Recruitment Archives - Headhunters International

June24619788 September 5, 2019 No Comments

CV Key Skills

Everyone knows you never get a second chance to make a first impression. But what some job seekers do not realise is that a CV is the first impression you leave on a prospective employer so it is no exaggeration to say that a bad CV can ruin your chances of being hired.

It is also important to have a CV because of the following 3 reasons:

It is a Record: Keeping a CV and updating it regularly will help you keep track of all of your minor accolades, many of which you might forget if you don’t organise them all in one place.
It Demonstrates Professionalism: Skills aren’t everything when you are on the job market. Often it isn’t about what you can do so much as how you can do it. Companies want employees who present themselves as polished professionals.
It is a Reference: For employers, a CV is helpful simply for keeping track of candidates. Your CV is the point of reference that keeps you visible to employers during the hiring process.

What Do Recruiters Look For in a CV?

Successful CVs stand out for many reasons, but recruiters primarily look for the following traits when evaluating the document you give them:

Presentation: Aesthetics are the first thing anyone reading your CV will notice. Does it look like a typical, cookie-cutter template? Is it easy to read at a glance? Is the information organised in a thoughtful manner? Is the document clear, efficient and precise? Inconsistent formatting, typos, and uncommon file formats are all quick ways present yourself in a negative light.
Relevance: Employers are interested in the relevant aspects of your professional history. So they probably don’t need to know about your part-time high school job as a car washer or that you are interested in collecting coins unless those things are directly related to the job for which you are applying. Don’t include things just to fill out the CV; every item on your list should be relevant to the task at hand.
Experience: Of course, the contents of your CV are critical too. Employers want to know what experience you have in the profession, or what skills you possess that will help you thrive in the role.

Key Skills to Highlight in Your CV

When putting together a CV, it can sometimes be hard to determine what skills or experiences to include and what to leave off.

The following types of information are relevant examples of what skills to highlight on a CV:

Administration Skills

Arranged meetings with senior management personnel
Distributed and filed new employee paperwork
Contacted customers and suppliers to arrange deliveries and receive orders
Managed transition of data from Microsoft 98 OS to Windows XP
Undertook digitisation project to scan the physical file and transfer to the cloud-based servers.

Communication Skills

Successfully mediated conflicts between staff members
Drafted and distributed interdepartmental memos
Read market reports and trend forecasts and 1-page business abstracts laying out all the key data and conclusions
Evaluated candidates for new positions and wrote brief reviews during hiring process
Recorded minutes of all executive level meetings

Managerial Skills

Oversaw customer service, financial, and administrative operations in the main office
Managed and trained two administrative assistants
Ordered raw materials and managed the receipt of all orders, confirming correct amounts and products
Arranged optimal scheduling for shop floor staff and filled vacancies when employees were sick or on holiday
Coordinated deadlines and completion estimates between customers and production staff

Interpersonal Skills

Managed and trained multiple new staff members
Took charge of account management for several customer accounts
Coordinated business lunches and special events (such as concerts and sporting events) for key clients
Planned and hosted the annual holiday party
Hosted weekly employee lunches with staff members from multiple departments

IT Skills

Coordinated social media marketing campaigns
Built company website using interactive web design elements with HTML and CSS
Oversaw backup of company files to a cloud-based storage service
Managed transition from CD install software to new, scalable SaaS systems
Managed and organised Excel databases with performance analytics data

Problem-Solving Skills

Identified issue in IT systems and provided alternate solutions
Drafted a report providing ways to streamline office functions, which were later implemented by management
Replaced traditional office desks with standing desks for all willing employees, which led to an 8% increase in office productivity
Addressed customer complaints in a timely manner, providing store credit for faulty products
Implemented flexible scheduling and reduced overall energy consumption by 14% in six months.

Creativity Skills

Set up and maintained a company blog online, with more than 5,000 daily visitors
Drafted new design plans for a product that sold more than 1 million units
Designed new labels and logo for the company
Created invitations to the annual holiday party
Designed brochures and product catalogues for distribution by mail.

Finance Skills

Oversaw payroll for more than 80 employees
Paid taxes on both federal and state levels
Utilised Quickbooks for invoicing and accounts payable
Kept track of profitability via Excel spreadsheets
Implemented new credit card payment scanners

How businesses can do more to address Britain’s skilled worker shortage

Lloyds Bank’s Business In Britain survey showed a rise in business confidence, but firms also said that it is getting harder and harder for them to find the staff they need to capitalise on it.

The bank reported that while confidence was at an 18 month high, challenges in hiring were at a ten year high.

A staggering 52 per cent of respondents said they struggled to recruit skilled staff in the last six months.

It should be stated at this point that this is no cynical attempt by Lloyds to garner a bit of cheap publicity. The Business in Britain report is in its 25th year and is put together from the views of 1,500 companies, mostly small and medium sized enterprises that are (as we keep being told) the engines of growth. As such, its findings are worthy of note.

Now, regular readers won’t be surprised to see me using this as yet more evidence of just how stupid, and damaging, the current Government’s approach to immigration is.

Making EU residents feel unwelcome, and pandering to racists, will cause real, and lasting economic damage to this country. They’ve already started to vote with their feet, exacerbating the nation’s yawning skills gap.

However, at the same time, it is also fair to ask whether businesses are doing enough to mitigate the problem themselves, and whether their approach to recruitment isn’t making the difficult situation they identify worse than it otherwise might be.

After all, we were talking about the skills gap before the EU referendum and it would likely have continued to cause problems even had David Cameron’s decision to call it not resulted in an outbreak of collective insanity.

Part of the reason why it continues to be an issue is that businesses are failing to exploit the talent that is under their noses.

For example, I constantly highlight the disability employment gap within these pages. Despite the labour shortages Lloyds references, skilled disabled people can’t find jobs.

According to disability charity Scope, the difference between the rate of employment among able bodied people when compared to that of disabled people currently stands at a staggering 31.3 percentage points.

But it isn’t just disabled people. Unemployment is also markedly higher among black and minority ethnic people, about twice the rate found among white Britons in fact.

Last year, I revealed the results of a TUC study that found that the disparity in incomes between BAME workers and their white workers actually increases the more qualifications they get.

Meanwhile, we constantly see reports highlighting poor treatment of female staff, and of LGBT staff.

What all this indicates is that UK businesses are failing to tap into some substantial pools of talented and skilled workers, failing to make the best of the workers from them when that they do hire them, failing to treat them well.

Part of the problem might be being caused by recruitment agencies. Many firms use them, and they may sub consciously, or even deliberately, exclude certain candidates from shortlists to minimise what they misguidedly perceive as “risk”, all with the aim of keeping their clients happy.

Why Companies Are Turning To Headhunting Firms

There was a time when business leaders resorted to working with headhunters only for the seemingly impossible job searches. Today, companies are changing their perception when it comes to executive search firms with the numbers indicating this trend strengthening over the next decade.

As business and hiring practices continue to evolve, the plight of the headhunter looks to be one of longevity, and business owners may find themselves increasingly reliant on them to fuel their company with fresh talent.

At the same time company leaders are turning an eye towards headhunting firms, they are finding it harder than ever to find good talent using traditional methods. While the value of personnel is better understood and appreciated than ever before, the availability of talent seems more scarce by the minute. Traditionally, internal recruitment teams have filled the vast majority of roles for a company, yet the increasing complexity of today’s job descriptions is proving to be more difficult for corporate recruiters to manage than in years past.

There are simply too many roles at most large companies for a handful of corporate recruiters to adequately recruit for. This is especially true for upper-level positions that may not need to be filled frequently. A corporate recruiter may not have experienced the job search before for these positions.

For a company to have the breadth and range an executive search firm possesses, they would need to employ an entire search firm themselves; fully equipped with the tools, licenses, and operational processes.

Simply put, recruitment firms with specialized teams of recruiters are far more likely to have the experience to find and, more importantly, qualify candidates for specialized roles than corporate recruiters.

Based on the survey responses of nearly 4,000 corporate talent acquisition leaders, 61 percent say their team will stay the same or decrease in size in 2017. One reason for this is companies are warming up to the idea of using search firms for positions that are not commonly filled. While an organization with a large sales team may have no trouble filling average sales roles, the internal recruitment team may struggle to find a director of compensation with the right experience. Not being exposed to the wide range of compensation talent like a headhunter, the internal team is likely to look for individuals with the same job title, and underestimate the importance of the type of experience, varied exposure to both specific and broad-based areas of compensation, and the importance of finding an individual who has worked with a similar company. In the medical field there are general practitioners, and then there are specialists — the headhunter is the specialist.

One clear advantages headhunting firms have over corporate recruiters is the ability to reach out to passive job seekers. Passive job seekers are professionals who are not actively looking for a new job but may be open to new opportunities. Eighty-five percent of professionals in 2017 are open to new opportunities and with recent developments like Linkedin’s “Open Candidate” tool that allows professionals to indicate they are open to conversations with recruiters, the ability to recruit from a company’s competitor is easier than ever for a recruiter. While headhunting firms excel at this, corporate recruiters have limited resources. It takes a much more proactive approach to attract this level of talent than the average active job seeker.

Companies also have a better understanding of the cost of a bad hire these days. Poor hiring decisions can cripple a company’s growth and the data points to bad hires being costlier to an organization than previously thought. Because hiring mistakes are costly, companies are extending their hiring process longer and taking more precautions to guard against making poor personnel choices. This, however, can be a double-edged sword as time-to-hire increases and jobs stay unfilled longer.

While companies are willing to put more effort into finding the right candidate, they still need to fill the jobs in a relatively similar time frame. This is where the speed and efficiency of an executive search firm is attractive to business leaders. The lack of bureaucracy and a focused approach, typically lead to faster time-to-fill and quality candidates.

Top 10 mistakes corporate recruiters make:

Unrealistic job descriptions,
Shotgun approach to marketing jobs,
Recycled job descriptions,
Reliance on dated techniques and processes,
Take time away from hiring managers to explain the job,
Recruit through employees friends,
Too rigid on specs,
Boring communication,
Failure to evolve,
Complacency.

Recruiting and Retaining Top Talent Remains Biggest HR Challenge

In an environment plagued by skills shortages, finding and retaining talent remains the biggest HR challenge in 2018: half (51%) of HR managers say they struggle to find people with the right skills to do the job, according to a new survey by AXELOS, custodian of some of the world’s most sought-after certifications.

Adding to the pressure is an awareness that hiring the wrong external candidate now costs in the region of £17,000* (£16,843, to be precise), according to the 500 HR managers questioned by AXELOS. That sum covers recruitment fees, advertising, assessment of applications, interviews, induction and training (onboarding), and the first three months of salary (£7810); it also factors in such negatives as poor work outputs, loss of productivity, disruption to projects and then the cost of putting things right by recruiting someone new (£9033).

To address the skills gap and prepare their workforce for the digital economy, 41% of businesses now favour training and up-skilling existing employees for new roles, while a similar proportion (41%) say they will recruit entry-level candidates who will receive training once they are in place.

But one-fifth (21%) of businesses say they find it difficult to find the budget to train and up-skill existing employees to meet their needs, and 22% say that it is a struggle to get employees to participate in continued professional development (CPD). Bearing these challenges in mind, 42% of businesses say that promotions for existing employees with relevant skills will be conditional upon no need for further training, while just over a third (36%) of businesses will continue to recruit talent externally.

While these measures might seem expedient, AXELOS warns that organisations that fail to invest in training and CPD for their staff could be damaging their employee brands and even their human capital. This assertion is supported by a separate survey of 1,000 employees, also conducted by AXELOS: over half (55%) of respondents say they would prefer to remain with their current employer, but only if new career and training opportunities are on offer.

Fortunately, digital badges for qualifications and CPD provide some new hope when it comes to both recruitment and retention. In fact, their growing adoption is bringing multiple benefits on both sides of the employer/employee equation.

By engaging in CPD and adopting digital badging for new certifications, employees are demonstrating a commitment to growth and development that will favour their internal mobility. At the same time, digital badges can showcase an individual to existing and potential employers, emphasising the credibility and currency of their professional qualifications. 55% of employees will take a more favourable view of businesses offering CPD and digital badges, saying that they are more likely to remain loyal to an employer that invests in CPD; if it comes to finding a new job, they are likely to see an organisation offering CPD as more attractive.

For the employer, digital badges represent a proven and effective way for HR departments, hiring managers and recruiters to ensure that candidates have up-to-date skills which are relevant to the job in question. At the same time, digital badges enhance employee satisfaction, since they demonstrate the employer’s commitment to investing in improving the skills of its workforce and encouraging loyalty among its employees. 30% of HR managers agree that digital badges motivate employees to participate in CPD.

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