, unfortunately, it's the contractors who are set to lose out the most.
Veritas aren't the first and won't be the last recruitment company to go out of business, but it does beg a question - as a contractor, what steps can you take to stop this from happening to you?
There is a real need to check out the financial stability of the agency who are going to be responsible for paying you. Companies House is a good start, and cheap financial information can be easily and quickly obtained from UK Data Ltd (www.ukdata.com) or from Dunn & Bradstreet (www.dnb.com). You don't need to be an accounting expert to understand these reports, and it's well worth the investment before you sign anything. If a bank were to lend a company money, they'd be doing their homework - it's imperative that you protect yourself the best you can.
Of course, to all those candidates looking for a permanent job, none of this is relevant - an agency going bust won't affect your chances of getting a new job.
Thursday, September 20, 2007
Recruiters Never Respond to Job Applications!
Searching the web the other day, we came across the following feedback regarding one particular Recruitment company:
As usual, I had no acknowledgement and no contact. I doubt that the job advertised even exists. Recruitment consultants are pond life and even lower in the food chain than estate agents. It is unprofessional to not even acknowledge applications.
I have heard nothing from them as yet, after 2 weeks. I have left a phone message and still heard nothing. The feedback, so far, is negative purely because they have made no contact to date.
Useless, no contact, no continuity, wouldn't bother with them.
Who are they talking about? Say it quietly, but they're talking about us.
These quotes come from a service offered to candidates who apply for jobs via one of the major job-boards in the UK. It's a chance for them to give their feedback on various aspects of services offered to them by particular agencies.
To be fair to us, most of our feedback is positive, and all of our negative feedback comes from candidates who never had a response from job applications. Generally, it seems, candidates who never receive a response are particularly cutting. Calling us pondlife because no response was received is pretty harsh, as is calling us useless.
So what can we learn from this? Firstly, we can draw the conclusion that not receiving a response to a job application is a serious gripe that most candidates have with recruitment companies.
We take feedback very seriously, and we've thought about our policy towards job applications many, many times. The first thing we have to point out is that, as much as we'd like to, it's impossible to send a personal response to every single applicant we hear from. Our consultants frequently receive in excess of 100 applications per day, many from people whose backgrounds don't match the advert at all. Given that it takes about 15 minutes to assess an application, and write a personal e-mail outlining exactly why the candidate has, on this occassion, been unsuccesful, it would take 1500 minutes - or 25 hours - to respond to them all. Despite the long hours we work, we don't have the ability to change the number of hours in any given day. We have in the past tried to reply to as many as possible. You might notice as well that we're one of the few recruiters out there who encourage phone calls and publish direct lines in our adverts.
Despite this, there are in theory a couple of actions we could take in order to ensure that all applicants receive a response - and therefore eliminate this "no response/no feedback" issue. For instance:
- We could set up an "autoreply": every time an applicant applies for a job they receive a non-personal response saying something along the lines of Dear candidate, thanks for applying, if you haven't heard from us within X number of days then you've been unsucessful.
- We could make it clear in job advertisements that if you hear nothing then you've been unsuccesful.
The reason we've never done this is quite straightforward: what would it achieve?
The really frustrating element of not getting any feedback is the fact that you don't know why your profile wasn't selected. If you receive an automated response, would you feel any happier? Would that give a reason to leave positive feedback? In all likelihood, frustration would stem from the fact that all you got was an automated response rather than anything personal, and you'd still have a negative experience.
Anyway, given that we care about our candidates service an awful lot, we'd like to throw a question out there. What can we do about this? What would candidates and potential candidates like to see us doing?
As usual, I had no acknowledgement and no contact. I doubt that the job advertised even exists. Recruitment consultants are pond life and even lower in the food chain than estate agents. It is unprofessional to not even acknowledge applications.
I have heard nothing from them as yet, after 2 weeks. I have left a phone message and still heard nothing. The feedback, so far, is negative purely because they have made no contact to date.
Useless, no contact, no continuity, wouldn't bother with them.
Who are they talking about? Say it quietly, but they're talking about us.
These quotes come from a service offered to candidates who apply for jobs via one of the major job-boards in the UK. It's a chance for them to give their feedback on various aspects of services offered to them by particular agencies.
To be fair to us, most of our feedback is positive, and all of our negative feedback comes from candidates who never had a response from job applications. Generally, it seems, candidates who never receive a response are particularly cutting. Calling us pondlife because no response was received is pretty harsh, as is calling us useless.
So what can we learn from this? Firstly, we can draw the conclusion that not receiving a response to a job application is a serious gripe that most candidates have with recruitment companies.
We take feedback very seriously, and we've thought about our policy towards job applications many, many times. The first thing we have to point out is that, as much as we'd like to, it's impossible to send a personal response to every single applicant we hear from. Our consultants frequently receive in excess of 100 applications per day, many from people whose backgrounds don't match the advert at all. Given that it takes about 15 minutes to assess an application, and write a personal e-mail outlining exactly why the candidate has, on this occassion, been unsuccesful, it would take 1500 minutes - or 25 hours - to respond to them all. Despite the long hours we work, we don't have the ability to change the number of hours in any given day. We have in the past tried to reply to as many as possible. You might notice as well that we're one of the few recruiters out there who encourage phone calls and publish direct lines in our adverts.
Despite this, there are in theory a couple of actions we could take in order to ensure that all applicants receive a response - and therefore eliminate this "no response/no feedback" issue. For instance:
- We could set up an "autoreply": every time an applicant applies for a job they receive a non-personal response saying something along the lines of Dear candidate, thanks for applying, if you haven't heard from us within X number of days then you've been unsucessful.
- We could make it clear in job advertisements that if you hear nothing then you've been unsuccesful.
The reason we've never done this is quite straightforward: what would it achieve?
The really frustrating element of not getting any feedback is the fact that you don't know why your profile wasn't selected. If you receive an automated response, would you feel any happier? Would that give a reason to leave positive feedback? In all likelihood, frustration would stem from the fact that all you got was an automated response rather than anything personal, and you'd still have a negative experience.
Anyway, given that we care about our candidates service an awful lot, we'd like to throw a question out there. What can we do about this? What would candidates and potential candidates like to see us doing?
Monday, September 17, 2007
Why is it so hard to get a job in the Games Industry?
It's well known throughout the technology world that the games industry is an especially difficult career path to take. For the statisically-minded amongst you, a brief piece of research we've done using one of the major on-line job boards suggests that whilst there's 310 jobs currently being advertised with the word "games" in the title, there's also some 8800 candidates interested in a job in Games. That's some 30 potential candidates per position, on just one of the major job boards.
An e-mail we've had from one jobseeker in the Games industry has shed some light on just what it's like to be a jobseeker in the unfortunate situation of looking for a job in Games. Here's the bulk of it:
Sometimes companies think the work's not up to scratch, but I find that difficult to believe after applying for a CG Generalist's position in acommercials studio in Toronto and being offered freelance work by the owner. The only reason I didn't take it was I lacked the 2 yrs. production experience neccesary to go over to Canada to work.
I'm not perfect, but I am employable.
Then there's nepotism. A Trainee Artist's position in an Architect's studio I chased for weeks came to an end when the recruitng agency told me in a depressed tone that the owner ended up hiring someone he already knew over somenone he didn't, wasting everyone else's time in the process.
A brick over the head is the only response to such moronic behaviour.
Once you're done with that, there's the classic, "Your work's great, but we're looking for someone with commercial experience." To which you reply," How I am going to get any experience unless someone gives me a job?" This happened today when I applied to an events agency which wanted an arm and a leg in terms of skills for a 3D Designer's position.
And I had them, but not the commercial experience to get the job.
And finally, the worst scenario of all. Someone more experienced than you gets the job. I applied for a Graphic Technician's job in an automotive company applying texture maps to basic moulds (easy peasy and full time with a very good salary) but lost out to a guy after my interview with slighty more experience than myself.
Plain bad luck.
Sometimes, the powers that be can be finicky, fussy, corrupt, and just plain unfair.
But there is a plus to this. I'm starting work next week as a Matchmove Artist on a short Horror film for 3 weeks. At the same time- job hunting.
So things are happening. Just painfully and slowly.
I do need a job- right now and in 3 weeks time. £55 a week not being enough to live on whilst on the dole.
I am employable, I am skilled and I am getting work.
Lady luck I think, just needs to wave her magic wand.
It's our guess that almost anyone who has been in the situation of trying to "break" into an industry that they really, really want to work in has been faced with similar problems. So what advice can we give? Well, we can't wave the magic wand that appears to be needed, but we can suggest the following:
1) Get your showreel (or portfolio, or even your CV for non-graphical/art-based positions) on-line. Savvy recruiters, the ones being bombarded by the same candidates via the jobsites over and over again, will find it. It also means that you can get examples of your work over to potential employers quickly. Publicise your showreel, even do some SEO work on it.
2) For would-be animators out there, think carefully about the content of your showreel. Feedback from the industry suggests that companies are interested in Animation examples which are harder to pull off, such as lifting/pushing heavy objects and realistic walk & run cycles. Try and keep examples to things which show animation as close to real life as possible.
3) Work Experience. Even getting work experience can be tricky, but it's such a powerful tool that it's worth writing to every potential employer and asking to do some voluntary work.
4) Personal projects: Keep working, keep creating and publicise your work as much as possible.
5) Think outside of the box. Don't rely on the on-line job-boards to get you a new position: this is the most obvious job-hunting tool available, so if it's all you're using, then it's probably what everyone is using as their first port-of-call. Don't assume that companies won't hire you because the job pages on their site are empty.
We have a specialist Games division over here at Idealpeople, so feel free to get in touch with any specfic queries or requests for advice. Happy hunting!
An e-mail we've had from one jobseeker in the Games industry has shed some light on just what it's like to be a jobseeker in the unfortunate situation of looking for a job in Games. Here's the bulk of it:
Sometimes companies think the work's not up to scratch, but I find that difficult to believe after applying for a CG Generalist's position in acommercials studio in Toronto and being offered freelance work by the owner. The only reason I didn't take it was I lacked the 2 yrs. production experience neccesary to go over to Canada to work.
I'm not perfect, but I am employable.
Then there's nepotism. A Trainee Artist's position in an Architect's studio I chased for weeks came to an end when the recruitng agency told me in a depressed tone that the owner ended up hiring someone he already knew over somenone he didn't, wasting everyone else's time in the process.
A brick over the head is the only response to such moronic behaviour.
Once you're done with that, there's the classic, "Your work's great, but we're looking for someone with commercial experience." To which you reply," How I am going to get any experience unless someone gives me a job?" This happened today when I applied to an events agency which wanted an arm and a leg in terms of skills for a 3D Designer's position.
And I had them, but not the commercial experience to get the job.
And finally, the worst scenario of all. Someone more experienced than you gets the job. I applied for a Graphic Technician's job in an automotive company applying texture maps to basic moulds (easy peasy and full time with a very good salary) but lost out to a guy after my interview with slighty more experience than myself.
Plain bad luck.
Sometimes, the powers that be can be finicky, fussy, corrupt, and just plain unfair.
But there is a plus to this. I'm starting work next week as a Matchmove Artist on a short Horror film for 3 weeks. At the same time- job hunting.
So things are happening. Just painfully and slowly.
I do need a job- right now and in 3 weeks time. £55 a week not being enough to live on whilst on the dole.
I am employable, I am skilled and I am getting work.
Lady luck I think, just needs to wave her magic wand.
It's our guess that almost anyone who has been in the situation of trying to "break" into an industry that they really, really want to work in has been faced with similar problems. So what advice can we give? Well, we can't wave the magic wand that appears to be needed, but we can suggest the following:
1) Get your showreel (or portfolio, or even your CV for non-graphical/art-based positions) on-line. Savvy recruiters, the ones being bombarded by the same candidates via the jobsites over and over again, will find it. It also means that you can get examples of your work over to potential employers quickly. Publicise your showreel, even do some SEO work on it.
2) For would-be animators out there, think carefully about the content of your showreel. Feedback from the industry suggests that companies are interested in Animation examples which are harder to pull off, such as lifting/pushing heavy objects and realistic walk & run cycles. Try and keep examples to things which show animation as close to real life as possible.
3) Work Experience. Even getting work experience can be tricky, but it's such a powerful tool that it's worth writing to every potential employer and asking to do some voluntary work.
4) Personal projects: Keep working, keep creating and publicise your work as much as possible.
5) Think outside of the box. Don't rely on the on-line job-boards to get you a new position: this is the most obvious job-hunting tool available, so if it's all you're using, then it's probably what everyone is using as their first port-of-call. Don't assume that companies won't hire you because the job pages on their site are empty.
We have a specialist Games division over here at Idealpeople, so feel free to get in touch with any specfic queries or requests for advice. Happy hunting!
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