How and Why did we come up with the idea of The Magic Hour?

You may have seen us posting about our new service – which we’ve called The Magic Hour. The name was coined by one of our candidates who we helped with some coaching and advice earlier on this year.

Essentially – The Magic Hour is an individually tailored, one to one coaching session where we review your CV and make recommendations on how to improve it, how to make it ATS friendly and how to show yourself off to the best advantage. We also look at your LinkedIn profile and make recommendations on how to change it and how to post to improve your visibility on the platform. We explain how recruitment in the UK works and how to navigate your way through it. We encourage you to work out and articulate what you enjoy about your role and home in on what exactly you are looking for next.  We also give some general advice around job searching and your individual job search plan.  We believe that it gives candidates a sound base from which to launch their job search and helps them secure their next role more quickly.

My Own Experience:

The idea for this came from my experience of being made redundant a few years ago. I felt like I had been cast out to sea – with no direction or understanding about how to best go about finding my next role. It left me feeling very vulnerable and exposed and the experience of this has been one that has been long lasting in my professional life. I wanted to be able to help candidates by providing a useful service to help them take back control of their job search in these very strange and unpredictable times. I wish I had had something similar – it would have saved me weeks / months of floundering about like a mad woman (read my redundancy post!).

In the normal run of things when we are briefed by a client for a role, we start by having a chat about which candidates on our database and network would be a good fit for the position, and who from that list might be ready for their next move.  Then we’d schedule a conversation and go through a very similar process to the Magic Hour, but obviously tartgeted to the new brief.  So we coach candidates through aligning their skills and experiences as closely as possible to the role profile to make sure that the most relevant strengths are easily apparent to the client.

At the moment we have very few ‘live’ briefs on the go!  But we want to keep talking to people and helping candidates to be as strong and focussed as possible in their job searches, so in order to be able to keep doing that we’ve streamlined and focussed our experience and advice and come up with The Magic Hour. This is a fixed fee service we have priced at £150 incl VAT.

We have talked to candidates across the private, public and third sectors in the UK and internationally – consultancies, agencies and in-house clients – and we have seen what works.  We’ve placed candidates in huge complex global businesses and smaller, owner managed companies, and we’ve been doing this successfully since 2012.  There are thousands of professionals on our database and we’ve talked to them all!

A Complete 360 degree view of recruitment:

Before becoming recruitment consultants we have both been candidates (obviously!) and hiring managers, so we really do have a 360 degree view of the process and we have consistently had positive feedback from our sessions.  In fact our business has grown precisely because our candidates often become our clients as they move through their careers and grow their own teams.  So we are confident that we add value.

We are partnering with some clients at the moment and working on some fantastic opportunities and our network of candidates can absolutely rest assured that we will be actively in touch about those as and when appropriate.  The idea is that you do not need to be a candidate for a specific role in order to benefit from our help and advice, or even a CX professional – The Magic Hour is relevant to candidates across any discipline and industry.

Those who do not undertake The Magic Hour will be at no less of an advantage for future roles with us as we are ONLY interested in fitting the right candidate with the right job. That approach will never change at CX Talent Ltd.

The Magic Hour is there to help keep you going in your job search. If you decide you’d benefit from our in depth advice and book a package – you’ll be helping us keep going too!

Here are some recent testimonials:
‘I’d recommend THE MAGIC HOUR, 100%. CX Talent Ltd care, that shows in the EPIC service they provide!’ –

“I found the conversation, tips and guidance extremely useful and it has given me the boost and motivation to focus my efforts in a constructive and disciplined way to search and secure that new opportunity which is out there somewhere for me!”

‘I loved my magic hour, it was not only informative it also motivated me to do things differently…. a real breath of air. Thanks Jo & Kate’.

 

Are there any positive outcomes for Customer Experience Recruitment from COVID?

As a Director and owner of CX Talent Ltd, I have spent many hours lamenting the lack of CX roles, wondering if we can continue to trade as a business with the very few roles we’ve managed to hold on to and fill during the last few months. I know that I am not alone in this – many of the recruitment agencies we all know of may sadly not make it through. In House resourcing teams are under enormous pressure to fill roles internally rather than use agency partners in order to help reduce costs. We’ve all seen the tsunamis of candidates applying for each and every role! With that sort of role demand – what’s the point of appointing an agency? I wont lie – there have been moments of panic and several sleepless nights!

Advantages of Appointing an Agency at this moment in time:

There are many advantages to appointing a specialist recruitment agency for specialist roles. In a nutshell, we can fill them REALLY quickly and efficiently with the right people and the best talent, while ensuring an excellent candidate experience. I don’t need to advertise unless we don’t have the right people with the right skill set, in the right location for the right money. Other than that – we use our extensive network and database. But enough of that – I’ve talked about it at length in previous posts and this is not the purpose of this particular post

I still have moments of despair and worry about the state of the economy and the lack of roles out there. However, I do have more and more moments of clarity and positivity. I’d like to share them as even in adversity you can find positives to reflect upon:

Listening and Talking with increased number of diverse individuals:

Over the past few months I have spoken to several fantastic individuals both from the CX world and external to it. I have really enjoyed listening to other people’s stories and in many cases being able to help them move forward effectively in their job search. LinkedIn has been our mouthpiece to talk about issues around recruitment and customer experience that we find useful and interesting (and hopefully you do too). Our post engagement seems to be growing – so I take this as a good sign?!

Our huge and rapidly growing top talent database:

Our candidate database, which was already amazing, is now bursting at the seams with the most amazing Customer Experience candidates. I would be confident of filling any Customer Insight, Research, Strategy, Implementation, Change and Transformation, Digital, Product role in a heartbeat. When the market does eventually return to some degree of normality our reach in the Customer Experience world both here in the UK also internationally looks likely to be unrivalled.

Kindness and Longevity of relationships:

We’ve been overwhelmed by the kindness and graciousness of those candidates and individuals that we have spoken to and advised, some of whom have even gone on to publicly thank us. I cannot tell you how much that means to both Kate and myself, it makes all the hours of work and all the conversations more than worthwhile. We see our relationship with candidates and contacts as ongoing and beyond just the next role. Whether we place candidates this time or in 1,2 or 5 years is irrelevant – once you are in our world you’ll stay in it as long as you’d like to, whether that be as candidate or client.

Magic Hour:

We continue to offer and enjoy our Magic Hour sessions with candidates and again, are delighted with the feedback and thanks we have received. These are not just interesting but also so rewarding, as we are helping people position themselves to their best advantage to help them secure the next role – wherever that might be from.

Best Mates and Laughter:

Talking personally – I am so lucky to work with one of my dearest friends. There is never a day that goes by that we don’t find something to laugh at! We pick each other up off the floor when needed and celebrate when things go well. We discuss the matters of the day, current affairs (always an opinion to be shared and very usually agreed upon), and very occasionally the frustrations of being a WFH mum of school age children (Quite a few actually) and newly WFH partners as well (Quite a lot more!).  I genuinely would not enjoy my job as half as much if it was not for the fact I work with Kate.

So all in all – though business may not be where I’d like it to be and though I’m not able to help as many of our candidates into roles as I would like, I count my blessings.  It might just be that when we get out of these strange times or indeed learn to live with them – CX Talent Ltd will be better, stronger and more resilient as a business than ever before.

If you are thinking of expanding your customer teams and need to act fast and efficiently – please contact Kate or myself. We pride ourselves on being open and transparent and kinder than many other agencies out there. We are fast, efficient and offer the best candidate and client experience we possibly can and WE REALLY CARE about doing the best job, finding the best talent and finding the best talent the right jobs.

Are we being too quick to abandon the physical office?

 

I signed up with a temping agency after graduating – I still didn’t really know what I wanted to do and needed to earn some money.  After sending me around a selection of advertising agencies I was sent to the Really Useful Group (Andrew Lloyd Webber’s theatre production company) as temporary secretary to the Head of Marketing.  I didn’t know that Arts Administration was even an option, but I loved it, stayed, got offered a permanent job, and that was the start of a 15 year career in theatre production, pr, marketing and management.

 

So going into different offices gave me the chance to find a career I loved but more than that, being in the office with older, successful professionals actually taught me HOW to do these jobs.  I listened to phone conversations, went along to meetings, visited the different box offices / ticket agents / ad agencies / theatres themselves and saw and heard all these different professionals at work.

 

How are people learning how to do their jobs?  Online mentoring and zoom meetings are  great, really valuable – but not the same as sitting in an office actually hearing different people engage, negotiate, present, make business cases and generally helping you find our own professional voice.

 

Jo and I were able to start CX Talent Ltd over eight years ago now because of our experience and interests – we had both been regularly recruited and been hiring managers and knew what worked and how to deal with people and their careers not as transactional target points but the real life events they are.  In addition we both had different but valuable understanding of customer experiences in different industries and were interested and connected enough to find out more.

 

Our careers would have looked very different without the real time exposure to our business environments.

 

What can we do to help young people starting their careers to broaden out their learning?  My feeling is that businesses will gradually bring back most of their workers for most of the week to an office environment despite all the early thinking that almost all staff who can do will start to WFH.

 

As well as the learning environment provided by the shared workspace there is also the creative and competitive buzz – of solving problems, innovating, sharing a laugh or encouraging each other along.

 

There are real issues for businesses to weigh up here – how much office square footage can be safely lost without loosing out to these other, difficult to quantify issues?  I hope that we are able to go into this change carefully and with consideration to future proofing in terms of long term resilience and keeping the pipeline of new talent on track.

 

For a conversation about talent planning or customer experience recruitment please do get in touch – we are specialists in this field with client across many sectors and industries in the UK and internationally.

 

If you are a candidate in the current market please check out our website and LinkedIn page for free access to hints and tips to support your job search, or for a personalised session consider booking a Magic Hour.

As we’re emerging from lockdown and easing back into the world it’s interesting to look at the new behaviours that could improve our lives in the future – and what we’ll be happy to leave behind.

 

Remote working – this is the big one and there has been a lot of focus on it.  Companies can no longer claim that productivity has to suffer and many more people will be working for part of the week from home.  This will have a really positive impact not only on work / life balance for individuals and families, but also on the wider transport system and environment as collectively there will be a significant impact on the number of journeys taken each week.

But also…. the joys of office working – despite the advantages of working from home many workers are keen to get back to the office at least part time.  The company culture, camaraderie, feeling of teamwork and shared endeavour are all stronger and more accessible when we’re physically together.

Busy = important?  Let’s leave this one behind.  I hope that the forced slower pace of the last few months helps us be more mindful about what we WANT to do and break the cycle of doing everything we CAN do just because it’s there.   Stress as a status symbol seems a very old fashioned pose when we are surrounded by the horribly real issues provoked by Covid-19.  Let’s keep focussing on productivity, not hours at the desk.

Customer service is JUST as important as we knew it was – as customers we’ve given companies the benefit of the doubt for months about long wait times for reduced support,  but all the signs are there that we have had enough of poor customer service and want our issues resolved now!  Businesses which acted with the best intentions to hastily adapt processes in order to keep afloat now need to accelerate when it comes to aligning those processes with customer satisfaction.  Customer loyalty is more important than ever and businesses that are doing well in terms of both customer and employee engagement are very visible – these actions now will be remembered!  Good Customer Experience is the KEY differentiator – and both successes and failures are widely shared.

Deliveries – I think we’ll all keep on shopping more online.  The extra billions enjoyed by Jeff Bezos over the last few months as a result of Amazon’s success reflect the trend for taking advantage of the convenient and efficient access to almost everything we need, delivered to our door.

Cleaning – the rise of the anti-bac!  I am sure that this will gradually relax and that hairdressers for example won’t need to ostentatiously wipe down each chair between clients – but it seems likely that we’ll all keep the habit of being more aware of keeping especially shared spaces a lot cleaner.

LinkedIn and virtual networking – LinkedIn particularly has seen a huge surge in networking as people use the platform to connect, build relationships and successfully find new roles.  It’s great to see the support being offered – and the positive results will keep us all coming back for more.

Raised profile for health and care workers – they’ve always been appreciated but now they are rightly celebrated.  Let’s hope (and lobby for) better pay and conditions for these sectors in the future.

Pets – lots of people have used the time at home as an opportunity to get a cat or dog, knowing they can spend the time training and socialising them.  I hope that the pets will adapt as we go back to work, they might find the adjustment difficult at first, but hopefully a new balance of home and office working will ensure success.

Community and creativity – we’ve found different ways to be sociable and communities have found many ways of supporting each other. From making phone calls, delivering food and prescriptions, timed celebrations on VE day and the clap for carers bringing us together, to hyper local seed swaps for people spending more time in their gardens – hopefully some of these links will endure.

Recruitment – we’re talking to people all the time in different sectors and waiting to see how this will change.  Many companies are coming to the end of recruitment freezes and looking to solve their own new problems.  Customer Experience looks likely to be more important than ever as people are more careful with their spending and each buying experience matters for products and services across the board.

 

If your company is recruiting in the CX space give us a call – we are expert specialist recruiters who have spent over 8 years building a network of customer experience candidates.  We understand the sector and will curate a shortlist of fantastic talent for your role, leaving your hiring manager and HR to get on with the many other demands of the complicated present.

If you’re a CX professional looking for your next role, get in touch – we are always happy to chat and make sure you are in our database.  We are actively working on roles and may have the right one for you.

Do you need some help with your job search? Jo van Riemsdijk at CX Talent Ltd gives her top 10 tips to get you started.

I hope that the tips I detail here will be of some help to Candidates looking for roles or thinking about their next move.

1.If you are in a job and thinking about moving – my first piece of advice would be – DON’T! Squeeze every last drop of experience you can out of your current role and be grateful you have a job – there are a lot of candidates out there who don’t! Don’t disengage either – you may find that you start to really enjoy where you currently are. By all means get your CV ready and your Linkedin profile ship shape – but please stay put!
2.If you are not in a job – do not despair. We will get through this and the market will pick up again. Contact us and we can have a chat about putting an action plan in place.
3.Spend no more than 2 hours a day (if that right now – probably 2 mins with the recruitment freezes out there) looking on job boards and applying for roles. Then for goodness sake go and do something entirely different. Just because you don’t apply for a role the minute it is advertised – does not mean that you won’t get it.
4.Your CV should be tailored for each and every role – WITHOUT FAIL!!!!!!!!! It’s a competitive market out there and will become more so. Absolutely no stretching the truth! Look at the areas the JD is really focusing on. If stakeholder engagement and influencing is one of the main themes – then emphasise this experience. If its customer experience communications – then bring this to the fore. Don’t assume that the person looking at your CV understands CX, has any interest in CX or your CV for that matter. You need to hit people in the face with your suitability for a role.  DON’T ASSUME PEOPLE READ BETWEEN THE LINES.
5.Come up with a CV that you can tailor quickly and effectively. Good CV’s have a personal statement at the top, a list of key skills and / or achievements. Then professional experience, education and other info. I also like to see training undertaken and any software packages you are familiar with (though this is job specific).
6.Your Linkedin profile is incredibly important. Do you have a picture? Please – DO NOT PUT ONE OF YOU WEARING SILLY GLASSES OR DRINKING ALCOHOL. This is a professional networking site – not Facebook! Linkedin should act as your shop window – does someone have your perfect job and is searching for someone like you? MAKE SURE THEY FIND YOU!! Be specific about your skills and describe yourself as your next ideal role – again telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth! The more specific you are on Linkedin about yourself – the more likely you are to be found. Don’t fall into the trap of trying to do a catch all profile – as it will become so generic that you wont be found for anything.
7.Utilise your network – talk to old bosses, get in touch with old colleagues. You never know – they could be looking for someone to run a programme or project short term. Getting involved in interim or contract roles during this time will do you no harm and conversations had about your job area, industry sector, areas of expertise in general can lead to great things.
8.Get involved in conversations on Linkedin about your industry or area of expertise. In our case this is Customer Experience – yes, I know do as I say not as I do! I am aware that we have not been the most vocal people on Linkedin but we are trying to change that! Post regularly, comment with at least 8 words and thoughtfully on relevant posts. Like posts that are relevant to your interests and skill set. Linkedin rewards people who use the platform by making you more visible. It will increase your exposure to people who might be looking for staff.
9.Is there an organisation you’d love to work for? Why not reach out to the Department Head or Director – for our world this would be CX Director or Head of CX, or the CEO if you are one of our more senior candidates. Don’t be afraid to show you are keen on working for an organisation – it’s terribly appealing to have a strong candidate approach you particularly when you decide you want to recruit either immediately or further down the line. Even if it results in a coffee and nothing more – it’s another contact made.
10.Talk to us – we’d love to be the ones to place you in your next job. But even if it’s not us who place you there, we are keen to help you find your next role. The more we talk to you – the easier you are to place and the easier it is to place for you when you need help with recruiting for your teams.

Arise the Independent Recruitment Specialist Agencies!

 

Increased redundancies, reduced numbers of vacancies, vast numbers of candidates. Could The Independent Specialist Recruiter be the answer?

 

Every day the number of people asking for help to find work increases. Every day I see more of the the little green strapline on people’s pictures indicating that they are available for work. We know that the number of candidates is rising faster than the number of job vacancies. We were expecting for the numbers to rise coming towards the end of June as from August 2020 employers will be expected to pay 25% of their furloughed workers wages and the furlough scheme itself will be finishing at the end of Oct. This will sadly increase the number of redundancies and any company looking for candidates to fill roles will be absolutely inundated with applicants – not all of them qualified.

 

So if you are recruiting  in house – on the one hand – AWESOME, so many candidates to choose from! But on the other hand for those Resourcing teams – how on earth are you going to get through that many applications sensibly to find the right candidate and offer some semblance of a decent candidate experience? We’ve heard constantly how dissatisfied candidates are with their recruitment experiences at the hands of agencies and in house resourcing teams – so couldn’t this be the time to make things better? Shouldn’t we be looking to put in place future plans to ensure that this critical business area that is so broken starts to function better? Better recruitment means better employee engagement, means better employees, means better retention – means better Customer Experience as the employee has bought into the business and wants to do the very best that they can for the business. This all starts with the Hiring Process!

 

Wouldn’t it be marvellous that instead of people sighing at the thought of recruiting new members of their team – they felt excitement and anticipation? Could we ever get to this point? I wonder whether recruitment and recruitment processes are at a critical point now. Just like with those organisations who have thrived in the pandemic – pivoting their offering to suit the needs of the customer. Recruitment needs to step up too! A large number of Independent Recruitment Agencies have continued to function during lockdown – offering help and advice to candidates who need support and help in trying to find their next role whilst trying to keep the business going despite recruitment freezes. CX Talent Ltd has continued to run – we know that a large number of our candidates are and hopefully will become our clients. We want the experience of dealing with us to be a partnership – a good experience for all. We are not unique! There are lots of specialist agencies in other fields – just like us who behave with integrity and want to do the right thing by both the candidate and the client.

 

I would urge In House Resourcing teams at this time to consider looking to the independent specialist recruitment agencies who can really add value – please look beyond the PSL. We know our candidate bases really well, we understand the nuances and intricacies of our market areas and we’ll be able very quickly and easily to find the RIGHT person for your role. Do you need to know benchmark salaries? Don’t use the job boards – talk to a specialist agency, get an accurate picture. Do you need a very senior candidate in a specialist field? – why talk to the Executive Headhunters – why not just go to the Specialist Agencies – they know who the movers and shakers are without having to research it! Now more than ever – you NEED the RIGHT person in any role.  AND Independent Specialist Agencies really care – both about the candidate and the client – both are as important as each other to us.  Really good agencies are not interested in getting any old bum on the seat – we want the RIGHT bum on the seat! Those placements last, they work! – it means you might use us again! Specialist Agencies thrive on repeat business. We LOVE creating strong working relationships with our clients. We know who will work in each role and who is culturally aligned – we can keep an eye on taken coming through and create your talent benches for you!! I do feel that organisations who don’t fill critical roles with the right candidates will struggle in the new normal.

 

You won’t regret getting a really good small independent agency in to help you recruit. It will save time and money in the long run – we might even make recruitment better, cleaner more enjoyable! Shouldn’t that be the aim?!

 

At CX Talent Ltd we offer the opposite of a ‘volume game’ – we have a real understanding of our candidates’ experience and career aspirations, and we provide our clients with a carefully curated shortlist of excellent people for consideration.

 

For all Customer Experience and customer related roles – please contact us at CX Talent Ltd – we’d love to get involved!

Poor Candidate Experience can damage your Brand.

Kate and I have not always been in recruitment – I personally have been a Picture Researcher, an Account Manager, A Business Development Manager, A Commercial Director and now Recruitment Consultant. Kate has been involved in Theatre, Production and PR in General Management and is now a Recruitment Consultant. Why you may think? Isn’t recruitment dirty and nasty and doesn’t everyone hate you?! Well – yes! But that is why we wanted to do it, because we wanted to do it better and make a difference.

We’ve both been a candidate, We’ve been a Hiring Managers and we like people! We have seen and experienced recruitment from all sides. I am good at Relationship Building, I’m good at selling (though this should not be a big part of my current role) and I care about people getting and doing jobs they love. Kate is too – but she brings the operational focus. The only BIG JOY of being in recruitment is knowing we have placed someone in an awesome role that is completely right for them. If it is right for them – it’s right for the client and great things can happen! As we know – businesses are created by people, run by people and are nothing without their people – so more effort should be placed on finding the right people – Right?!!

When I started up CX Talent Ltd with my friend Kate Baird we didn’t start out as CX recruiters. We started out trying to help local businesses by providing them with short term and interim candidates to help run high level projects. It didn’t work! We fell into CX recruitment almost by mistake – but quickly realised that there was a big gap there, where those recruiting for the roles didn’t understand what they were recruiting for as the roles tended to be so diverse and complex. CX Candidates were completely unrepresented at that time and we found a lovely niche in an area that I would have probably found myself in had I not had my children. We’ve grown our business slowly and organically. Most of our business to date has been by referral and from many of our amazing candidates who like our approach.

What is our approach?

Simply to not be like the other recruitment agencies out there. Don’t get me wrong – there are some awesome ones and those we applaud. However, as you will be aware a great number of people and companies in recruitment have an awful name and reputation and we DON’T want to be like them! We TRY to be as personal as possible, talking and viewing our candidates as individuals not numbers. We try to give as much information and advice to help them secure their next role – irrespective of whether it is with us. Ideally of course – we would place every single person, but that simply isn’t possible. We LISTEN to what our client’s want in a person and then look to our network to find those people. When we have been given a briefing for a role – we don’t immediately rush out and advertise it. We don’t tell our candidates to check roles on our website – we proactively inform candidates when we have a role that is suitable for them. When we’ve been given a briefing – we will already have a few people in mind and those are the first we speak to. Then we go into the database and look to see who else might be interested, then Linkedin and then and ONLY then will be advertise for a role. That is only if we don’t have enough people with the right skill set in the right location for the right money.

So is that why I’m not be familiar with your brand?!

You wont have seen us advertising very often on Linkedin or other job boards. We are not overly shouty about ourselves – but maybe we should be?! Our candidate base is AWESOME full of amazing CX professionals of all levels. If you need someone in this field, In House or Consultancy – seriously look no further – we’ll have them! Other specialist agencies will have amazing candidates in their fields.

 

Who goes into the Hiring Process with joy in their hearts?

Absolutely No-one!

Customer Experience Recruitment – made easy


What I would like is for when In House Resourcing Managers and Hiring Managers have to recruit for CX roles – they think of us. They don’t think – OH GOD! I’ve got to recruit – this is going to be painful. Which is certainly the current way that people feel when they have to recruit!  Instead of that – they think: – ‘OK – I’ve got a role to fill – I’ll call Kate or Jo and they will get it sorted. It won’t be painful or laborious – it will be a great partnership’. We’ll get them the right person into that position as seamlessly as possible. Shouldn’t recruitment be like that – always for all roles?

I know that there are a lot of great In House resourcing teams – fantastic! However, they are often working on far more roles than a Recruitment Consultant is and they can be hugely varied. The In-House Resourcer is often far more stretched than a Recruitment Consultant. With the more complex and specialist roles – like CX, Customer Insight, Transformation, Digital CX, UX, UX Research etc… it is surely easier for these teams to look to a specialist agency to help them find that talent? It is cost effective to get those people in place in a business as soon as possible. It saves on advertising costs and allows those In House Resourcers to get on and fill the roles that are easier to fill – where they don’t necessarily need expert knowledge to know who is suitable for a role and who is not.

I’ve read so many posts on Linkedin recently by people who have had appalling candidate experiences, where they are one of maybe 400 applicants or more for a role. They are often feeling vulnerable due to not being in work and are susceptible to take the silence badly. Don’t damage your brand by offering bad recruitment experiences. As Noah Halperin (a recent contact on Linkedin) so eloquently said in a recent post – ‘People are not a product and processing them like they are is to the detriment of all’. How can recruitment have become like this? People hire people – yet it’s become very transactional and dehumanised.

How can we help to overcome this?

Why not consider using the smaller Independent Specialist recruitment agencies for the more complex roles? They are often owner run and always want to do a great job – this in turn always ensures a great recruitment experience for both candidate and client. It will protect your brand and you might just help keep some of them in business! It is surely a win win!!?

If you’ve got a role – please don’t just look at the PSL agencies. Please look beyond and see if there are others who can offer you a better service – you may be pleasantly surprised!

If you are preparing for an interview or even looking for your next role – take the time to have a think about how to present yourself on a video call – it will be worth it!

 

First and foremost, do your homework in the normal way.  Re-read the job description, research the company, prepare some questions as well as answers to standard interview situations like – why did you leave your last role?  What are your weaknesses?

 

Write down a list of your own strengths and successes and have this to hand.  Having these at the front of your mind will make it MUCH easier to bring out examples to illustrate your skills and experience.

 

Think about the technical side.  Make sure you are well lit – no on wants to interview a shadowy outline!  But not dazzled either as this will be distracting for you.  See if you can set up your computer in front of a window with a white or cream blind to even out the glare.

 

Make sure that the background for your call is neutral and tidy – again you want to cut down on distractions.  I would recommend a tidy room in your home as better than a Zoom background screen, you want to appear authentic.

 

Check your clothes.  It may be by video from home but it IS an interview so treat it as a formal meeting and dress accordingly.  No stripes, small graphics or neon colours, they will all distort on a screen.  Make sure to present yourself in a professional way.

 

Practise looking at the camera on your screen instead of at the interviewers’ eyes – you will make a better connection.  Remember that you’re only seeing (and showing) about 25% of each other on screen so you may want to ramp up non verbal engagement signals such as nodding, smiling and using hand gestures  (take it easy here!!).

 

Record yourself on a practise interview with a friend – it really is the best way to improve your delivery and well worth the time.

 

And finally, allow some extra time at the start of the interview to check your tech – check your camera is on, your audio is working, your son isn’t downloading a massive game upgrade which is likely to interfere with your connection (personal experience anyone?!), your wifi isn’t having a wobble – think of this as your journey to the meeting and leave time for a margin of error.  You don’t want to ‘arrive’ late or flustered – but calm, well prepared and in control!

 

Very best of luck with the job search and please do get in touch for more help and advice.

Businesses and recruiters who are able to empathise and act with (professional) personability will always do best – now more than ever when all brands are under scrutiny about how they are reacting to the COVID – 19 situation.

 

From a recruiters’ point of view, you are likely to get a larger than normal candidate pool of interest in any roles you are currently looking to fill.  This will of course add pressure to your Resourcing / HR team – but the candidate experience is still an important ‘touch-point’ with the wider world for you as a brand, and the process must still be handled with respect and integrity.

 

We’re hearing more often about companies ‘ghosting’ candidates with no feedback or replies at all, and hearing too about how unpleasant and even degrading this feels when someone has taken the time and care to apply for your role.  Doing the courtesy of sending a short reply is an easy win in terms of retaining credibility as a brand prepared to care for its’ employees going forwards.

 

Being open about the interview process and timeframe is another easy win – if you can manage candidate expectations from the outset it is much more likely that they will stay engaged (don’t forget, strong candidates will be applying to other jobs too!).  Especially as traditional processes of face to face interviews in physical offices are being discarded, it’s vital to set out your expectations in terms of interview rounds, assessments and virtual working frameworks. It’s such a shame to lose candidates to other organisations because they were quicker in their processes than you! By keeping candidates engaged in the process – even if you are not as quick as others, you are less likely to lose them.

 

For candidates – bear in mind that businesses are dealing with higher levels of applicants and be prepared to be patient.  Be extra careful to tailor your CV to each and every application to make sure that your skills and experience align as well as possible with the job description to get through that first stage  – the ATS system.

 

Also remember – skills and experience are vital of course, but approach and attitude count too!  Try and build in some ‘WHO YOU ARE’ as well as ‘WHAT YOU DO’ into your CV –  think about why you want this role and why you are interested in this particular company.  Mention both these things clearly in your covering letter.  And, walk the walk.  Think about what really drives you and then be proactive (and professional) on social media platforms.  Put together a list of all the things you’ve done in your career to date that you are particularly proud of. In our world of Customer Experience that would include VoC programmes that have worked well, examples of where you have personally improved the Customer Experience, examples of where you have shown excellent stakeholder engagement and influencing skills. Listing all of these examples down will mean you don’t forget them in interview.

 

The recruitment process can and should be a great start to a long relationship with a new employee and a fabulous chance to show the human face of a brand – it can provide a useful and insightful window into the business for a wider market.  In fact, don’t let it be anything else!  There is a lot of pressure out there at the moment and it’s more important than ever for everyone in the process to be kind and empathetic.  It will pay dividends.

 

 

Some further advice – for recruiters think now more than ever what an independent specialist recruiter can do for you in terms of understanding your needs and acting as your front line in finding the perfect candidate, and for candidates – stay positive and proactive!  We have more help at www.cxtalent.co.uk/the-magic-hour/

Have You Been Made Redundant? Lost your job? This is My Story:

I’ve seen a lot of posts recently about redundancy. About how people are feeling and what they should do next. In a previous life way before I became a recruitment consultant – I was working in a Media organisation and lost my job!

I hope that my own experience and insights might give any of you in this situation some solace and some notion that it WILL BE ALRIGHT!

I was somewhat younger than I am now but I have NEVER forgotten how I felt, what I did and the mistakes that I made. To say that I lost my confidence would be an understatement. It absolutely destroyed me! I was young and, in my mind, invincible and absolutely BRILLIANT (in my own opinion) at the role!! So how could this happen? What was it about me (and 3 others I might add) that led to this?!

I mean how could they get rid of SUCH an indispensable member of staff?! Why me? Why not Janet from Accounts or Cliff from IT? Well – this is an easy one! IT WAS A BUSINESS DECISION! It had NOTHING to do with me, nothing to with my skills or ability to do the job. The ROLE had been made redundant, not me as a person. This is so important to realise – it is not you, you are just as employable as you were before. The business has made a decision that THE ROLE cannot be substantiated and so the decision has been made to make THE ROLE redundant. In all honesty – It took me years to actually realise that and come to terms with it.

I realise now – with several years of hindsight – that work categorically defined who I was. Without the job – who on earth was I? Maybe that very question led me to feel so panicked and lost?! Before a husband and children – as a young person intent on having a great time with their friends, there was not much else in my mind that defined who I was. But, again with hindsight there was a lot about me that defined who I was and work was just one part of that and when I got a new role that would add to who I was – it would not COMPLETE who I was. I think a number of people do this – allow work to become such a huge part of their life that it becomes all consuming – keep perspective on this if you can.

The feelings I had after ‘the meeting’ were disbelief, anger, sadness, disappointment and panic! How could this be? What was I going to do? Quick – get a new job!!! OMG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Unfortunately for me – I let these feelings completely overtake me!

So, what did I do?! I would call it the headless chicken approach! I contacted and met over 26 recruitment agencies – surely, the more agencies I was listed with – the easier it would be to find a role?! WRONG! I was at that point under the false illusion that recruitment agencies would contact you to let you know about roles that they might have for which I was suited. Some did – but a great many did not. I also thought that they had hundreds of roles all the time that maybe they weren’t telling me about. WRONG! I had no idea how sales driven recruitment was, how jobs needed to be filled quickly, how the recruitment consultants were looking for their next roles all of the time! I was also under the illusion that the recruitment consultants would act as my advocate, helping to sell me into the client as a strong contender for the role. WRONG! I was often sent in with several other candidates often without any supporting evidence of why I might be the right person for the role.

The agencies I dealt with at THAT time – were not interested in me at all as a candidate. Fortunately – today, there are a lot of agencies that do care.

I’m not trying to turn this post into a massive sales pitch – but at CX Talent Ltd we genuinely care about our candidates. We do proactively contact candidates to let them know about roles we are working on that might suit them. We work really hard as candidate advocates. A great deal of our approach was borne out of the time that I was looking for a role and trying to provide a service that I would have found appealing and helpful as a candidate.

I applied for hundreds of jobs – using the same CV assuming that whoever saw the CV would READ it and automatically see that I had some good transferable skills if they read between the lines. WRONG! Resourcing teams usually only look at CV’s for about 6 seconds. They dont always read between the lines – some do, but most do not! And that’s assuming that my CV even got through the then very basic ATS systems! I used the scattergun approach – what an unbelievable WASTE OF TIME!!! I could have been spending my time being so much more effective!

When I lost my job it was a beautiful spring / summer – very much like it has been to date. But I didn’t go out and enjoy the sun, I didn’t read more books or meet with friends for coffee. I sat at my computer ALL DAY EVERY DAY – thinking that if I didn’t then I was not doing enough to get a job. Shouldn’t getting a job be like having a job – shouldn’t finding a job BE the job?! Well – again, with hindsight I would say no! Because I became OBSESSED with trying to find the next job and allowed the panic to set in and grow so I became desperate. I would go to interviews and almost terrify the interviewer with my keenness and would not necessarily present the redundancy issue as well as I could have. So I would come across frequently as a bit bitter.

I needed to accept and come to terms with what had happened to me. My headless chicken approach clearly delayed the acceptance stage for me. In fact I don’t think I really reached that until I had my next role. It took me about 4 and a half months of utter madness and sadly weight gain – before I got the next role. Thanks to an incredible MD and great senior management team – I rebuilt the confidence in my abilities and stayed for nearly 9 years!

Having this experience has given me a personal insight into what it means for someone to lose their job.

I have been both Hiring Manager, Candidate and now Recruitment Consultant so I have a 360 degree view of job searching. I wish I had had someone to give me a true insight into what it means to look for a role and how recruitment works.

CX Talent Ltd offers a bespoke tailored package for candidates for a fixed fee to help – if that level of support is required. It’s called The Magic Hour – (though its longer than that!). However, here are some tips from me to you – to help harness that panic and use it for positive action.

1.Write a CV that really emphasises your key skills and those skills that are transferable. BE PREPARED TO TAILOR IT EVERY SINGLE TIME!
2.Make sure your LinkedIn profile is up to date and that you have SEO’d it so that people looking for someone like you can easily find you.
3.Do reach out to agencies if you see them advertising roles you might be interested in.
4.Do reach out to agencies who are specialists in your field. Independent Specialists are by far the best!
5.Dont register with 26 agencies – that is completely INSANE!
6.Make a job seeking plan and stick to it!
7.Spend no more than 2 hours a day looking for and applying for jobs – it does not matter whether you are the first or last person to apply for a role.
8.Get in touch with old bosses and your network and let them know you are on the look out for a new role
9.Dont be afraid to proactively get in touch with companies you might like to work for.
10.Keep perspective – there are a lot of people in your shoes at the moment. It will take some time – but you will PREVAIL!

Losing my role – was awful. But it made me the person I am today. I honestly believe it made me better as a person – more empathetic, more resilient. I developed an understanding that NO-ONE is indispensable – EVER! Without meaning to sound like my Mother – it was a very character building time! It’s definitely helped me in my role as Recruitment Consultant.

So PLEASE keep the faith – it will be OK! You will get through this! Be targeted in your job search, tailor your applications and TRY NOT TO PANIC! Good Luck!

If you need any help or advice please contact us at CX Talent Ltd – we will do what we can to help. 01279 550102