Tips for Job Seekers - A recruiter's perspective

Searching for a job can often be very stressful and for some even emotionally and physically draining. The process could take time and hard work before one can find success. As a job seeker your search can become more effective if you learn how to streamline your effort and you do this by doing proper research and preparation.
As an IT recruiter I have had the experience of interacting with thousands of IT job seekers through the years and some of them truly impressed me with their approach and conduct and left in me an inedible mark and a positive influence. Unfortunately I cannot say the same for majority of the job seekers. These tips are meant especially for those job seekers who wish to improve and hone their job search skills - a recruiter's perspective.
1. Resume writing: In today's competitive market, it is imperative that you always have your resume ready and updated - you never could tell when and where from the next great opportunity will come to you. Design a resume which clearly states your experiences, achievements and basic information such as educational qualification, contact details et al. Always be prepared to customized your resume based on the prospective employer's requirements and expectations. Having said that it is equally important that you do not put anything extra in your resume for which you can not substantiate. Keep in mind too the layout and the format of your resume design. You will receive Recruiters' appreciation, attention and respect if you are prepared to take the time and effort to do up your resume which is neat and detailed. And for those mature/specialized skills job seekers focus not on your needs but the needs of your prospective hirers - this definitely will catch your recruiter's attention.
2. Job Market Research: Once you have your resume prepared and/or you are prepared to initiate your job search actively the next thing for you to do is explore your immediate available options - networking through your friends, contacts, colleagues, ex-colleagues, and maybe talk to your favorite recruiter. You have much to gain and little to loose by befriending a recruiter. Remember this that a recruiter talks and meets many job seekers everyday and receive many mails every single day. How do you make the recruiter remember you and/or remember your profile? The most obvious is that you have a very impressive resume which stands out amongst the crowd - for many of us this might not be an option and lets be prepared to face and accept it. The other option is that you cultivate and nurture a friendship or contact with your recruiter - this is known as networking and let the favors be mutual. Favor I mean will be when you contact him for available openings or market information and when he contacts you for leads and references.
If unfortunately you've exhausted your immediate options, you then need to widen your horizon and start scanning through the different job sites and even newspapers - recruit/opportunity sections. Most of today's job sites, that's if you are a registered member will mail you new jobs that are specific to your search. This means you have the luxury of new jobs being presented to you without you having to scan through the job sites one after the other. The other option is go directly to your prospective company website and search for their current job listings. Lately, I've found that mailing groups like yahoogroups are a good place to find out the current jobs in the market as posted by various recruiters. Some of these jobs might not even be advertised/available anywhere else.
3. Send out your resume: Now that you have your resume ready and you've done your market research and you have a good idea of where to send out your resume/application go ahead and start applying. Do keep in mind the following e-mail tips:
a) Hide your distribution list: To avoid looking awkward never put multiple email id's in the "To:" field in your e-mail message. A good and self respective recruiter may not be very enthusiastic to contact you if it looks like you are working with every other firm in the market. As far as possible avoid sending your resume to more than one company in the same mail. A recruiter loves nothing more than if you take the pain of mailing to him alone and addressing him by his name in the mail. However for whatever reason, against your better judgment presumably, if you have to write to multiple company please do so by using the "undisclosed-recipients" feature in your e-mail program, or the "bcc:" field.
b) E-mail content/Cover letter: How you approach to land yourself the job that you desire or successfully gain your recruiter's attention will be determine by how well you address and express yourself in your email or cover letter. A good introduction will include a brief highlights of your experience, skills and your reasoning on your fitment for the role, do make it short and to the point. Again, remember that a recruiter loves nothing more than to hear his own name when approached by a job seeker. Go ahead make his day, write to him, call him by his name, you have nothing to lose!
c) E-mail subject: If you are applying for job through advertised jobs with a reference code given, do make it a point to use the reference code in both your subject line and in your cover letter. This goes to show that you understand the requirement and that you do understand and one does assume that you have what it takes. This way chances are higher that your application will be validated and not get lost in the muddle or worst in the junk/spam mail folder.
3. Follow up: Often, a recruiter can get overwhelmed with too many mails to check and too many calls to attend to and return et al. It does not hurt one bit if you can follow up your application with a gentle reminder mail or even a short call. To a good recruiter, he will be convince that you are indeed serious about your job search and therefore he will take the extra effort to look into your profile and take the necessary action. In other words be pro-active in your job search and be ready to reap your harvest.
3. If nothing else works, try blogging: For those job seekers who for whatever reasons have only one desire or specific goal to find a job with a particular company, and after exhausting all options but still unsuccessful in landing himself a job with the company, it might be worthwhile to blog your way into their hearts and finally inside the organization. But if you are not the blogging type that's ok because you might still be able to find yourself a job by reading others blog, such as this blog by yours truly advertising jobs with Charterhouse.

Finally, it does not hurt to thank others. Prepare short thank you mails for your recruiter, like the ones that you sent to your prospective employers, after attending the interview. Not many job seekers takes the trouble to thank his recruiter. You might say that its their job why should I thank him. You are right but as I mentioned earlier it does not hurt you much to thank him but it could go a long way in building a good relationship with him. Do not forget, you might still need him the next time you start to look for new job.
In conclusion, let me quote the 3 Ps. According to Katie, job seekers should "keep in mind the rule of the 3 Ps." They need to have:
Purpose: Have a purpose for what you're doing; don't just use a scattershot approach - have a plan and follow it.
Persistence: Don't give up! The process can be hard on the ego, but stick with it.
Patience: All things do come in time.

I would add Passions to the above. Be passionate about what you do and what you intend to do and what you would like to achieve. Be positive, and show good amount of enthusiasm especially while interacting with your recruiter or your prospective employers. A good motto to keep in mind- "Passions is virtue" and "Good things come to those who work".

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*Happy hunting folks!*

Internet candidate search

With the advent of Google, for many of us our job vis-à-vis finding and extracting information and sourcing people and resume becomes much more convenient and faster. Today the importance of Google in our day to day activities cannot be undermined. Infact, we will have a separate series of discussion on Google in the days to come and I hope to share with you the wonderful thing you can do with Google to aid you in your search process.
Searching for resume on the net or ‘Googling’ for resume has become one of the tools a good recruiter frequently resort to besides all the other traditional methods and as such it will be advantageous and very prudent for any budding or seasoned recruiter to try and understand and/or master the art of using the internet for sourcing resumes for both active and passive candidates.
The following steps are adapted from Job Machine and I’ve personally practiced the steps and am sure most of us in the recruitment industry today would be using some or if not all of the steps to search for candidates.

Step 1: Understand the requirement and identify the search keywords.
One of the key attributes a good recruiter must acquire and developed is the knack for understanding what the client wants (give an apple if the client wants and apple and not guava or pear). If a recruiter can understand what the client requires then it is also safe to assume that she must also be able to identify the search keywords from the requirement. Search keywords are especially relevant for those in the IT industry. Eg:
ABC client is looking for a Systems Analyst with Interwoven Teamsite skills and at least 3 years of J2EE experience including Websphere, JSP and XML. The candidate must also have 2+ years of experience using PERL scripting.
From the above specification, one can understand the keywords which are highlighted/bold. Therefore, the search should contain the above highlighted keywords.

Step 2: Broadcast the job.
Broadcasting the job is a very critical activity any recruiter must get habituated with. It serves the following purposes – build your networking channel, image building exercise for your company, building your databank, etc.
The first step must be to post the job on your company website and to the subscribed paid sites (Eg; Monster, Jobsdb, Naukri, etc) and how you design and word your post will matter on the responses; this is a separate topic and shall be discussed in the future.
The second step will be to post it to the free sites (Eg; devbistro, jobvertise, etc).
The third step will be mass mailing using bcc on your email application to those candidates whose contacts are already in your databank.
The forth step involves posting the job in all the online groups that you have a membership and if not get registered and start posting (Eg; yahoogroups – teamsite, ezlink, etc)

Step 3: Search Internal database
If you are with an established company you are almost likely to have a sizeable database and chances are that you might find someone with the skills that you are looking for. How well you organized your internal database or how good you are in mining your database either manually or using external search applications is very important. After all, what’s the point in having and maintaining a database if you are not successful in identifying the right profile from your database, assuming the right profile resume does exist within your database. One very efficient search application is call X1. If your organization decides to use X1, you then do not have to spend too much time in organizing your email folder or your internal database, X1can be configured to search all your inbox, server and local hardisk. X1 performs the search instantaneously like how Google desktop does its search. The only drawback X1 has is its inability to search for symbols such as #/+ etc. Imagine how frustrating it can be if you were to search for VC++ or C# resumes.

Step 4: Search Resume boards
Today many of the leading job sites offer their database at a cost. Some of the leading sites are – monster.com, dice.com, naukri.com. If your company subscribed to these sites, you must search their database. Each sites will have their on search methodologies but most of them will use Boolean search (Will discuss on this separately) for keyword search.

Step 5: Identify and locate competitors
The most likely place our target candidates will be found will be with the competitors. Therefore, one must identify who are the competitors and locate them. This is especially useful when you are looking for people working in the same domain area or similar projects. Eg: Let’s assume our client is Barclays bank and they require Software Engineer with production support experience in the areas of equities and derivatives. The likely place that we can find such candidates, lets say for a place like Singapore will obviously be with their competitors like – Credit Suisse, UBS, JP Morgan, etc.

Step 6: Search for candidates from Competitors
Now that we know who are the competitors and where they are located we can start the search for candidates in these companies. The best approach is searching the internal database first and then using the resume boards. If both these fails start searching the web (details in the following steps). Once you identify the candidate start calling, however if you fail to identify anyone with the required skills/experience, it might be prudent to anyway call and ask for reference or leads. If you cannot reach or they refuse to talk to you or give you any references, drop them a nice sounding mail and thank them for their time and share with them on what you are looking for. Who knows they might have a heart change and decide to forward the mail to their friends/contacts/network. The key here is not to give up but be persistent and keep trying and keep ‘scratching your brain’ for innovative approach or methods to source the right candidate.

Step 7: Search for resumes on the web
The web is one vast hunting ground for any recruiter. How well you master the skills required for internet search will differentiate you from any ordinary recruiter. The following techniques are some of the most common and effective methods to find information/date on the net. Some of the methods given below are search engine unique and care must be taken to do proper research on each sites before embarking on your hunt.
Boolean: Boolean search operators can drill down and find the information you are looking for faster. These operators are used to weed out irrelevant pages thereby narrowing your search results to find exactly what you are looking for. Here are the basic commands used in searching the Internet search engines for resumes.
7.1) Boolean Key
AND - The AND operator delivers results with the terms you requested. For example, searching resume and oracle will return pages with both terms - resume and oracle.
OR - The OR operator delivers results with either of the terms you requested. For example, MCSE OR M.C.S.E.
NOT - The NOT operator will not deliver certain words in your search results. For example, Java NOT coffee will deliver closer results for JAVA Programmers and not Java Coffee.
NEAR - The NEAR operator locates words that are located in close proximity to other words. For example, Java NEAR Programmer. Not every search engine supports this operator.
( ) Parentheses - The ( ) operator allows you to group terms and build longer search strings. For example, NOT (submit AND employer) will avoid pages with both names.
* - The * operator is a wild card. Adding a wild card will find words contain the wild card. For example program* will help so you do not have to run separate searches for words similar like: programmer, programming, program

7.2) Basic Query - This is the string you would use to locate resumes. You would normally add keywords for skills and/or geography to limit your results.

7.3) Flipping - An easy way to locate resumes outside a target that have a link to the target URL. An ex-employee maybe. In Google, this option is available in Google Advance search, alternately you can type the input from google.com itself, eg: link:www.interwoven.com. Flip searching allows you to locate internet web pages that are linked to a certain website. This search will give you a very generic result but one can amend this to search for resumes.
link:www.interwoven.com AND (title:resume OR url:resume)
The results might still be very generic and not all of them might be resumes. One can add some more keywords and further refine this result.
link:www.interwoven.com AND (title:resume OR url:resume) AND template

7.4) X-Ray - A quick technique that searches internet pages inside a website, can be use to locate resumes. In google use: site:www.interwoven.com

7.5) Peeling Back - A technique you should use almost every time you locate a resume. You might be surprised to find many others. More details on this topic is available at swatrecruiting.

** Happy Hunting folks!**

A day in the life of a recruiter

A recruiter day is never mundane. Life for some, begins even in the wee hour of the morning when we receive calls from either our candidates, our clients or our boss. A candidate will typically call us for feedbacks on their profile, to discuss about their profile, or use us as a sounding board, or whatever reason that they can come up with. Client can only call us at this hour for some pressing requirements or to fixed an interview for one of our candidates but never to enquire about our well-being :-). A boss who calls his troop at this hour can only be a boss who demands every moment of your time, to drive you, to stress you, or to motivate you(am not sure if I will buy that though). Life can be stressful if you consider your job as just a job. One must learn to have bigger and better opinion about the role that we play. I always consider myself as a consultant, a solution provider, damage controller, fire fighter and even a counsellor and an advisor. To be able to play such roles wearing such diverse hats, one has to have the qualities that are intrinsic, fundamental, central, essential and basic in any recruiter. Such as an enquisitive mind, good planner, a great thirst for information, basic common sense, well informed, knowledgable, subject matter expert and the list goes on. Consider this, how can you possibly talk to a client or a candidate convincingly about ERP when you are not in a position to differentiate between SAP and ASAP? A good recruiter is someone who can talk on any subject or atleast has an opinion or something to say on the subject. A good recruiter must have a gift of the gab, suave and good communicator. But the best recruiter are those whom I call as agressive listener. Listening ability is a very critical quality a recruiter must posses. Until you develop or acquire the habit of listening you cannot expect to hone or improve upon your knowledge or understand what is required or what is being said. Listening alone is not the end but the mean to achieving higher success. Listening must be accompanied by the ability to analyse what is being communicated - verbal or non verbal, intended or unintended, and the steps following that are - analysing and understading, and storing and recollecting the information as and when required or desired, and using the right or optimal amount to the right audience at the right time and right place.
The recruiter now is on his way to the office and even while commuting he constantly receive calls on his handphone and those that he could not talk to, he will try his best to return their calls when he reaches the office.
Once in the office, in my case, I will normally start of by checking my inbox, scan for any mails that requires my immediate attention and take necessary action, else keep the mails in the inbox and tackle them in awhile. Firstly, I need to gather my thoughts, plan for the day and prioritise my acitivities. I plan either by jotting down the activities using my writting pad or in cases which are time specifics, I would normally use my 'Tasks' option in MS Outlook. Because of the adhoc activities and the busy schedule the whole day, using 'Tasks' becomes life saving. This is the best way by which I generally do not missed any pre scheduled appointments. A good recruiter must be a good disciplinarian and what I meant by this is that, one must divide the day into activities, acitivities must be time bound and one must stick as close to the alloted time for each activity as much as possible and one must discipline oneself to try and adhere to the plan, afterall we only have 8-10 hours in a day in the office. Activities can broadly be classified into:
- Reading mails
- Replying mails
- Check sent mails (for any critical mail sent and for which reply is expected or required)
- Go through the pending requirements
- POA
- Sourcing - Check databank, Job sites, etc
- Allot time for new requirements
Besides the above activities one must keep in mind the calls - receive calls and make calls and which can sometime make up for more than half of your day.

We will talk in length about the activities some other day and also discuss and share the tools that every recruiter must possess or have acces to. For today, I guess this should do.

BTW, before logging out from my work station, I normally jot down the activities that I need to accomplish or attend to tommorrow and leave it on my desk and the next morning the cycle continues.