In the first two blogs on finding a job through LinkedIn we reviewed your profile and how to search for job advertisements through LinkedIn. In this final part the aim is to raise your profile to ensure that you are noticed by more people.
There are three ways in which you can be more active on LinkedIn which will help to raise your profile; they are through adding more connections, joining groups and answering questions.
LinkedIn, like most online social media, can absorb a lot of your time and it needs to be carefully managed. Whilst out of work, it could be worth your while giving an hour a day to using LinkedIn, more than that and the potential returns drop off quite quickly.
Moving on to the three methods outlined above, the most obvious first move is to increase your connections. Again, be careful and be sure to develop a strategy. Some people work on the basis of getting lots of Connections; anything over 500 and you are designated a LION or LinkedIn Online Networker. If you go down this route then you will be connecting with anyone and everyone that approaches you as well as spending a lot of time seeking out other people.
Alternatively keep your connections limited and professional. That means deciding on what sort of person you are happy to have as a Connection. Almost certainly people in the same profession; definitely people who are opinion formers and influential in your line of work. Probably not more junior people than yourself. Avoid adding lots of friends and family, use your Facebook account for those people.
If you are starting out then prepare a list of people you know with whom you would like to connect. Then go up to the Search box (top right on the top navigation bar), type in the name and see if you can find them. If you can, then go in to their profile just to check that it is the correct person. You will see a yellow button to the right of their profile box, it says ‘Connect’, press that and you will be invited to connect with the person. Complete the box and click on ‘Send Invitation’. If they don’t wish to connect with you then you will hear nothing further. If they do connect then you will get an email telling you as much from LinkedIn.
Another way to add connections is to use the top right hand box on your home page entitled ‘People You May Know’. Click ‘see more’ and scroll down to see if you recognise any names or see any useful job titles. To the right of each name is a ‘Connect’ heading. Click on that and then follow the simple procedure.
Using these two methods you can quickly build up a useful Connections list. On your home page you will see what it is that these people are doing once you have connected. Equally if you have a Twitter account, a blog or just by using the ‘Share an Update’ box at the top of the main column on your LinkedIn Home Page you can tell them what is on your mind.
Try a very simple, ‘Hi Everyone, I have just left XXX and am looking for my next big opportunity.’ It will reap rewards.
To join groups, all you need do is go to the top navigation bar on your Home Page, find Groups and then click on Groups Directory. LinkedIn will give you some suggestions based upon your profile, but better still use the Search box on the top left. Where it says Keywords, type in your professional keywords. Account Manager, for example, brought up 97 groups. You can click on a group to find out more about them before you make your decision.
Don’t join too many groups, about six or seven is more than enough. Join the right groups for you and then get involved. Answer questions, pose questions and most of all, keep yourself informed about the latest developments in your particular professional domain.
Groups are also a good way of connecting with like minded people who may know about jobs. Beware joining too many recruitment agency groups; you will find yourself inundated with information about jobs that are of little interest to you.
Finally, it is worth exploring Answers. Go to the top navigation bar once more and find ‘More’; now click on ‘Answers’. This will take you into the public arena for LinkedIn where anyone can ask or answer a question. A golden rule is to answer more questions (ratio about 10:1) than ask questions. There are plenty of silly people on LinkedIn and you will quickly identify serious questions from the flippant and attention grabbers.
In the right hand column you will find a section entitled ‘Browse’. This has a broad list of professional types. Find your professional interest and then narrow down your search. You will find a rich seam of questions and some interesting answers. By answering questions in a knowledgeable way the person answering the question can nominate you as an expert which will raise your profile further.
In each of the three methods mentioned above you will need to find your niche, decide on the amount of time you want to commit to the project and then be consistent. If you use all three methods then you will widen your network, get connected to people with the same professional interests and, as a result, get noticed.
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In the previous blog we looked at how to make your profile ideal for the work search. In this blog we look at how LinkedIn helps you to find a job fast.
You need to start on your LinkedIn Home page. In the right hand column you will see a section entitled ‘Jobs you may be interested in’. In the box there will be a selection of three or four jobs.
It is worth checking those jobs every day. The jobs will be targeted towards whatever it is that you have populated your profile with in terms of key words and industry sectors. That is why so much emphasis was laid on getting your keywords right in the first blog of this series.
If you click on one of the jobs in the box you will go into the advertisement page for that job. Usually it contains a job description or detailed description of the job.
If you look to the top right of the script in the advert you will see a small box that says ‘Posted by’. This is a useful tool which ordinary jobsites don’t give you.
By clicking on the name in the box you get to find out something about the person who filed the advertisement. You could, if you felt inclined, make a connection with that person or get an introduction through your contacts. As a minimum, it will be worth looking over the person’s profile to see what you can find out about them.
The person concerned will almost certainly have the name of the employer and possibly their website address on their profile, which in turn means you can check out the organisational site and find their website very easily.
If you can find the website for the organisation then check out if they have a careers or jobs section. If they do then that is always the better way of applying. Better still, get a telephone number from their ‘Contact Us’ page and ring the person direct to see if you match their requirements. The personal contact always works best when searching for a job.
To go back to the LinkedIn site, you can decide if you are a good match for that job and if so you could select to apply for the job by clicking on the ‘Apply Now’ button at the bottom. Ideally, have your CV and covering letter prepared and ready to attach.
At the very bottom of the page you will see two very useful additions. A section entitled ‘People who viewed this job also viewed’ and Search more jobs’. Both give you additional search options. If you look at the ‘Search more jobs’ it will help you to narrow down the categories that are most appropriate to you. This will open you out into a myriad of further jobs in that subcategory.
Naturally, the jobs you are shown are only as good as the information in your profile. Equally, the jobs categories you see in the ‘Search for more jobs’ section relate to the particular type of job you are viewing. For example, you may be looking for a job in internal communications, but the job you clicked on may be more marketing oriented. In which case the categories you will see will be more marketing focussed.
You can overcome this problem by going back to the Home page. Go to the top navigation bar and click on jobs. Put in a job title in the ‘Search for Jobs’ box. This will bring up further jobs options. Look at the left hand column on this new page and you will see that you can refine your search even further.
LinkedIn will encourage you to join up to their Job Seeker Premium service. This will cost you £12.95 a month for the basic and up to £32.95 for the Job seeker Plus. Don’t sign up for the annual subscription unless you expect to be out of work for that long. The value of this service remains questionable at present.
By now you should have found a large number of potential jobs. Now the hard work of filtering through those jobs begins.
In the third and final blog on finding a job on LinkedIn the focus will be on raising your profile even further in order to get you noticed.
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Finding employment in our current economic crisis is no mean feat. Where to find a job fast is on the minds of some three million people in the UK at the moment.
I am often asked if there are any additional methods beyond the traditional adverts, agencies and networking approach. The answer is yes. Searching for employment has never, in some ways, ever been easier. Or at least finding a suitable job; the rest is down to you and the quality of your Curriculum Vitae (CV) and interview skills.
One of the growing new ways of searching for employment is through social media. Over the next three blogs I will discuss finding a job through LinkedIn, the professional businessperson’s social media site.
This blog looks at setting up a good LinkedIn profile and how it will help you to get recruited.
To start with, ignore most of the advice you have probably been given by friends and family. Your LinkedIn profile should not be your CV placed online, nor should it be a heady text of your needs, desires, visions and interests. If you really want to find a job then your profile should be as skilfully crafted as your CV.
Let’s start with the headings. In your ‘Professional Headline’ it is pointless putting the job title of your previous job. Instead you should indicate what it is that you do for a living. So instead of ‘Assistant Manager, Payroll and Benefits’ you might put ‘HR specialist in Payroll and Benefits’. This assumes, of course, that this is what you want to continue doing for a living.
The next section of job search importance for you to complete is the ‘Professional Experience and Goals’ section. There is a lot of poor advice floating around about what to put in this section. Some say that you should write it like a story in the first person. Others say that you should write about what you are looking for rather than what you have done. These two items of bad advice will not help you to get a job.
Instead write your entry in similar style to the profile at the top of your CV. This section should say what you are, along with your key skills. Make it rich with the things you want to do (i.e. probably the things you most enjoyed doing in your previous job) because by inference this will tell any potential employer what you want to do in your next job.
A typical entry for this section might read as follows:
‘An experienced Sales and Marketing Director within the pharmaceutical sector. Extensive exposure to worldwide markets, culturally sensitive and accomplished at researching, developing and implementing complex marketing strategies. An adept team leader used to handling morale issues and drawing out the best from the team whilst meeting demanding deadlines’.
Below that comes the specialities section. Most people either don’t know what to put in this section or they fill it with waffle. This is perhaps the most critical section of your whole profile. The golden rules are to keep it short, preferably use bullet points and it must be keyword rich.
In fact your whole profile should be keyword rich. That means that you should use the professional words you would expect to use in your everyday work. As a communicator, for me that means words such as, copywriting, proofreading, press releases, internal communications, external communications and so on. If your specialisation uses lots of acronyms then use them; software proficiency language such as Java, Perl, Python etc are very important. Project management skills such as Prince2 or legal jargon such as PQE 10 years are all important additions to your profile.
Going back to the specialities section, don’t overdo the specialities. If you put in lots of bullet points then you are hardly a specialist. As a general rule six bullet points should be the maximum. Your bullet points should reflect the types of keywords a recruiter might type in to their keyword search. Below is an example:
• New business startup & setup (& business rationalisation)
• E-commerce development
• Affiliate marketing
• Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
• Website design
• Article marketing.
The fourth and last section to be covered in this blog is ‘Experience’. This is the section where you list all the jobs you have done in chronological order starting with your most recent.
Again, some golden rules.
Don’t cut and paste from your CV. LinkedIn is a public site which is open to anyone and everyone. There may be things in your CV which should not be broadcast to a wider audience.
You don’t have to put down every job you have done. If you put lots of jobs, does this mean that you have no staying power? Probably not but it could look like that. You needn’t go back more than fifteen years (i.e. to around 1997). If you have worked for just one employer for a long time then split this up into the individual jobs you have done whilst working for that employer.
Having laid down these golden rules, it is important to put something in the ‘Description’ part of this section. Ideally this will include a one or two sentence description of your job at that employer. For example:
‘Responsible for providing full time management, communication, administrative and logistical support to the CEO of this rapidly expanding international organic produce retailer’.
Underneath that put some bullet points giving your key achievements in the job. Again, don’t put too many bullet points. As a general rule the most recent job might have up to six bullet points, but as you move further in to the past the number of bullet points will decrease. Make sure that in these bullet points you make the text keyword rich with language that will draw a recruiter to look at your profile.
If you follow this advice then your profile should look professional, be rich in keywords and prove a handy additional tool in your work search. One final point, don’t forget to put a good quality photograph into your profile.
Next time, we will look at how your profile helps LinkedIn find a career opportunity for you.
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In these times of economic stress it seems like almost every company, and a lot of public sector organisations, are making people redundant.
The process is pretty horrid for all concerned. Of course we all give our thoughts to the employee who has been made redundant, but it is no easy thing for most managers or HR professionals to have to do, and it is hard for those who are left behind.
That is why having to serve notice is all the more difficult. The statutory notice period is one week for each complete year the employee has been continuously employed with them, up to a maximum of twelve weeks.
Now that really can be a lingering death.
Even the most conscientious employee will find it difficult to concentrate on the job. If the process leading up to the redundancy has been contentious or acrimonious then some employees could be apathetic, obstructive or even destructive in their remaining weeks. The workplace could be filled with poor productivity, petty arguments, poor timekeeping and absences.
Ultimately the organisation will suffer through low productivity and falling morale.
For those who remain there will be feelings of guilt and, even worse, pity for the person who is leaving. Unfortunately it can also be a time where the sharp witted and even sharper tongued can revel in hurtful jokes. For some it may be a time to whisper in corners or ‘get even’ for slights that have festered way beyond their time.
The effect can be corrosive on those who remain and can break down team bonds as views differ on the person about to leave.
For the person about to leave, the situation is arguably the worst. They are forced to sit there listening to the gossip, fending off the ‘kind’ words and counting the days to the end of life as they have known it. Each day becomes a chore. Each hug another reminder of their situation. One person described it as the worst form of rejection; a sense of worthlessness and a lead weight on their self confidence.
But it doesn’t have to be like that.
The company or organisation could choose to give the employee gardening leave; that means they have the time to find a new job whilst still technically employed. The survivors of the redundancy period can settle down into a new ‘normal’ without having to worry about the feelings of those leaving. The company can rebuild productivity as well as morale by moving forward with those who remain.
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It’s a tough old world at the moment with redundancies still coming thick and fast, the latest being the 3,000 or so jobs going at BAE Systems.
A sense of resignation affects people who are at risk but even when the chances of redundancy are high there are things you can do.
In almost every case, where redundancies are happening, choices are being made.
Take the BAE Systems case. The plant at Brough in East Yorkshire is going to lose 900 jobs, but 400 hundred jobs will remain. In Lancashire the job losses are 565, but 3,405 will remain; and in the case of Warton, also in Lancashire, 843 jobs will go whilst 5,694 will remain.
Curiously even smaller plants are being affected. Filton , Farnborough and Yeovil will all be affected; even Hillend in Fife, where, despite the factory having recently won a £20 million contract, 35 of the 200 workforce are to go.
I do not know the reason for the spread of redundancies or the selection criteria in the case of BAE Systems. I do know, however, that the selection criteria laid down by companies laying off staff are give them opportunities to pick and choose who goes. In organisations in which I have been involved in their strategic change, marking systems have been put in place as part of the selection criteria as well as internal competitive interviews where two or three people apply for the one remaining job.
There are four broad areas where the selection process might be applied. The skills and qualifications of each person being assessed. The standard of their work performance, where this might be gauged by a review of previous performance appraisals. The adaptability of the candidates to take on other roles. The attendance and disciplinary record of each person being reviewed.
It is easy to see how all four of these areas can be subjective. If you have a long history of being a bad attendee, of poor timekeeping, or of being stroppy, difficult or inflexible then there is little you can do. But if you think your organisation is likely to make redundancies then now is the time to make sure you are getting in to work on time and that you are showing maximum flexibility.
Likewise, work performance can be improved. We all have a habit of doing what we like doing and avoiding the things we don’t like. If there is any risk of redundancy then now is the time to review your job description (assuming you have one) and make sure you are covering all the key areas. If there is an area that you don’t enjoy doing and avoid or do badly then that is the area for you to put some effort into right now. Any improvement in that part of your job will be noticed by your line manager simply because it is the area where most improvement can be made. Being noticed for an improvement in performance at this stage is a really good move.
But beware; working longer does not equate to working harder or smarter. A clever manager will easily recognise that working longer could just mean that you are a less efficient worker or that you are not good at prioritising your work. Then you will get noticed for all the wrong reasons.
Adaptability is the other area where you can gain some advantage. If you have additional skills that you can bring to the job then now is the time to start using them. Equally, if there are internal roles being advertised, then applying for those roles might be a smart move provided it doesn’t weaken your position in the existing team. If you find yourself in the situation of having to re-apply for your job or go through an internal competitive interview then make sure that you are a very good fit for the role.
There is one final solution. For most people, being made redundant is, ultimately, an opportunity (even if you don’t see it like that at the time). If you have not been happy in your job, if you seek a new direction in career or you know that you will be one of those most likely to go – then don’t wait, make the first move.
Often in a redundancy situation, the best people don’t wait to be told, they start applying for other jobs immediately. On average it takes about three months to find a job for an average office worker. It becomes more difficult and can take more time the more specialised you are or the more senior your role. So now is the time for action not recriminations.
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Curriculum Vitae or Resume writing is probably one of the hardest tasks in the world. Trying to write your own CV can be very hard, and the temptation is to turn it into a history of your career. Of course a good CV should be like a marketing leaflet. It’s sole aim is to get you an interview and it’s construction should be viewed in that way.
Taking the marketing leaflet analogy a step further, your CV should be well designed, easy to read, relevant to the reader and concise. Very few first drafts of the CVs I see match any of these criteria.
Design is important. Put yourself in the place of the recruiter. You may have several hundred CVs in front of you. Do you have the time, energy or inclination to read them all? Probably not, so you may well select out those that look interesting and easy to read. That’s why design is important. No photos (unless you are a model or actor). Selective emboldening, underlining and italics. A sensible typeface such as Times New Roman or Arial. And some white space.
Easy to read? Many first draft CVs are packed full of words many of which are unnecessary and which clutter up the text. Many people clutter their CV by writing in the first person “I am an experienced marketer with . . .”, when it can be said more effectively in the third person “An experienced marketer with . . .”.
Active words rather than passive words are also a must – led, designed, managed, sold etc.
Then there is the self evident clutter. Name: Fred Frank – well yes of course that’s your name so why do you need to put ‘Name:’. Then we have ‘Address’, ‘Telephone’, ‘Email address’ – more self evident clutter that make your CV look messy.
It is important to review the relevancy of your CV. We all have lots of interesting things going on in our lives. That doesn’t mean that you have to spell them out in your CV. If you want a job as a salesperson, then your three month sabbatical as a chef in a local restaurant is unlikely to deserve two paragraphs of explanation.
Relevancy is about finding those things in your career that show you are capable of doing the type of work for which you are applying. Skills, experience and, best of all, achievements.
Too many CVs have sub headings that say ‘Responsibilities’. They may well have been lifted straight out of your last job description. But they don’t demonstrate that you were any good at the job or that you could do the job. That comes by showing what you have achieved, rather than what you were asked to do. Instead of saying ‘Responsible for widget sales’, being able to say ‘Grew widget sales by 29% over 12 months’ is much more likely to get you an interview (assuming it is true of course!).
Keeping your CV concise is the final point to consider. A CV should not be more than two pages long (unless they have asked for more). Recently I helped a friend to reduce her CV from eight pages to two. We did this by cutting out irrelevant words, avoiding duplication, formatting, and removing material that wasn’t relevant to the recruiter. All of a sudden she is getting interviews where before she was getting rejections.
There’s lots more to writing a CV and I would always recommend that you enlist the help of a friend or colleague. If you require professional help then look no further than our partner company New Horizons (www.newhorizonscareers.co.uk). They help individuals with career planning and redundancy as well as corporates with outplacement programmes.
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Just before going away on holiday several people asked me about LinkedIn and the best way to get started. Having returned refreshed and reinvigorated, here are some simple and quick tips that should help.
1. Always remember, whatever you put up onto the internet is, ultimately, publicly available. So don’t post up anything you don’t want others to see. Therefore your LinkedIn profile needs to be carefully thought through
2. In the professional headline try to be a little more adventurous than just putting your job title. Tell people what it is you are or you do. Remember this tag line appears when people do a search for you
3. Under summary there are two tried and tested options. The first is to put a short ‘profile’ of yourself. The sort of thing that you would put at the top of a CV which says what you are (and by inference what you want your next job to be). That’s good for job hunters. If on the other hand you want a larger description of yourself and your career then write a script which is in the first person (I am a . . .) and which gives the most important parts of your career. If you are promoting your company as well then make sure that you weave its features into the story
4. Under specialities I recommend putting single words or short phrases. These are the ‘keywords’ which describe your skills and expertise
5. The section marked experience is designed to give the reader a work history. A lot of people don’t fill this section and are missing a trick. It’s a bit like a CV, but perhaps you don’t put in quite as much detail. Give them a short description of your job and then some bullet points with the highlights, especially achievements and awards
6. Under education it seems pointless to me to put all your educational details down, just higher qualifications such as a Degree, Masters or Doctorate
7. If you have a website then don’t forget to put the link in under ‘Additional information’. Also your Twitter account, but I recommend not putting interests because this is a bit too personal for a business style profile
8. Likewise under ‘Personal Information’ I don’t recommend filling in items such as marital status, birthday and telephone number. Under address put your public email address and that will help people to contact you if they need to do so
9. Once you have filled in the profile (oh yes, a photograph is a good idea, but don’t make it quirky) then start adding connections. There is a very serious point here. Be clear about why you have a LinkedIn profile and the nature of your audience. Family and friends are better accommodated on a Facebook account, leaving LinkedIn to your professional connections. I always suggest that you start with immediate work colleagues/ex colleagues. Then move on to your contact list and finally that pile of business cards you have been hanging on to. Hopefully you will get people contacting you, and asking them to join their ‘professional network’ – that just means they want to connect with you. If you know them and they are of the right calibre for you then do so. If you don’t know them, or they don’t fit your professional category then don’t be afraid to refuse
10. And finally. LinkedIn has a rich seam of Groups. Go to the top menu bar, then to ‘Groups’ and then ‘Groups Directory’ and you will find a massive list of groups. Search for your professional interest groups and join a small number. Although you can ask to join, the host can refuse (but not very often). You will then be privy to a rich seam of professional information, thoughts, discussions and debates.
There is a lot more to LinkedIn, which is probably why it is one of the most well known and liked of the business networking sites, but this should get you started.
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Recently I was asked for my thoughts on what a manager should do in his first hundred days with a new team in a new company. The following is a checklist of some of the things I came up with and would welcome any additional thoughts from thos who have been through this as well.
General Dos:
- Remember that your new team will be apprehensive, even wary about you
- Listen and observe much more than talk
- Ask lots of questions
- Explain that for first 100 days your priority is to learn & understand so need their help
- Take time to understand the organisational structure and where your team fits into it
- Discover as much as you can about the culture of the company, Vision, Mission etc
- Find out about your responsibilities, company rules and requirements
- Remember first impressions count – so make them good ones
- Always deliver what you promise
- Try to find some small quick wins; small problems that are easily solved but which help to build trust between you and the team
General Don’ts:
- Don’t make changes until you understand what is going on (probably not before the first 100 days is up
- Don’t go on about your old organisation/team and how good/bad it was
- Don’t start laying down rules until you understand the people you are working with
- Don’t forget there is a job of work to be done, so much of this checklist is centred around you doing your job at the same time
- Don’t underestimate the power you have as the new Manager – but don’t abuse it!
Priority One (approx first 14 days):
- Getting to know your team is the number one priority
- Call a team meeting early on, introduce yourself and ask them to introduce themselves to you, also explain your management style
- Meet each team member individually. Go to their workstation and arrange a time with them which is convenient to them
- Be sure about any internal hierarchy in the team and reflect that if necessary in the order in which you see people
- Talk to HR, get Job Descriptions and if possible review individual files
- Also a high priority is to get to know your boss, what matters to him/her & their work style
- Get to know who your external (outside the team) stakeholders are i.e. internal customers
- Meet them individually and find out from them what they need from your team
- Tell your relevant team members about the meeting especially if they are the normal point of contact – then involve them in any future meetings
Priority Two (approx first 30 days):
- Find out what it is your team does
- Discover who does projects (time limited events) & who does processes (ongoing work)
- Learn what impact each area of work has on the organisation & build a list of priorities
- Find out and understand any performance/achievement targets, goal setting etc
- Benchmark Job Descriptions, team member skills set and passions against existing work. If a better balance can be achieved then talk to HR
- Have lots of short team meetings rather than a few long meetings; 20 mins v 90 mins
Priority Three (approx first sixty days)
- Now find out why your team works in the way they do
- Look for work patterns that don’t appear normal to you; why are they being done that way?
- Hold team meetings to investigate working practices; dialogue not discussion. Open up meeting by explaining topic area, don’t express an opinion, ask for their views, ensure everyone gets to speak & at end of the meeting summarise what you have heard
- Then introduce/explore possible new ways of doing the same work and seek their opinions
- Where impacting on other teams/departments seek their views as well
- Discuss with line manager and beware the work practice may have come from him/her
Priority Four (up to 100 days)
- Lay out your strategy for the future
- What do you want to change (double check that your alternative is sensible and fits with the work practices/culture of the team/organisation)?
- How do you want to change it?
- Who will implement the change?
- Discuss one final time, get buy-in from the team, line manager and implement
- Also tell them what works well, what you want to keep and why
- Start planning for the next 100 days.
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The curriculum vitae made a bold statement – Budget responsibility.
Recruitment consultants are faced with these statements every day of the week. Of course it leaves them no wiser as to the extent of the candidate’s capabilities.
The budget could be a short term one off budget for a small project, perhaps a few hundred pounds. Or it could be that the person concerned runs a multi-million pound budget.
I have come across a number of such instances recently. In each case the person concerned has failed to sell themselves as effectively as they might; think of it this way.
‘Budget responsibility’ is a bit like flying at 35,000 feet, you can see deserts, oceans, forests, mountain ranges but no detail.
‘Responsible for a budget of £250,000 where 65% represents staff costs, 20% represents’ – STOP. Too much detail. It’s a bit like being in a helicopter flying at 200 feet, all you can see is the detail and nothing else.
The ideal description falls somewhere in between; Responsible for £250,000 annual budget covering special projects. Aha, now we understand what it is you do and have a feel for the scope of your work. It’s the 12,500 feet view; you can see enough detail to understand what is going on.
Another example might be ‘Responsible for internal newsletters’. Great, but again there is no scoping. ‘Responsible for weekly internal newsletters to 2,500 staff’ tells the reader what they need to know about your abilities.
Good luck with the CV writing.
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Perusing through the newspapers the other day I came across an article which made me chuckle. It reminded me of the perils of being petulant.
Currently the former Brixton Estates CEO, Tim Wheeler is sitting in an employment tribunal in Holborn. The story, inevitably, is complicated and it would be wrong to apportion blame at least until the tribunal makes judgement. The best articles so far can be found at:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/constructionandproperty/7029465/Brixton-ex-chief-Tim-Wheeler-allegedly-threatened-guerrilla-war-against-non-execs.html
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/constructionandproperty/7047423/Tim-Wheeler-ran-Brixton-as-private-business.html
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/construction_and_property/article6995905.ece
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard-business/article-23798155-city-spy-tim-wheeler-is-turning-air-blue-in-court.do
I am sure there are more to follow as the tribunal may well stretch into April.
What does emerge from the newspaper articles is that Tim Wheeler appears to have had a rocky time with his Deputy and the Board of Brixton Estates.
Apparently, when asked if he would cancel a ski trip to Japan as the company went into a cash crisis, Wheeler is alleged to have responded, “F..k that, I’ve paid for it”.
Later he is alleged to have said that the firm’s stockbrokers were “spineless w..kers”.
Further evidence from Lady Patten, a Brixton Board member at the time reveals more. “It was a frantically busy time and it should have been all hands to the pump” Lady Patten asserts, “Tim should have been leading the company at this difficult time but instead was either on holiday or at loggerheads over his financial position”.
Deputy CEO at the time, Steve Owen, goes on to say that “What Brixton needed was a decisive and effective leader, but at this crucial time he (Tim Wheeler) simply appeared to focus on his own interests”.
Putting to one side the amusing and juicy choice of language, what can we learn from this tribunal?
• It is interesting to note that Tim Wheeler had been with Brixton Estates for 24 years. He must have had a good relationship with Board and employees alike to have lasted that long. Clearly something went wrong in the final few months which led to a complete breakdown of relationships. I suspect that the breakdown was not helped by Wheeler’s choice of language. The evidence would also suggest that he is a fiery and emotional personality
• If the evidence from Lady Patten and the Deputy CEO is to be believed, then Wheeler appears to have panicked and gone into defensive mode in the final months, thinking more about his own financial position than trying to protect the company and its employees
• Taking his old company to an employment tribunal may have seemed sweet at the time but will it really work? Let us suppose that Wheeler wins. He may be richer, although his lawyer’s fees are going to be astronomical. His tribunal will remain on public record for all to see. His name and reputation is being sullied by all the defendants – and mud sticks. Ultimately it will be a Pyrrhic victory.
It could be that Tim Wheeler is an excellent CEO and potentially a good catch for some other company. The perception emerging from the tribunal would suggest the opposite and that is the real danger for anyone going down the employment tribunal route.
The money may look tempting at the start of the process, as might the revenge but it rarely works out that way.
Brixton Estates have moved on, they were taken over by Segro last August.
Tim Wheeler may find it a little more challenging in the months ahead to find another job as a FTSE 250 CEO. Petulance rarely pays off.
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