How to stand out from 1,999 others

Guest blog from ACR Recruitment Partner Nel Woolcott

What do you do when your CV is one of 2,000 – and there are just 25 advertised jobs?

That’s the sobering snapshot of job hunting in Peterborough today. 

PJ Care advertised 25 jobs at its multi-million pound new care centre in Bretton Way. The first round of recruitment will see the appointment of nurses, care assistants, chefs, kitchen assistants, housekeepers, maintenance staff, receptionists and admin staff.

After advertising the positions, the company was inundated with an incredible 2,000 applications.

Such a big response hit the headlines. I was invited onto BBC Radio Cambridgeshire recently to discuss what job seekers must do to make their CV stand out in these circumstances.

My advice was centred around tailoring CVs to meet the requirements of the role. It’s simple advice, given to all our candidates, but it’s effective. Dissect the job ad and description and then highlight relevant experience to put yourself in the running.

From a Peterborough recruiter’s point of view, we’re delighted to see such a substantial influx of new jobs – the centre will eventually employ around 180 staff. And there’s further good news with the announcement of new jobs being created at Serco.

The backdrop to all this is, of course, that unemployment in Peterborough reached a 17 year high in February.

But investment of this type in the city is a real demonstration of business confidence which, I hope, will help give others the assurances they need to start looking to the future.

Moments of truth

I was invited by the Royal Bank of Scotland to address a group of business people on the subject of customer retention. My credentials? My proud admission that we are still working today with businesses and people who were among our first clients and candidates when the business was established back in 1995.

From the beginning, I was passionate about recruiting, not selling - and everyone in the ACR team shares that ethos. We’re all commercially aware but our focus is firmly on customer service.

That isn’t always easy. We have two sets of customers, our clients and our candidates, and keeping them both happy can be a balancing act. But it is one we strive to perform.

During my presentation, I quoted Jan Carlson, president and CEO of Scandinavian Airline Systems (SAS) in the 1980s and early 90s. He popularised the concept of ‘moments of truth’ for business.

A moment of truth, according to his philosophy, was a contact between a customer and an employee. In his case that might have been a passenger checking in at the airport or being served during the flight. Each moment of truth was an opportunity to meet, and if possible, exceed a customer’s expectation for quality and service.

Every business has moments of truth. We identified ours in the early days of the business. They have changed as the industry has moved on and the internet has played a much bigger role. But we still have them – as every business should.

For candidates it’s about acknowledging receipt of a CV, their visit to our office, a follow up phone call after an interview, for instance.

For clients it’s about regular meetings, appropriate feedback and invitations to our regular employment law seminars.

We have created further moments of truth by introducing an initiative called ‘touches’. Recruitment partners are required to make and measure high quality customer contact.

At every moment of truth, we maintain our professionalism which is also reflected through our branding, our marketing, IT systems and the added value we offer to both sets of customers.

Our corporate social responsibility agenda provides further opportunity for customer, and potential customer, contact.

Preparing for the talk made me think about exactly what ACR does do to retain customers. Most of it is so built in to the way we do business we barely notice it anymore – it’s just ‘what we do’.

But it was a great revision exercise and one I felt worth sharing here…

The Budget fall out

As I write, one of our management team Nel Woolcott is at a Budget breakfast event held by the Stamford Chamber of Commerce, gauging the reaction of local businesses to the Chancellor’s announcements yesterday.

Generally, I was encouraged by his speech, seeing it as positive for businesses and job creation.

The changes to Corporation Tax will, I believe, encourage businesses to invest in their workforce. Speeding up year-on-year reductions creates certainty for businesses. That, in turn, encourages growth which is, of course, good for the recruitment sector.

The change in the 50p rate of tax, albeit delayed for a year, sends a positive message to home-grown entrepreneurs that the UK rewards success and job creators – again good for our sector.

Of course, no budget ever ticks every item on everyone’s wish list.

Mr Osborne did miss some opportunities to give businesses a boost and so, in the medium and long term, encourage job creation. I would have liked to have seen specific measures introduced to cut EU red tape In fact, any simplification of regulations would have been welcomed, particularly surrounding the agency workers’ and the pensions auto-enrolment system. And an employers National Insurance holiday for businesses employing young people would, I believe, have gone some way to ease the spiralling burden of youth unemployment.

But I guess, we can’t have everything – at least not in one go!

Look out for us on the national news!

It started out as a telephone conversation with a Channel 4 News reporter wanting to glean information for a jobs market report.

Then came the request to do some filming in our Park Road office.

Before we knew it, recruitment partner Karen Dykes was in front of the camera discussing market challenges, the benefits of voluntary work and the current jobs situation for school leavers in the area!

The focus of the report, for this Sunday’s news programme, was a 15 year old student from Jack Hunt School in Peterborough. The news crew followed him compiling his CV and having careers discussions in school.

Then they came to our offices where Karen spent some time offering the teenager some pointers on his CV and discussing how beneficial work experience can be when it comes to job hunting in the future.

Karen was then interviewed further with her views about various aspects of the job market filmed.

Of course, we don’t know which sections will make it into the report – but we will all be in front of the television on Sunday at 6.25pm to find out!

Demand for digital marketing skills in city outstripping supply

For months, if not longer, the talk in recruitment has been about the disproportionately high number of candidates in comparison to vacancies. But, in one sector at least, the scales have tipped in the other direction.

The demand for digital marketing specialists is on the increase – and, from conversations we’ve been having with other business people and clients, we suspect it’s not a short term spike but the beginning of a long term trend.

For the uninitiated, and I should probably count myself in that number!, digital marketing incorporates search engine optimisation, Google analytics, pay per click advertising and the whole range of social media – Facebook, Twitter and the like.

More and more companies are getting involved in these forms of marketing. But they need people to manage it. And that’s where they’re struggling to find people. Online marketing is still in its infancy so the number of experts in the field is still relatively small. Demand is outstripping supply.

We’re particularly noticing this in Peterborough where media and marketing is one of the growth sectors. We are getting more and more requests from companies, large and small, for people with a background in digital marketing and finding the right calibre of people is a challenge.

I hope that this is something schools, universities and other training centres will pick up on so that, eventually, we will start to see a healthy flow of people with the right skill sets to match these kind of vacancies.

In the meantime, if you have an online marketing background or expertise, congratulations – you’re in demand!

Recruitment drive launched in the city

We are delighted to be part of a new recruitment drive launched in the city.

A long standing client has announced expansion plans which will create a total of 30 new vacancies. These are support roles for the contact centre so the hours are Monday to Friday 8.30am to 5pm rather than shift work. The aim is to fill the roles between now and the summer – some on a permanent basis and others on contract.

This is perfect timing for the city. As in so many places, the number of available jobs has been in continuing decline. The announcement that a raft of new roles is being created can only be a positive – not just because it offers new opportunities to job seekers but also as a demonstration that companies are investing in the city and in the future.
We’re now working with the client to pinpoint the right people for the new roles which will be supporting contact centre staff.

Again this sits perfectly in Peterborough which has become something of a ‘service centre’ hub over the last few years. The skills – customer service, admin and IT - are there among the workforce to be utilised.

We’re now busy organising an open event for next Friday. We will be inviting candidates whose CVs match the required skills to attend on an appointment basis. Those we deem suitable, both in terms of their skill set and their personality, will then be passed through to the client.

This is a really exciting opportunity for us, job seekers and the city – I shall look forward to reporting back on how it goes.

Jobless figures up but hope on the horizon

The good news is that opportunities in the job market do exist but, being at the front line, we know they’re not particularly easy for job seekers to find, or secure.
The latest rise in unemployment reflects this.

Figures, covering the three months until November 2011, show an increase of 118,000 in the number of people out of work. The jobless total, according to the Office of National Statistics, now stands at 2.68 million.

While the private sector has continued to create new jobs it is not in sufficient numbers to compensate for the 67,000 shed by the public sector. So the scales don’t balance. As I said, the opportunities do exist but not in the quantities necessary to reverse the upward trend.

The outlook may appear gloomy but we have noticed some sectors bucking the trend. And, according to news from the industry body Recruitment and Employment Confederation, we’re not the only ones.

There is strong demand in IT, for office professionals and in engineering and surveys reveal encouraging signs in terms of hiring strategies for the coming months.
Around 40,000 permanent positions each month are being filled by recruitment agencies – which does prove we’re working hard for our candidates!

Of course, I’m realistic. The job market is tough at the moment. And the general thinking is that it will continue to get worse before stabilising later in the year.
In the meantime, we are doing what we can to help lessen the impact of the difficult economic times on both clients and candidates.