8 Hints & Tips for the Jobseeker of 2015

How do you make sure 2015 is your best year yet? When you make your New Year’s Resolutions, think about these simple tips to give yourself the best chance possible, whatever stage of the recruitment process you are at.

Stay positive - Job Searching

1. If grammar and formatting aren’t your strong suit, get a few friends to help you with your CV. 65% of employers said that poor spelling and grammar is the most likely reason for them to bin a CV. You can’t fall at the first hurdle; it’s too small!

2. Updating your skills is a great way to make yourself more valuable on the job market. There are many free and online courses you can take, where you can practice your professional skills in a safe place. This extra training will help convince a potential employer that you are driven and committed, as well as having tangible, relevant skills. Here are some easy ways to upskill in your spare time.

3.  If you have a good relationship with a previous employer, arrange to meet up for a chat about your options. If they don’t know of a vacancy that suits you, they can surely put you in touch with valuable people in the industry.

Stay cool – The Interview

4. The signals your body language displays leave an impression of your personality in the interviewer’s mind, and this impression will inevitably affect their decision. Make sure your body is saying the right thing by using this guide, which will show you some handy tricks to help you exude interview confidence.

5. Nobody’s perfect, and giving nothing but a glowing account of yourself may come across as false. Without selling yourself short, be willing to talk about your weaknesses. Show them that you are shrewd enough to identify and accept them, and then that you have the drive to improve them.

6. It’s not enough to glance over a company’s website, so do your research. Find out about their achievements in the last year, their work ethic, their history and their vision for the future. How can you be a part of their growth?

Stay humble – Responding to an offer

7. Once you have accepted an offer, send a formal letter of acceptance. You will find plenty of templates online to help you with this. Taking the time to do this will show your new company how grateful you are, and how seriously you will take your new position.

8. If you’re going to decline, do so gracefully. You never know, you might reapply! You may need their help in the future, so maintain the relationship and take the opportunity to learn from the interview experience. You want their memory of you to be a good one.

New Year’s Resolution; three easy ways to upskill yourself outside of work

A skills gap is set to rear its ugly head next year, but some employers are still reluctant to train their staff. This may be because they are afraid that employees will move on and take their skills to another employer (or worse a competitor), but according to research, they shouldn’t be so worried. 57% of ‘upskillers’ develop themselves in the hope that they may get promoted with their current employer. As we approach 2015, we’ve decided to put together a few ideas for how you can develop your own career and skillset to make yourself especially valuable in the New Year.

Here’s how to make sure you are part of the 66% of UK employees who are seeking additional education or training outside the workplace. Below are three of the top skills globally recognised as needing development in the workplace, and ways in which you can easily improve them without significantly eating into your spare time:

1. Learn to lead

According to KGWI 41% of workers want to improve their leadership skills, and one of the best ways to do this is to become a school governor. You don’t have to be a parent, just passionate about education in your area. Not only will it develop your skills in analysing data, dealing with budgets, performance management and employment issues, but it will also give you the chance to make a difference in your community.

Developing your boardroom skills as a school governor is a great opportunity to focus on the strategic, innovative aspects of leadership, without having to worry about administrative tasks. Even better, this won’t take up all your time; not only do most school’s governing bodies meet just twice a term but, under employment law, employers may give employees who are school governors reasonable time off to carry out their duties.

2. Learn a language

As more and more organisations branch out globally, KGWI found that 64% of workers want to add value to their skillset by becoming bilingual. There are many ways you can do this. One of the most popular (and free!) is an app called Duolingo; it teaches you in a similar way to how you learn to speak as a child, making it very logical and easy to learn quickly.

If your organisation is international, show your commitment and keenness to improve by asking to spend some time in another country. This is by far the best way to learn; most people can become fluent in a language in just three months if they throw themselves in at the deep end! But there are some more passive learning techniques for you if you’re a busy bee, including watching films, listening to audiobooks and reading children’s books in your chosen language. You will be surprised how quickly and subconsciously you can pick it up once you begin surrounding yourself with it.

3. Read more

All jobs require some form of written communication. Luckily, improving your written communication skills can be effortless; just read! Find just half an hour before bed each night, on your commute or in a coffee shop to read a book. Your literacy will grow without you noticing it, and this will automatically improve your own writing skills.

These are the types of skills which will set you apart from other jobseekers. Demonstrate your initiative and thirst for knowledge, and show the employers of 2015 that you are exactly what they are looking for!

Life-Work balance; employers and employees need to get their priorities straight

“Once upon a time, work took place outside of the home during designated hours. Today, that world is a fairy tale” – Ron Friedman, CNN

Work-life balance is a topic consistently dividing opinions. With developments such as UK flexible working laws, Germany’s proposed anti-stress legislation and findings regarding work related mental health issues, it has never been more important. 39% of 2013-14 work related illnesses were caused by work stress, depression or anxiety and over 40% of employees neglected other aspects of their life. Whilst an employee issue, employers need to increase their understanding and realise that an effective leadership response could be hugely beneficial. 

A number of factors have contributed to the issue’s prominence, perhaps most critically: the increasingly global business environment (time zone disparity), flexible working and the consistently accelerating integration of technology into the workplace. As a result the ‘9-5 working day’ is growing outdated, whilst the line between work and home life is becoming increasingly blurred; thus giving birth to the ‘always on’ culture that plagues many employees. Both employees and employers are culpable, and whilst neither can have total control of the relationship, improvements can be made.

What can employees do?

With 30% of UK employees experiencing a mental health problem each year, action is clearly required. Long hours are stressful enough, but those continuously planning and thinking about work when they get home, never truly leave the office. Therefore, it is important to have hobbies, interests and activities that they can escape to in their free time. In addition, employees should take regular breaks at work and time away to re-energise; if they have set limited annual leave, they should try to stagger it across the year. One idea championed by many is to only respond to texts and phone calls when out of office, ignoring emails. This way, people only contact you if issues can’t be sorted out independently or if they’re desperate. Helen Taylor (Head of HR, The Instant Group) advised: “when you do take time out, leave work at work, you won’t deliver anything meaningful and reading emails endlessly will prevent you from having a good break”.

When working, time management can be a crucial tool and Helen Taylor suggests that “...we often get caught up completing ‘easy’ tasks; using our best hours for the most important tasks is key”. By working smarter, they may be able to avoid working longer. If employees feel taken advantage of with unreasonable workloads/deadlines, they need to communicate this with management. 

What can employers do?

Only 13% of employees worldwide are engaged in their work, with twice as many disengaged/hostile. Richard Straub (ex-IBM Executive) writes: “Instead of liberating the creative and innovative energy of employees, blind processes and rigid hierarchies hold them down”. Businesses need to embrace flexible working and trust employees, therefore empowering them to work how and when they are most effective. This gives employees the freedom to handle distracting personal tasks as and when required, enabling a sharper focus on work. 

The required transformation is to measure overall output, not input. People work best in different ways; if an employee is exceeding their targets, does it matter if they visit the supermarket at 3pm on a Wednesday? Outdoor clothing company Patagonia enabled staff to set their own hours, use on-site day-care and take regular breaks for exercise; their profits tripled in the last 5 years. Friedman concludes that: “Instead of ‘work-life balance’, organisations are better off empowering employees to integrate work and life in ways that position them to succeed at both”.

Market confidence for 2015 as apprenticeships grow

Since the release of the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement, UK PLC has breathed easy with the prospect that the British economy is set to grow by 3% in 2015, much higher than previously predicted (+2.4%). As we continue to climb out of recession we have come to expect impressive growth in the UK economy, but not quite on this scale! In October, unemployment fell below the two million mark for the first time since the financial crisis, with a record 30.8 million people in work.

Despite this growth, there has been a sudden loss of momentum for contract roles. According to APSCo, the temporary jobs market had slowed recently, although permanent jobs are still strong (driven mostly by growth in Engineering and IT). This growth in the IT sector has been profound, and probably largely due to the ‘app economy’; developers and programmers in particular are in high demand. Another major factor pushing this growth is the threat of cyber-attacks on businesses and their data, which, though awful, does offer the IT industry a silver lining; a huge number of jobs have been created to combat hacking.

Looking to the future however, APSCo’s Chief Executive Ann Swain notes ‘as we approach the end of what has been an incredibly buoyant year… it seems clear to me that there is just one real challenge ahead’. The dark cloud over 2015 she refers to is the impending talent shortages…

The demand for professional talent has reportedly risen by almost a third, and can only be resolved by reassessing talent attraction strategies. Encouragingly, however, this is beginning to emerge. The CIPD reported that two million apprenticeships have been created in the last four years and, steadily, the outdated attitude that somehow apprenticeships are less valuable than a university degree is dissolving. More and more young people are questioning the automatic university route, hoping to earn while they learn and set themselves apart from the millions of Bachelor degree holders. But more can be done; Katerina Rudiger, Head of Skills and Policy Campaigns for the CIPD, spoke of a “need to incentivise schools to promote apprenticeships more strongly as a pathway into work, and more generally, to improve links between business, schools and colleges to help prepare young people for work”. Along with the announcement that post-graduate students are now able to obtain government-backed student loans of up to £10,000, the hope is for a boost in. Minister of State for the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills Nick Boles commented that “apprenticeships have a vital role to play in supporting the long term economic plan… ‘[they] are a solid route into some of the country’s most prestigious professions.”

Though not expected for some time, all this may well result in higher average earnings growth in the future. As salary growth remains markedly below 2014’s employment growth, it is unlikely that we will feel the effects of a healing economy just yet. The CIPD predict that, as there is a strong supply of labour at current salary levels, it will take a while before employers are compelled to raise salaries, but as the year closes, we feel there is much to look forward to. 

Head, shoulders, knees and toes; a jobseeker's guide to interview body language

As an introduction to our upcoming guide for jobseekers on interview body language, we have explored the basics of what you can do to ensure your body is telling the right story.

As you prepare for your interview, Googling buzzwords and choosing the best examples of your successes to relate, you must remember that an enormous 55% of communication is body language. 38% is based on the tone of your voice, and just 7% comes from your words. So, to perform your best in an interview, you must choose what your body is saying as carefully as you choose what you are saying.

Here’s a head to toe guide to walk you through the basics:

When you are under pressure your body does what it can to help, relieving or exorcising this stress by moving, fidgeting, tapping or via other forms of expression. When you deliberately stop your face or voice from showing unease, your body compensates by releasing the tension elsewhere. The trick is not to force yourself to bottle up tension but to manage how to express it, even turn it to your advantage.

Making a conscious effort to use certain body language to appear comfortable or bold is not a failsafe; it would be naïve to suggest that holding eye contact slightly longer than usual will immediately win over an interviewer, but using the tricks and techniques outlined in our upcoming guide will free you up to be yourself, removing obstacles of nervousness, letting you breathe easy and flourish in the interview environment.

Wherever I lay my hat, that’s my home office

Marissa Mayer – appointed last year as President and CEO of Yahoo - received a lot of press coverage following her decision/ultimatum to come and work in the office or work for another company. The announcement provoked a debate on productivity and the merits or otherwise of working from home. From where I sat (in my office, at home of course) the discussion that followed mostly missed the more central issues of trust and indirect or intrinsic benefits.

I should declare that I am fortunate enough to enjoy the best of both worlds; an employer that trusts me to work at home as much as I want, and still generous enough to provide me with an office when I prefer (or when it’s half term, when the travelling is easier and the noise levels at home increase). This isn’t just an arrangement that significantly aids my productivity, it’s one I value strongly and see as a key benefit of working for Moog. So a couple of days a week I substitute most of the two and a half hours I would spend commuting for more time working, and benefit from a bit more sleep, and quite a lot less money spent on petrol.

As a reward person, I’ve always been an advocate for giving people what they value, if you can, rather than what you want them to have. To that end, I’ve argued for ‘light touch’ regulation on areas like job titles, working from home and dress code, and that we all end up better off sanctioning the occasional abuse by the minority rather than letting this fear of abuse define what we give.

It’s a philosophy that has more than once got me into trouble. I set up a switch to a smart casual dress code with one former employer who had a sizable call centre where it was proving difficult to find and then keep staff. I reasoned that a causal dress policy might make jobs there a little more appealing and a little less costly. It led to an email from the CEO that you could see had been typed with such venom the keyboard must have sunk about an inch into the desk. I was to be held personally responsible for the decline in productivity that was now inevitable, as well as the lost customers he thought would recoil at the sight of men in M&S chinos and polo shirts. I suppose I didn’t help by replying and speculating how much more successful Richard Branson or Bill Gates could have been had they invested in a tie. Branson’s take on the changes at Yahoo were pretty clear – you have to trust your staff.

Google’s CFO Patrick Pichette talks about there being “something magical about sharing meals” but for me there’s something difficult to swallow in Google’s anti-telecommuting stance given their products, and it makes me wonder if it’s really just about money and control. Alexandra Shulman, British editor of Vogue, laid out a defence of Meyer’s actions, but it’s worth noting how in the last two paragraphs it all comes down to her desire for her team to be accessible on her terms, as and when she wants them to be.

And what about the money? Well, it’s worth heeding what happened to Robert Propst, the man who designed the first work cubicles for Herman Miller. His Action Office designs aimed to increase efficiency, privacy, and create a better work environment. It didn’t take long for some companies to see that his designs could be modified to fit many more employees into the smallest possible space. It had the opposite effect to what Propst had intended, and he later described cubicle-based workplaces as a “monolithic insanity”. Clearly the relationship between proximity and productivity needs to be explored with care.

- Alan Measures, Director of Reward at Moog Inc.

Alan Measures is Global Director of Reward at Moog Inc, a worldwide designer, manufacturer, and integrator of precision control components and systems. He has over 20 years of reward experience from a variety of industries, and has worked for Boots The Chemists, Zurich Financial Services/Allied Dunbar, Bass Brewers, Hewitt Associates, Prudential and Marathon Oil.

Alan holds a B.Sc. degree in economics from the University of Wales. A member of the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development (CIPD), he spent 8 years as a tutor on CIPD reward courses and is a member of the CIPD Reward Forum.

In his spare time Alan endures a life long affiliation to West Ham United, while his family and neighbours endure his passion for playing the guitar and the mistaken belief that volume is a substitute for talent.

Simply seeking superlatives? Try less and achieve better customer service.

What a customer wants is very simple; their query or issue resolved as quickly and easily as possible, with minimal effort on their part. But with 77% of organisations reporting that their customers’ issues are resolved in one go, and just 40% of their customers reporting the same, it is clear that something is missing. A CEB study entitled ‘Blinded by Delight; Why Service Fails and How to Fix It’ identified two key attitudes which, though unusual, ought to be prioritised over the status quo if businesses’ positive perceptions of good service and their customers’ actual experiences are to match:

1. Customers are far more likely to penalise a company for poor behaviour than praise it for good behaviour.

2. Customers are just as happy when their expectations are met as when they are exceeded.

What this tells us is that customers prefer prevention to cure, and that simply meeting their expectations is all the customer wants and needs to be happy. So is a rearrangement of our priorities what is needed? Should we focus not on customer satisfaction (a variable conclusion) but on efficiency (which will invariably result in a satisfactory conclusion)? As the CEB study suggests, managing and tracking how much effort an interaction costs a customer will tackle the issue at its source. In order to do this, we need to better understand these two attitudes:

1. Customers are far more likely to penalise a company for poor behaviour than praise it for good behaviour.

The CEB study found that ‘96% of customers who put forth high effort in service interactions are more disloyal, while only 9% of those with low-effort interactions are more disloyal’. The number of customer service horror stories massively outnumber the good stories, which proves that word-of-mouth is far more eager to penalise than to praise. This peculiar dynamic casts a bad light on society but is a powerful piece of knowledge which businesses can use to reimagine their customer service. So why this imbalance? When a customer has to re-contact a company, the context of the interaction is pre-emptively negative, as opposed to the neutral position they entered with when they first gave custom. Therefore, businesses do not have to outperform themselves and their competitors in order to serve their customers well; they have only to make no mistakes.

2. Customers are just as happy when their expectations are met as when they are exceeded.

Unfortunately, the CEB study found that ‘most companies underestimate the value of simply meeting customer expectations and overestimate the value of exceeding them’. This is unnecessary, as customers are in fact expecting no more than you can reasonably give. They expect no less either, but it should be easy enough to take advantage of small expectations. 

‘Customer service by its very nature is reactive’, but this is okay as long as the customer has to expend only minimal effort. They will be loyal to and promote a company that makes things easy over a company that manages customer service traditionally by apologising profusely, making other (often unwelcome) offers and affecting extreme politeness. Rather than meeting customers halfway with eager apologies, let’s go all the way with humility and simplicity. That’s really all they want.

UK workers are ‘taking possession of their lives’ as unemployment falls and salaries rise

Despite ‘the spectre of economic stagnation’ haunting Europe, the UK now has one of the fastest growing and stable economies in the world. Unemployment rates have fallen to an almost six-year low, with a record 30.8 million Britons now in work; that’s 694,000 more than this time last year.

Salaries have continued to rise over the last few months, although the rate of salary growth has slowed to its lowest pace since records began in 2001. However, now that the growth in average pay for UK workers has overtaken inflation for the first time in five years, our economy has earned itself an enormous silver lining. Governor of The Bank of England Mark Carney said the UK was witnessing “the start of real pay growth”, and permanent and contract workers alike should be very encouraged by the recent figures.

At first, we attributed the labour market’s growth to the widespread increase in part-time and self-employed workers. However, since June 2013 full-time positions have grown rapidly, demonstrating the ‘highest hiring optimism in Europe’ as employers feel confident enough to grow their permanent headcount. A huge 13,000 people per week are going back into work, according to Work & Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith in a BBC News interview. He said that “if you’ve been in work for a year or so, the average rise is 3.7% in salaries, which hides a trend that once you’re in work, you start to rise much faster”. “Almost all” of the 694,000 new workers are full time as people seek security in their work, according to Duncan Smith, who said that these developments are about “human change”, giving people “a real sense of getting on again and beginning to take possession of their lives”.

Of course, salary reports vary between industries. The Accounting & Finance industry, for instance, has grown very competitive, giving employers room and time to be more discerning when hiring. However, many bonuses have been reported as unsatisfactory, encouraging workers to seek higher base salaries.

The IT industry is displaying a lot of hiring confidence, particularly with permanent hires across big data and analytics. For instance, contract IT roles earn £360 on average per day.

Salaries are rising across the board for permanent HR roles, especially in L&D, talent and OD. As regulations and strategies are reworked, there is a huge drive for development and change amongst HR departments, which is in turn pushing for more senior, experienced specialists, forcing salaries to become ever more competitive.

HR in 2020; the technological advantages and security challenges

As employees’ expectations change and workplaces become increasingly diverse, HR needs to be prepared to respond to the developments ahead. The HR World's upcoming round table debate, ‘HR in 2020; are we ready for emerging global, technological and demographic change?’, will explore these impacts on the workplace of tomorrow, which will have to ready itself for the challenges that organisational change brings. Among other things, the debate will cover:

How will talent attraction and employer brand change with technology?

Rapid expansion and improvements in technology, in conjunction with growing adoption rates, have led businesses to consider how this can be incorporated into certain processes. As video interviews and sourcing candidates via social media becomes more and more common, the hiring process has already begun to embrace technology, but is this just the beginning? Will candidates soon be expected to provide video CVs, for instance? Will this be a more effective means of finding the right candidates?

Another extraordinary development is the emergence of gamification (the use of ‘gaming mechanics’, such as rewarding employees with points,the filling of a progress baror virtual currency to engage employees in solving problems). This is an increasingly popular example of companies embracing technology in order to achieve business goals.

Perhaps the most successful technological development has been the widespread use of LinkedIn. Most individuals are now expected to have a profile, revolutionising self-promotion and recruitment, and engaging the tech-savvy Gen Y. However, it is widely acknowledged that more needs to be done to attract this demographic, and it will be interesting to see how this develops.

The IT and Legal issues surrounding flexible working via mobile and the ‘bring your own device’ approach

The traditional 9-5 office-based week steadily becoming an outdated concept, and how and when people work is constantly changing. Although this has many benefits in terms of work/life balance and job satisfaction, flexible working is tough for managers to get right. If you have a portable device which you can work from, can choose your hours and can work from home, then how can you keep up with where the line is drawn? With this approach, the boundaries required for a healthy work/life balance become harder to define.

HR’s latest buzzword ‘bring your own device’ (BYOD), that is, using your own personal laptop, mobile phone or tablet to work away from the office, may be the answer to a lot of problems, but it poses many security and policy risks. HR should take proactive steps to fully understand and monitor this approach. Using social media in the workplace, particularly on personal devices, is an issue The HR World debate will explore in depth, asking; should employees be accessing these at work? What happens if they are partaking in inappropriate activity in work time or on business accounts?

The cultural shift required as businesses develop globally

As the marketplace explores international relationships, HR will be very busy managing and integrating an increasingly diverse work force. Different work practices and organisational thinking will require some proactive, transformational thinking, and The HR World debate will aim to put a finger on specific approaches, perhaps even defining a new breed of HR.

To discuss these issues and more, The HR World will host a round table dinner on the 11th November led by Helen Norris, Head of HR Partners at Nationwide Building Society, and attended by a collection of senior HR thought leaders. If you would like more information about The HR World’s round table debates and would like to get involved in future events, then please contact Caroline Beer on caroline.beer@TheHRWorld.co.uk or 07772 136 284.

Sustainable Solutions Series Edition #5: Social Media

How can you utilise digital to attract and retain talent, rather than by simply raising salaries?

In response to recent Labour Market Statistics, this series will offer some examples of ways in which recruiters and employers can keep well resourced during periods of low candidate availability. In this, the fifth in our series, we explore the value of recruiting via social media.

Recruitment magazine The Recruiter advised that word of mouth is the most effective way of promoting your business and products, but social media can take it one step further. As we know, we must take advantage of this channel as candidates become more digitally adept; 15 million people in the UK are on LinkedIn, the recruiter’s main platform, so if you promote your company and your employer brand via social media, it will not only reach more of your target audience, it will also establish you as a modern, adaptable business, in tune with the rhythms of communication of today. Currently, 29% of candidates now use social media as their primary tool for job seeking, and 92% of companies use or plan to use social media for recruiting. In the face of these numbers, recruiters need to take advantage of this tool.

By recruiting and promoting your employer brand via social media, you can make the most of:

• The best way to reach passive candidates
• An easy way for candidates to communicate with your company using a medium they’re comfortable with
• An accessible resource of information
• Access to the new online generation, who will become your future customer base
• Personalising your business by giving it a voice
• Reducing time-to-hire
• Increasing both the quantity and quality of applications
• Increasing staff referrals
• … and it’s mostly free! Of course, premier membership of networks such as LinkedIn requires a fee, but the world of social media is probably the quickest way to post new jobs to thousands of potential applicants without paying a penny.

Consistent, attractive social media activity takes time to build and maintain, but as your online presence grows and develops, you can sit back and allow social ‘sharing’ to do its work. Social media, as an alternative method of attraction and retention to just raising salaries, has proved to be one of the most successful strategies. A company is often judged as a potential employer by its online presence; the efficiency and consistency of your online activity reflects how the business operates on all levels. Businesses should not underestimate how much their online profile says about them; if we weren’t meant to judge a book by its cover, it wouldn’t have one.

Want us to do it all for you? Call our Client Services Director Steve Phillips on 0117 312 6767 or steve.phillips@resource-management.co.uk who will be able to offer you a social media solution tailored to your specific needs and style.