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Life in the old CV yet

Social Media & Your CV

Another year passes, and the collective might of social media and LinkedIn have still failed to consign the CV to the graveyard. It seems that now, more than ever, that the CV is seen as a focal point for candidate engagement, with LinkedIn and Social Media profiles providing supplementary information, such as how many beers or glasses of wine you are willing to be photographed with on a school night(that’s a fib but worth thinking about).

Sifting a CV

According to HR News, recruiters are now even more ruthless when sifting CVs with the amount of time spent looking at any one CV is now probably 5 seconds or less. What makes matters worse is that it is very rare for a CV not to have passed through some sort of filtering system, and therefore the CVs that the recruiter is scrutinising, has been shortlisted.

 

So why didn’t the computer shortlisted CVs make the final cut?

The 4 Main Reasons Your CV Was Rejected

  1. Poor attention to detail – spelling mistakes and especially letter drops such as manged (managed) or hte (the).
  2. Buzzwords – there is a fine line between a legitimate use of strong adjectives on your CV and being over zealous with your descriptives. Do you inspire or are you awe-inspiring?
  3. Too long – If your CV is over 2 pages long.. There are still only a select number of reasons why you can go over 2 pages with the main reason being that you truly are remarkable, a singular global authority. If you are not, and you break the rule then you are considered smug, self-righteous, narcissistic and unable to be concise.
  4. You didn’t tailor your CV to the brief – basically, you could not be bothered to make some adjustments to match your CV the advertisement or the job brief. This also endorses the narcissist theory in point 3.

The way forward seems to be indicating that more emphasis than ever will be on the written CV as the lead source of information. It seems that the last decade has provided us with a revolution in how we can communicate via social media with anyone on the planet, or read something on a phone or a tablet, but it has also made us realise that a well-written CV offers more tangibility than a LinkedIn Profile. It allows you as an candidate to shine as an individual, providing that you put in the effort.

Life in the old CV yet Read More »

Sir Alan Sugar is a bully claims Guardian

Apprentice bashing is back

Lord Sugar and his minions return to the UK tv screens 13/10/14 for the beginning of another series of the Apprentice. The BBC have started a drip youtube feed of the shows contestants aka candidates with sound bites for the couch potatoes that can’t understand the dialogue. You could say that the videos allow the candidates to express themselves but is it just another vehicle for bullying and ridicule prior to the show launch that they must endure? After we have all had a good laugh at their possibly lamentable claims we will see them face Lord Sugar and his bullying tactics according to The Guardian cribbing from the Radio Times. Lord Sugar says he just speaks as he finds and had he been a bully then he would have been inundated with tribunal cases, which he has not. Why they have chosen this over the dire quality of candidates would have nothing to do with an easy headline grab of course. It all begins with a series of videos that have been released which frame the candidate(s) in a noose of their own sound bites.

The real question should be; has The Apprentice become an early season pantomime over the last few years or does it still offer something of value? In the interim, ready yourselves for a hoist of the petard(s).

Steven Ugoalah audition – The Apprentice 2014 – Series 10 – BBC One
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Solomon Akhtar audition – The Apprentice 2014 – Series 10 – BBC One
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Sarah Dales audition – The Apprentice 2014 – Series 10 – BBC One
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Can big data prevent you from getting a job?

Big Data And Your CV

BBC News Article

The bald truth is that most companies are pretty bad at recruitment.

Nearly half of new recruits turn out to be duds within 18 months, according to one study, while two-thirds of hiring managers admit they’ve often chosen the wrong people.

And the main reason for failure is not because applicants didn’t have the requisite skills, but because their personalities clashed with the company’s culture.

So these days employers are resorting to big data analytics and other new methods to help make the fraught process of hiring and firing more scientific and effective.

For job hunters, this means success is now as much to do with your online data trail as your finely crafted CV.

Game for a job?
While the internet has certainly made it easier to match jobseekers with vacancies, a number of firms are moving beyond automatic keyword matching to find “suitable” candidates and trying more sophisticated analyses instead.

For example, recruitment technology firm Electronic Insight doesn’t even bother to look at your skills and experience when analysing CVs on behalf of clients.

Knack games as advertised on the iTunes store
Recruiters claim that games reveal more about a candidate than a traditional CV and covering letter
“We just look at what people write and how they structure their sentences,” says Marc Mapes, the firm’s chief innovation officer.

Its algorithm analyses language patterns to reveal a candidate’s personality and attitude, and then compares this against the cultural profile of the company.

“About 84% of people who get fired do so because of lack of cultural fit, not because of lack of skills,” he maintains.

And companies such as Silicon Valley start-up Knack are even developing games as a way of assessing the suitability of job candidates.

While applicants play an online game designed to reveal their personality, emotional maturity and problem-solving skills, hundreds of pieces of information are being collected in the background and analysed by data scientists.

For example, one game, Wasabi Waiter, involves the player serving customers in a restaurant and assessing their moods and desires. Every decision and choice the player makes tells a story, often unconsciously. Play reveals our true personality, the company argues.

“Gamification is definitely coming in,” says Paul Finch, managing director of Konetic, an online recruitment technology company. “Games can tell if you’re a risk taker or innovator and they appeal to youngsters’ gaming culture.”

Size matters
But innovative personality tests are supplements to, not replacements for, big data analytics, many recruiters believe.

Analysis of historic data from tens of millions of job applicants, successful or otherwise, is helping employers predict which new candidates are likely to be the best based on a comparison with the career paths, personalities and qualifications of previously successful employees.

“Now we’re able to use our own data to track how long candidates stay in a role before seeking new opportunities,” says Geoff Smith, managing director of recruitment consultancy Experis.

Can big data really revolutionise our world? We explore how the explosion of information and analysis will impact our lives and our privacy.

Power of big data
“We can also map out and predict typical career paths based on other candidates’ career histories, which makes us more efficient and more able to help candidates with their future career ambitions,” he says.

Ben Hutt, chief executive of Talent Party, a UK and Australian job site aiming to become “the Google of job search”, agrees that data science is saving recruiters a lot of time and money.

“We have 10 million candidate CVs on our database,” he says. “Using automated semantic analysis we can match suitable candidates to relevant jobs quickly and efficiently, saving human resources managers a lot of time.”

And Juan Urdiales, co-founder of recruitment website Jobandtalent, says machine learning algorithms are making the process of matching suitable candidates to relevant jobs much more accurate.

“We analyse more than 2.5 million profiles and more than 2.5 million job offers every month and learn which jobs the applicants click on and which they reject, refining the search process based on that data,” he says.

Selection bias
All this data analytics is also challenging perceptions about what skills and experiences candidates should have for the post.

President Obama speaking at The White House
President Obama’s White House has endorsed Evolv’s software as a way of fighting recruitment prejudices
For example, San Francisco-based company Evolv found that long-term unemployed people perform no worse than those who have had more regular work.

It also found that prior work experience and even education are not necessarily indicators of good performance in some roles.
[blockquote cite=”Paul Finch Konetic”]It’s all about reputation. If people can’t manage their own reputations, how are they going to protect the reputations of their future employers?[/blockquote]

And for some reason, service industry workers who regularly use five social media platforms or more per week tend to be more productive but less loyal than their less digitally social colleagues.

Social profile
In addition to all the historic data analysts have at their disposal, social media is offering recruiters a rich new vein of real-time data.

Our blogs, websites, Twitter rants and LinkedIn profiles reveal as much – if not more – about us than a semi-fictionalised CV.

“The days of keeping your personal and professional profiles separate are over,” warns Experis’s Geoff Smith.

“Social media is a great platform for individuals to demonstrate their expertise, experience and enthusiasm for their field of specialism. However, candidates need to be conscious of the online reputation they are building and the data trail they are leaving behind.”

A growing number of tech companies are offering tools that can sift through masses of social media data and spot patterns of behaviour and sentiment.

Employers are watching: what does your social media profile say about you?
“Online tools, such as Sprout Social and Hootsuite enable our recruiters to keep an ear to the ground on what’s going on with their clients, candidates and in the sectors we’re working in,” says Mr Smith.

Konetic’s Paul Finch agrees that applicants need to be aware what image their online profiles project.

“It’s all about reputation. If people can’t manage their own reputations, how are they going to protect the reputations of their future employers?” he asks.

Human touch
But technology can only take us so far, argues Jerry Collier, director of global innovation at Alexander Mann Solutions, a company sourcing staff for blue-chip companies including HSBC, Rolls-Royce and Vodafone.

“Recruiting should be about relationships,” he says. “Technology is only there to make that process simpler and more efficient.

“If you want diversity and a richer, more creative workplace, you need people from different backgrounds and experiences.

“Leave that to an algorithm and it will probably come up with the same type of person every time.”

Talent Party’s Ben Hutt agrees, saying: “When you apply data science to 10 million CVs, it becomes something really useful.

“But data science is never going to replace the face-to-face interview.”

Original article: BBC

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