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February 25, 2005
Online recruitment on the rise
An increasing number of employers and job seekers are turning to the Internet to fulfil their employment needs, according to new research.
From Netimperative
The National Online Recruitment Audience Survey (NORAS), conducted by Enhance Media, found that 64% of those applying for a job found online obtained an interview and 51% of those obtaining an interview got a job as a result of the interview.
These figures are up from 59% and 44% in 2004 and show the increasing effectiveness of the internet as a recruitment tool.
NORAS shows that online job seekers broadly mirror the UK population in terms of ethnic background. 83% of candidates are from a white ethnic group (British, Irish, European or other.) 4% are from a black ethnic group, 5% from an Asian ethnic group, 2% mixed and 1% Chinese.
Meanwhile, the report revealed that online job seekers are becoming more experienced. The average work experience of online job seekers has increased year on year to 13 years with the average age being 33.
One in 20 (5%) of those using the internet to look for jobs are Chief Executives, Owners or Directors and 30% are Senior Managers or Managers.
Job seekers also displayed an increasing brand loyalty and knowledge, with the average number of sites visited by a candidate when looking for a job decreasing year on year to 6. 11% of repeat visitors choose to visit a particular site because they have previously got an interview or a job through the site.
NORAS is being supported by industry organisations such as the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB,) the Association of online publishers (AOP) and the Association of Graduate Recruiters (AGR.)
NORAS winter 2005 took place from September to November 2004. Each participant received a detailed demographic profile of their users; this data was collected using Survey.com’s pop-up technology and was conducted among 18,235 job seekers. ABC ELECTRONIC certified Unique User figures in order to provide the site with robust user numbers.
1. job sites participated in the study, including Blue Arrow, fish4jobs, jobs.telegraph.co.uk, mad.co.uk, Times Online - Jobs, and Totaljobs.com
Posted by Mark at 03:36 PM | Comments (0)
February 24, 2005
Consulting candidates vote BLT best Management Consultancy recruitment firm for 4th consecutive year
Over 1,000 management consultancy candidates took part in Top-Consultant.com’s latest annual recruitment channel survey, now in its fourth year of publication. The 2005 results, presented today to an audience of 140 management consultancy recruiters, provide the only comprehensive picture of the changing candidate behaviour that has transformed the management consultancy recruitment sector during the last years.
Amongst the survey results are an assessment of the reach and market share of newspapers, job boards, recruitment agencies, corporate sites and referral schemes for attracting consulting candidates. The detailed findings are to be reported in the next edition of Top-Consultant's sister publication Consulting Times, but for the benefit of candidates and clients the recruitment consultancy rankings are reported here.
2005
RankFirm 2004
Rank1 BLR 2 Michael Page 3= Prism 3= Astbury Marsden 5= Woodhurst 5= Hudson 7= Korn Ferry 7= Heidrick & Struggles 9 Harvey Nash 10= EM Consulting 10= Selecture 10= Hays 10= PSD 10= Freshminds 10= Hoggett Bowers 10= Egon Zehnder
The results reflect feedback from the 1,000+ candidates polled for the survey, predominantly consultants with major consulting firms like Accenture, BCG, BearingPoint, Capgemini, Deloitte, IBM Business Consulting, McKinsey and PA Consulting Group. BLT emerged once again as candidates' preferred recruitment agency, an accolade they have now won four straight years in a row. Candidates praised BLT's professionalism, understanding of the consulting industry and their friendly and helpful staff as key differentiators.
Michael Page, Prism and Woodhurst have again performed strongly and retain top spots in the 2005 survey - whilst Astbury Marsden and Hudson have both built up a strong candidate following during the last year.
Posted by Mark at 03:55 PM | Comments (0)
February 23, 2005
Ingredients for success
Believe in yourself
Match your CV to the job
Approach companies direct
Read the news sections for your industry area. Get yourself knowledgable and enthusiastic.
Be patient, positive, clear-thinking and determined.
Posted by Mark at 05:14 PM | Comments (0)
Ask not what a company can do for you...
Dear Susan,
In my search for work, I have sent out many résumés and had several interviews. I wrote an extensive résumé pouring out my work history. When I go to the interview, I am asked more questions and am often given little time to ask questions myself.
I am bothered by how little information the recruiting companies disclose about themselves during the interviews. Shouldn't the company provide a résumé of its own, stating the history of the company, its accomplishments and a short covering letter regarding its requirements of the employee?
-- In the Dark
Dear In the Dark,
Your question reminds me of the exploits of a young family member who shall remain unnamed. On a quest for summer employment, she dropped off several dozen résumés to prospective employers around town. Ten days went by without a word. When I queried how her follow-up calls were going, she looked astonished. "Why would I call? They have my CV with my contact information on it. If they were interested, they would call me."
That wasn't the first time I had to shatter her illusions and now I'll have to do the same for you. Unless you are Bill Gates or a newly minted orthopedic surgeon, you have to market yourself to the employer, not vice versa. Your role is to convince the company you are indispensable to them and doing your homework before the interview is critical to your sales pitch.
You can research the employer via the company's web site, by searching the company's name on the web, through public documents in the library and via your network. Openings are usually posted on a company's web site, but if it's a small, private company without a site, you can call to request the job requirements well before the interview stage. You'll know then whether you fit the bill and how to present yourself as "the one."
That's how Sara Nixon, a marketing co-ordinator at an international negotiation and coaching firm, landed her job. Ms. Nixon resolved to set herself apart from the competition with an unusual ploy. She created a prototype of a company newsletter complete with a fictional corporate logo, an article about the company's goals and another one about herself.
"I thought, if I were doing the marketing for this company, what would I do?," she said, one year into the job.
Not everyone has the moxie to create a marketing vehicle for a company they haven't worked for yet, especially when in the doldrums of a job search. It's an exhausting, demoralizing business.
Being handed an information packet that includes everything you ever wanted to know about the position and the employer would be lovely. Being given the time to ask a few thoughtful questions during the interview is simply courteous. But going into the process expecting both is setting yourself up for a fall.
Posted by Mark at 05:00 PM | Comments (0)
Average personal debt hits £4,000
The average Briton owed £4,000 in unsecured debt at the end of 2004, 10% more than in 2003, a report suggests.
Market analyst Datamonitor said the 2004 figure is 45% higher than at the start of 2000.
In 2004, the average adult owed £1,302 on credit cards, £1,892 on unsecured personal loans and £812 on overdrafts and motor and retail finance deals.
Datamonitor's calculation is based on industry and official figures and excludes mortgage debt.
Debt build-up
The average £4,000 figure excludes credit card debts which are built up and paid off on a monthly basis.
The level of total personal debt - both secured and unsecured - broke through £1 trillion in July 2004.
Britons are accumulating debt at a faster rate than consumers in the US and many European countries, the Bank of England recently said.
"One of the major reasons behind this strong performance is the fact that the majority of bad debt indicators, such as unemployment, records of mortgage arrears and repossessions and county court judgements remain at their historically-low levels," said Oksana Selezneva, author of the Datamonitor report.
"This has given consumers the confidence to keep on borrowing and the ability to cope with their debt repayments relatively well."
Credit bubble
A number of recent surveys have however highlighted a growth in "problem" debt.
A report by PKF Accountants showed that young people were being forced into bankruptcy after accumulating big personal loan and credit card debts.
PKF's recent survey of Scottish insolvency cases showed that nearly two thirds of personal bankruptcies were among young people under 30, who were using credit to fund lavish lifestyles they could not afford.
However, in the short term, with interest rates and unemployment still low, most commentators do not expect the credit bubble to burst.
The Council of Mortgage Lenders expects repossessions to rise from 6,000 in 2004 to 10,000 this year.
However, this is still very low by historical standards.
Posted by Mark at 04:54 PM | Comments (0)
February 18, 2005
How can I make changes to my credit report?
There is a variety of information held on your credit report from a variety of sources. If any of it is wrong, it could affect your ability to get credit.
Here's how to correct the information held on your report.
The electoral roll
If you have registered to vote and your credit file does not show this, please contact the credit reference agencies listed at the bottom of this article and they will investigate the matter. If you have not registered to vote, you may want to contact your local authority about filling in an electoral registration form.
If you move home you can tell your local authority who will tell credit reference agencies about your change of registration in the course of the year.
Court judgments
If you believe a county court judgment has been recorded incorrectly, you should contact the county court, quoting the case number included on your file. If the judgment was recorded incorrectly the county court will alter their records. Credit reference agencies are told about any such changes within four weeks, but if you give them original court documents, in the form of a Certificate of Satisfaction or Cancellation, they may be able to change their sooner if necessary.
If you have paid a Scottish Decree, you should send Registry Trust (address below) a receipt or a letter from your creditor (known as the pursuer) to confirm your payment.
If you write to Registry Trust Ltd questioning the accuracy of a judgment recorded on your file, asking for an entry to be changed, you should send a cheque for £4.50 to cover their search fee. They will then tell the credit reference agencies about any change to your file.
For judgments made in Northern Ireland, if you provide documents from a plaintiff to confirm a payment, the agencies will change their records. If you have any questions about the accuracy of a judgment recorded on your file, contact the court concerned.
Registry Trust Ltd.
173-175 Cleveland Street
London W1P 5PE
Bankruptcies
If a bankruptcy order against you is annulled (cancelled) or discharged (that is, you have met all terms), you should send a copy of the Annulment Certificate or Order of Discharge to the credit reference agencies. They will then update their records. If your bankruptcy has been annulled they should completely remove any record of it from your file. If your bankruptcy has been discharged a record of it will be kept on your file but it will show that it has been discharged.
Voluntary arrangements
If you have any questions about a record of a voluntary arrangement you should contact the supervisor who dealt with your case. If you send documents from the supervisor to confirm that the information on your file needs to be changed, the agencies will change their records.
Credit accounts
After carefully studying the credit account details (credit cards, loans, mortgages, etc.) on your file, if you believe any information needs to be changed you should write to the lender concerned and ask them to give the correct information to the credit reference agencies.
Searches
Credit reference agencies will delete searches only when they are instructed to do so by the company who searched your file. If you are concerned about the accuracy of a record of a search, you should contact the company which carried out that search.
Linked addresses
Links between your previous addresses, or any addresses you may use for correspondence, may be listed on your credit file. The link will only be broken when the reference agencies are asked to do so by the organisation that created the link.
CIFAS
If you have any questions about a CIFAS record, write to the organisation concerned. If you disagree with that organisation over the information on your file, ask the organisation for details of the scheme for settling disputes.
Financial associations (shared financial responsibility)
If a financial association is shown, and you do not share a financial responsibility with the other person, or if that financial association no longer exists, you should write to the credit reference agencies. They will investigate the matter and make any necessary change to your file.
Aliases
If any names are shown on your credit report that you have never used, you should contact the company listed as providing the other name, or write to the credit reference agency and they will investigate the matter and make any necessary changes to your file.
Information about other people
If you share no financial responsibility with any other person mentioned on your file you can ask the agencies to ‘create a disassociation’. This breaks any connection between your information and theirs and so makes sure their information is removed from your file, and that your information is removed from theirs. To do this you must give the agencies your, and the other person’s, full name and date of birth, details of your relationship and any shared addresses.
To view your personal credit information that lenders are currently basing their credit decisions on, apply online for a credit report from Experian, the UK’s largest credit reference agency, now.
You will also receive a 30-day free trial to the CreditExpert Monitoring Service from Experian.
Click here for a free 30-day trial and a free copy of your credit report
Posted by Mark at 06:05 PM | Comments (0)
February 10, 2005
Valentine's Day Offers and Ideas
Don't miss the Valentine's Day Special.
A host of offers and ideas from Lingerie, Flowers, Weekends away, Champagne, etc.
Posted by Mark at 08:42 PM | Comments (0)
Watch out for fake domains
International characters in domain names leave door open for new phishing trick
Phishers can use a new trick to fool users of Web browsers (currently Opera 7.54, Konqueror 3.2.x., and Mozilla-based Web browsers such as Firefox 1.0) into believing Web addresses. The trick works so well that it can even be used on web pages that are allegedly SSL-protected. An advisory that appeared in the e-mail list Full Disclosure provides a link to a demo that fools users into thinking they are going to paypal.com. The web site even seems to be that of PayPal when the page information is viewed in Firefox; the only thing that doesn't seem right is the content of the web site. In the https demo, the address bar is highlighted in yellow in Firefox. The browser does not issue a warning of an invalid certificate.
Attackers and phishers can use this hole to place the seemingly authentic looking web sites on the Web to collect passwords and credit card numbers. Users hardly stand a chance of finding out that the web site is a fake. In particular, the notice of the validity of the server's certificate, which many service providers offer, does almost no good here. The complete certificate has to be displayed to reveal that the certificate itself may be valid, but not for paypal.com.
The cause of this problem is the support of Internationalized Domain Names (IDN), which allows for country-specific special characters to be used. Since March 1, 2004, German domains have been able to contain umlauts such as ä, ü, and ö when encoded using Punycode. Domain names can also contain Cyrillic characters. Unfortunately, a lower-case Cyrillic ‘a' looks almost the same as the lowercase Latin ‘a'. The only difference is the Unicode.
In the web site referred to, the first a in paypal.com is actually a Cyrillic a (http://www.pаypal.com/). In Unicode, decimal 1072 stands for the Cyrillic a. The link leads to the the address "http://www.xn--pypal-4ve.com" written in Punycode, not to the Internet payment service PayPal. The SSL certificate was also issued for www.xn--pypal-4ve.com and signed by Usertrust.
RFC 3451 mentions the possibility of security problems arising from similar-looking characters (called homographs) in domain names. In May 2002, two Israeli students also pointed out this problem and demonstrated it using Microsoft domains.
Since Microsoft's Internet Explorer currently does not support such internationalized domain names in its standard version, the attack does not work here. But in principle, the problem is not the result of errors in browsers or the resolution of names by name servers. It is not yet clear how this problem will be addressed. Users of Firefox and Mozilla can use a workaround and disable the support for IDN. In about:config (available via the address bar) the can set network.enableIDN to false..
Posted by Mark at 08:23 PM | Comments (0)
Why recruitment advertising is falling away
There could be worrying times ahead for media owners that rely on recruitment advertising.
Jobs data has ceased to enjoy any prominence in the UK business pages, as near full employment under the New Labour Government has been a real pillar of its economic policy.
In the printed world, recruitment advertising is a core revenue stream. It is important for two key markets – the national and regional newspapers and also for the B2B marketplace.
It should not be taken lightly, therefore, when the Advertising Association in its review of advertising expenditure published in January 2005 spends quite so much time in explaining why, despite economic strength, it still expects revenues in 2005 from recruitment advertising to "fall away, moving into the red by the middle of 2006".
They see the reason for this as being quite clear. They expect the development of the online recruitment agencies to significantly impact the demand for printed job ads. With approximately half of all national classified advertising being derived from situation vacant, this substitution will be an important pressure for national and regional advertising revenues.
Already we have seen Emap describe B2B advertising in the UK as "weak". While Emap has significant exposure to the public sector through the Nursing Times, other B2B advertisers with exposure to the private sector may also see revenue erosion.
This will come not only from the development of agencies' own websites but also as the underlying companies seeking to fill positions shift revenue from printed form to their own websites.
Now this begs the question as how this online substitution is captured in the overall AA data, and the extent therefore to which it represents a definitive loss of revenue to the sector. This will arise should online advertising prove to be cheaper and more efficient than the printed form.
Investors would be wise to look for those newspaper and B2B companies with a strong online presence that will protect against this trend. They should also be scouring the market for a good, strong online recruitment business that will become a target for one of the more threatened traditional publishers.
Posted by Mark at 05:33 PM | Comments (0)
Secretaries in short supply at UK law firms
Legal secretaries are currently in such short supply that many law firms across the UK have been forced to consider candidates with no experience of legal document drafting or other law firm-specific secretarial work.
The claim has been published in a salary survey of support staff commissioned by Angela Mortimer, a recruitment consultant, which in addition suggests that in job interviews, secretaries are increasingly demanding the opportunity to progress from a purely support role to a fee-earning position within the firm.
The survey also found that most legal secretaries are already studying for ILEX or for some other, similar professional qualification.
Substantial salary gaps between law firms in different regions of the country were also revealed by the survey, with London-based secretaries earning nearly twice as much as their counterparts in Birmingham.
In London, a typical salary for an associate-level secretary is £28,000, while in Birmingham a similar role pays only £16,000 per annum — equivalent to the most junior-level salaries in the capital.
Salaries for temporary secretaries varied less between the two cities, with those in London commanding £14,400, compared with just under £10,000 in Birmingham.
At the most senior level, partnership secretaries could expect about £30,000 in London but typically no more than £19,000 in Birmingham, the survey found.
Angela Mortimer, chair of the eponymous recruitment agency, said: "This survey is the most extensive listing we have ever compiled and really serves to demonstrate the disparity in incomes across certain sectors and within the industry as a whole."
She added: "If managers know what is motivating their candidates, whether it be salary, opportunity, challenge or feeling comfortable in the culture of the agency, it will go a long way towards improving staff motivation and ultimately output."
Posted by Mark at 05:25 PM | Comments (0)
Good news for Graduates: Salaries and Vacancies buoyant in 2005
The graduate job market continues to grow, according to research published today (Thursday 10 February 2005) by the AGR (Association of Graduate Recruiters).
The AGR Graduate Recruitment Survey 2005 – a survey of some of the UK’s leading employers – reveals that the number of graduate positions is predicted to increase for the second year running, this year by 14.5%. Last year vacancies rose by 15.5%.
Graduate salaries also continue to rise. AGR employers are expecting to pay new graduates a median starting salary of £22,000 in 2005 – an increase of 4.8% on last year, the biggest predicted increase for five years.
The results are dominated by a huge increase in both salaries and vacancies in the accountancy sector, where graduate starting salaries in some parts of the UK are predicted to exceed £25,000 for the first time.
The AGR Graduate Recruitment Survey is the definitive bi-annual barometer of the employment situation for graduates in the UK. The survey, carried out by High Fliers Research, is based on the responses of AGR members – many of the UK’s largest graduate recruiters in both public and private sectors. The research for this latest report was carried out during December 2004 and January 2005.
Carl Gilleard, chief executive of the AGR, comments: ‘The findings of our survey should bring a smile to the faces of final year students and recent graduates looking to enter graduate level employment this summer. Significant increases in vacancies this year; building on a substantial increase last year suggests that business confidence is high across most sectors.
‘Predicted salary increases of 4.8% are very generous and indicate that employers continue to recognise the value that top graduates bring to businesses. It also suggests that among recruiters competition for the best graduates is intensifying.
‘All the more surprising then, that some employers should find that they are not receiving as many high quality applications as they need to fill their increased recruitment targets. The report should act as a wake-up call to the graduate Class of 2005. They should seriously consider taking advantage of the buoyant graduate vacancy market now!’
The full survey report can be downloaded by members for free in the 'reports and surveys' section of the 'publications' tab. They will also receive a hard copy early next week. Non members can purchase the report for £200.
Posted by Mark at 05:15 PM | Comments (0)