Running the gauntlet of lazy recruitment agents

Anything but able

I want to believe that my LinkedIn profile is good enough and I would be the first to say any profile can be improved upon, but there is no perfect profile, we are just trying to project our best selves.

However, I get barraged with lots of emails from recruitment and talent acquisition specialists, though I am left wondering what the specialism is, as it is becoming obvious to me that they neither read nor assess my profile before proposing totally unsuitable roles that do not fit my experience, expertise, location, or remuneration requirements.

It would seem their professional acumen is vying for a world record in some sort of whack-a-mole exercise of flooding prospects in the hope that one or a few might be hit hard enough to be responsive.

Interest me, engage me

Too many times, I am asked to forward my CV on scant job information, they, thinking I would be interested when they have neither interested nor engaged me.

If you are contacting me, I would hope you have first read my profile and the embedded CV, your specialism coming to the fore by treating me as a professional, through reviewing my experience, roles, responsibilities, and broader profile, rather than as a mercenary for hire.

Then, interest me with a useful job profile along with the associated remuneration range - cut to the chase with the view that we do not want to waste each other's time.

If I am interested, you will get a response and we can have a discussion about the role and the prospects. Recruiters need to get better, the slap-dash approach is becoming an annoyance, hence this post.

And another recruitment agent called

What you can do with knowledge

I can imagine that not many recruitment consultants would have the time to go through my curriculum vitae (CV) in a professional quest to know their candidate, it makes me wonder if they devote any time to knowing their client too. Maybe, it would take time for the recruitment industry to adopt the due diligence activities of the financial institutions to ‘know your customer’ (KYC) as part of anti-money laundering (AML) requirements and regulations.

Now, I raise this because, if the recruitment consultant that called me this morning had bothered to KYC by reading my CV and before that, KYC by fully appreciating what their customer requirements along with details of the opportunity being offered, we might have had a different conversation along with my offering some grudging respect to a professional cohort that rarely works hard enough to earn it.

Know the location

It transpired that this recruitment called me about a job in Marburg in Germany, I asked there exactly Marburg was, she didn’t know (KYC) and eventually found it was near Frankfurt, between Bonn and Frankfurt, she said, but it has no relation to the former.

I know a bit of German geography and places, it is indeed near Frankfurt am Main to be differentiated from Frankfurt an der Oder on the Polish border, for there are many same name towns in Germany that need to be qualified by their regions, else you might end up hundreds of kilometres away from your intended destination.

One must make that point; if you are a recruitment consultant seeking to place a candidate abroad, do the research, find out about the place, the history, the cost of living, the interesting things. Sell the place as you sell the opportunity. Don’t appear stupid, it is annoying.

A chilling discovery

The offer was not exciting though, you don’t take me from an exciting English city and plonk me in the middle of a provincial German town for a pittance, though it does have centuries of interesting history and recent notoriety. It did not occur to me in these Coronavirus times until I checked that Marburg is an eponym for the Marburg virus which was first described in 1967 when German workers were exposed to tissues of infected grivet monkeys. The Marburg virus is in the class of the Ebola virus, they are both haemorrhagic fever viruses.

Obviously, I found myself going down this rabbit hole, in search of why grivet monkeys that are native to a region of East Africa were leaving infected tissue in provincial Germany. Then for the grace of absolution, the entry for the hapless grivet monkey does not cross-reference to the virus. They must have edited their Wikipedia entry to remove the stigma.

Going from my reaction, I began to understand why for posterity reasons, the new Coronavirus, first identified in Wuhan, China, ended up with the name COVID-19 rather than the Wuhan virus, for a sudden irrational thought somewhere in the future, might unwittingly taint any desire to be anywhere near Wuhan for anything. Much as we somewhat identify many other diseases that are eponymously named. [List of eponymously named diseases – Wikipedia][Science Magazine – WHO rules for Naming Diseases]

Don’t waste my time

Then, back to the crux of this blog, I wrote two blogs yesterday, one about recruitment agents and the other about the Coronavirus, there are links to my blogs from within my CV if it looks interesting enough to the reader.

In the case of the recruitment agent who had not done her homework and was completely out of her depth matching my profile to the requirements, if she understood either, a little more attention to detail rather than shuffling papers and manning a phonebank to earn commission might have achieved more for her, probably not with me, but with someone who might have seen the Marburg role as an opportunity.

Finally, if you are recruiting for an architect, don’t suggest the remuneration of a technician, it is a waste of time for both parties. It is not arrogance, just a bit of self-respect, many candidates are not hungry dogs jumping at any bone tossed at them and recruitment agents need to begin to earn their commissions by really putting in the work.

Through the prism of landing a new role

A market of bits

We are a churning marketplace that shifts through bit parts of being customer, seller, or product, we could even be a shop or shop window.

Like in a bazaar, we are flipped like fresh fish, then poked, and prodded to determine if we are of the quality to be served for dinner at home or in a restaurant. Nowhere is this of particular import than where you are on the job market seeking an opportunity for which you are first qualified and able to deploy your expertise and experience whilst at the same time you try to discern whether that prospect sets you up for the new when the project ends.

Don’t recruit like a brute

The engagement with recruitment agencies is at times a battle of wits, some of whom have just passed your profile through an ineffective and crude mangler without paying any attention to the detail therein.

There are times I have suggested I am a technical prostitute on the market for punters and patrons that take my fancy as much as they might be interested. Yet, it is not for anyone who comes or anything that goes. Discernment and discrimination are paramount, for there must be a good fit with the recruiter than engages you to represent your interests for which they will earn a fee if you accept the opportunity as even as they work to meet the requirements of their client.

Work for your keep

What irks me most is those who don’t do their homework at all, getting the basics of what we are about before calling and setting out to useful detail what the prospect portends. For instance, if you bring me an opportunity on mainland Europe, have answers for the concerns about Brexit and if relocation issues might be constrained for all sorts of reason. Then, already do an analysis on comparative cost of living to remuneration for taking someone out of their comfort zone abroad.

It is an insult to call me to match or offer than the same rate I am on in the UK where I have my comforts, accommodation, life, and friends as if you are doing me a favour. Much as I like adventure, I will not be fulfilling a role at a cost to myself just because you are persuasive or enthusiastic. I have been dealing with recruitment agents for decades, you are probably new to this game.

The market trumps all

I guess the funniest question I have had to answer is whether I have other offers I am considering. Let this be understood without any equivocation, I am on the market until contracts and agreements have been signed and delivered. Unless you are paying to keep me off the market, I have no obligation or allegiance. There are times I have gullibly trusted the word of a stranger and lost time and opportunity when the supposed arrangement fell through.

As a free agent, the decision for what I will do and where I will go is ultimately mine to make, if your sales patter does not sell, it would not be bought. It is not for me to become sentimental for what I have not obtained a binding and legally enforceable contract for.

In the end, I also must believe in myself, my reticence to apply for certain roles where I am well qualified and can grow to fill the opportunity is a battle of self-assurance and growing self-esteem. In my doubts, I hope a little voice of faith just urges me to do step out, step up, like someone I love would say, step on it. I will rise to the occasion.

Opinion: How we are losing the #ChildNotBride debate to Senator Yerima

Game, Set and Match to Yerima

We are swiftly losing the plot and the battle in the debate with regards to putting up our girls for marriage as espoused and promoted by Senator Sani Yerima.

In all the media appearances that the veritable ex-governor and Sharia law advocate has attended, he has literally wiped the floor clean with all his inquisitors demonstrating a thorough grasp of the constitutional issues that allow him the pleasures he enjoys without moral reflection because he believes he is in the right.

Meanwhile with our moral indignation, passion and disdain of the man and his views, we have deployed emotion, celebrity and ignorance against a well-prepared, media-savvy, knowledgeable and formidable force of personality who once again has successfully run rings round us.

Building an unassailable profile

Sani Yerima is a problem, a developing problem with a growing followership, media profile and international recognition; the little leaven of yeast he was years ago has slowly but surely leavened the whole dough, like the little venom of a poisonous snake has fully paralysed us in debate with neurotoxins presenting death.

We are never going to win this debate if we continue to entertain Senator Sani Yerima as the clown, more so, where we must tackle him requires proper intellectual engagement of people who have studied and understood the core legal, religious and socio-economic matters that underpin what makes these practices thrive without sanction.

Atrocious figureheads ruining the plot

This is no time to roll out figurehead celebrities oblivious of data and facts debating and contributing like airheads, adding fuel to the odious glare that is giving Senator Yerima the courage to state his case on the international media without apology.

Without doubt, the man is smart, he also has amazing political nous because what he has successfully done is make his own personal interpretation of issues the core and contention of the debate; once we have absented ourselves from the core objectives to toe this line, well walked by him and less known by us, we have basically lost before the first word is spoken.

The pimping media

The media also have to excoriated about how this debate has been derailed from giving more prominence to the protection of the rights of the child from entering adulthood long before they are due just because some men have found a propensity to satisfy their evil lusts with the innocence of kids.

Yes, the media, the houses and the personalities, for ratings and involvement latching onto the notoriety of the reprehensible have not furthered the debate for the cause of humanity and what is right, but have become voyeurs of comment and counter-comment, happily thinking they are providing a platform for debate when they are no better than pimps providing board for prostitute and punter to meet.

Respect the man

We will only begin to tackle Senator Yerima properly, when we humbly respect that he is knowledgeable, informed, equipped, savvy, smart and intelligent, it means we also have polish up our act by ensuring we match each of these qualities with people who have superior intellect on all the matters constitutional, religious and otherwise – we have many, prominent of whom is Maryam Uwais who gave a well-written submission on this matter here.

Senator Yerima and Constitutional Review – Maryam Uwais

We will never be equipped for the heavy lifting of radical change in national consciousness which some people term the reorientation of the citizenry, and in my view that will take generations of re-schooling, if we have not been exercised in lesser issues like Child Marriage, Female Genital Mutilation, Maternal Mortality, Rights of the Woman and the Child, Education, Health to greater social and infrastructure issues as Power, Resource Management, Corruption or even Homosexuality - We have to work with the discreet, and individual parts of the sum to make the whole product, the whole is too unwieldy to tackle, it is a leviathan of a problem.

This David is beating us fair and square

There is much to do, but we have to start with the basic sketches, pencil marks, brush strokes and composition before we get the big picture of where we want Nigeria to be.

The Big Picture is not a screenprint, it will be slow and painstaking, one generation working with the next and preparing the one after to take over reinforcing and building on the foundations laid down now; it is not a chicken or egg matter, but a chicken and egg coexistence because the future we so desire might not come to light until the lifetime time of the grand-chick, just as dreams of our fathers before might only be realised in the lifetimes of our grandchildren, we have to build continuity into the struggle and survival of humanity for the good, the better and the best.

One final note of warning, “Those who treat their adversaries with derision are soon humiliated in the theatre of battle. Think Goliath and David.” It goes without saying that Senator Yerima is playing the part of David too well for the Goliath of our disdain to realise that the stone of Islam in the sling of the Senator’s good aim is the death of Goliath and the end of our side of the story or the protection of girls who should not be brides.

Related reading

Nigeria: Senator Yerima's Child Is a Bride on Friday the 6th of September 2013

Nigeria: On Child Marriage, The Perception Drives the Debate

Nigeria: Senator's teenage marriage is lawful though reprehensible

Nigeria: Senator's defiance makes Sharia Law untenable

The case for State law over religious guidance

Thought Picnic: I am available, let's talk

What I have to give

Each time I have the opportunity to return to the market at the end of a project I wonder about what it is I can give to those that could use my skills.

My skills acquired over 22 or so years of working in IT, maybe skills of a lifetime too because a good deal of how I project myself comes from everything that makes the person that I am.

Behind the façade of assuredness about ones abilities lays a niggling concern about relevance, you read the job offers and measure yourself against the requirement wondering if you do match them or you are extending yourself beyond your capabilities.

I am able

Now, I believe I have always risen to the challenges in terms of projects or problems put my way for solutions or innovative ideas.

The whole workshop of my expertise is brought to bear in crafting the concept, the process, the workflow, the solution and the implementation giving due consideration to maintaining operational effectiveness whilst improving the environment.

However, I have somehow been unable to put that level of passion into my marketing literature, my curriculum vitae shows so much but probably does not reveal enough about my usefulness.

Looking further afield

In some cases, I tap my resource of professional contacts built over the years who have been my source of jobs in the last 15 years, but in tougher times, the net has to widen to include new contacts and people who hardly know what I can do and probably may never appreciate that who they are getting is a lot more than what they are seeing.

Sometimes I feel I am a man of many abilities without a coherent channel of expression, it becomes a bother gnawing at my confidence and contributing to my sense of uncertainty.

Yet, I believe, things would turn out right, I just have to keep letting people know I can bring something valuable to the table and it would be of use, worthwhile and of good quality helping their organisation be better at what they do.

Maybe it is also time to begin something anew, my ideas of what makes for the conversion of crazy ideas into viable solutions – that is a process towards avoiding irrelevance.

In any case, I am ready for a new job, can we talk?

Reference

LinkedIn Profile

Beware of deceptive LinkedIn recommendations

Professional social networking

LinkedIn* is more or less the professional networking site that allows for people to keep tabs with people one has somewhat interacted with in professional life.

For a person who has been self-employed most of my working life and has worked in many organisations, LinkedIn offers a forum to keep tabs with people I have worked with and also allows one to keep abreast of the careers of those same people.

Most recently, I tapped this professional network for job opportunities after having been out of work for almost a year and that mostly due to serious illness. I was glad to find that many of my ex-colleagues responded with sympathy and help which eventually lead to a job.

Self-referencing resource

I have also found that the LinkedIn profile can serve as an adjunct to a curriculum vitae (CV) because it can contain information that would not necessarily appear on a CV for instance, it can be a self-referencing portal if an employer reviews the profile finds people you have worked with and probably knows those people or organisations and make qualified assumptions or deductions of the prospect.

A slightly more subjective but useful function in LinkedIn is the recommendation feature, it can be interesting and indicative of the views ex-colleagues have of a person, hence, it is important that the writer and recipient pay particular attention to the construction, content, context, intent and import of the recommendation.

The recipient is given the opportunity to edit and recommend to the writer changes that would reflect better in order not to have the opinions misconstrued by other readers.

Understand before acceptance

Where English is used but not the mother-tongue, it is even more pertinent that the matter be reviewed by an English speaker before publication. I have at least in a number of cases had to decline recommendations that were subject to unfavourable interpretation even though the intentions were noble and generous – such however should not be enough to allow a recommendation or it would be the equivalent of shooting oneself in the foot.

I was completely mortified when I read a recommendation posted on a LinkedIn profile, I was half persuaded to highlight that the intention and the meaning were at complete variance. However, on reflection, the writer might well have meant what he wrote and the recipient none the wiser about the nuances and pitfalls of the gentle English putdown has proudly published this damning assessment of abilities sandwiched in passable praise.

The short recommendation

“Person is a great consultant with a lot of knowledge from everything. Doesn't bother helping you with all sort of things. Really a great team worker and a nice colleague.”

Three short sentences that speak volumes that are either lost in translation from a Dutch context or are a good excuse to use language as a deficiency to castigate in the most unfair light.

Person is a great consultant with a lot of knowledge from of everything. Either way, the knowledge from or more correctly, the knowledge of everything could easily read as a Jack of all trades and a master of none. The more charitable turn of phrase would probably have been a very broad knowledge of technical concepts – giving it a more specific frame of context. Whilst Dutch allows for verbosity and generalisations that could be easily contextualised, English is not that forgiving.

Does he bother or does he mind?

Doesn't bother helping you with all sort of things. This is the damning part because it reads like he doesn’t mind helping you in every way but it says he is the most unhelpful person you can find regardless of the situation presented to him.

It might be that the writer thought bother was synonymous with mind; in some contexts ‘Are you bothered?’ or ‘Do you mind?’ could be interchangeable but definitely not here. With Google Translate to Dutch the meaning did not carry as well until I modified the sentence to read as “He doesn't bother helping you with all sort of things.”

Dutch requires that the object and subject are very explicit in a sentence, it is not that good with implicit references and so this passed the censorship of the recipient when it should not have gone any further.

Can he really be?

Really a great team worker and a nice colleague. This would leave one almost wondering what the writer was trying to say after the first two sentences and it might well allow one to consider the possibility of a Freudian slip. Malevolently, this was the sweetener to the bait, obfuscating the intentions in the second sentence.

You might call it pedantic but recommendations are read with a greater attention to the detail rather than the general idea of what the writer is trying to convey – this recommendation has in my opinion torn the professional reputation of an otherwise knowledgeable and great consultant who is a nice colleague to shreds.

To think this recommendation has been published for over 2 years might well mean the damage is already done.

As for my opinions of the recipient, I could not possibly comment any further. The advice is, never accept wholesale a recommendation you do not fully understand and comprehend regardless of the good intentions of the benevolent writer.

* LinkedIn - Wikipedia

Are you selling or shelved?

Recently, I was touted as someone who knows a bit about making CVs do what they are supposed to do. Create interest and get an interview.

So, in the end, I did receive a number of CVs and ended up writing this commentary which I believe would help towards ensuring that you are represented to the standard you do want to be recognised when your material lands on a recruiter’s desk.

Some of the commentary is directed and personalised, but no less relevant to any CV you read or write.

Introduction

I read your CVs with interest and decided it might be better to share a few thoughts about what I believe makes CVs do the talking before they really, really want to meet the persona behind the data.

I have a number of analogies which I think would help reframe a lot of the detail of what in your CVs to bring out the qualities that really sell.

At first, I view a CV as marketing literature, it is your brochure that says, when I sent you my resume, I saw myself as the best person you could recruit for that role. How do you get your CV to do that.

First Analogy:

This is quite morbid but contains some interesting facts of life. When I visit a cemetery, I first look round the first few tombstones to give me an idea of the time frame in which people were buried in this cemetery after which I go looking for the mausoleums or grand edifices that tell you about the persons, persons and families buried therein.

Then I hear a famous person is also buried there and go looking for their headstone usually expecting to see something grand. If the stone is grand, fine, however, if it is ordinary, I am a bit underwhelmed.

What is the point here? Many CVs are tombstones, ordinary, plain and simple, nothing of note apart from gleaning an idea of what is about. The CVs that stand out have professional formatting, straight to the point and clearly engage the interest of the reader - these are the mausoleums.

Always give your CV a different look.

Second Analogy:

Culled, edited, personalised and updated from an article about the Perfect CV.

This chap comes round and says, "I've got a gun", in some cases he would instil fear, if well known, he is probably trying to show off and his friends say "so what?" Any one can get a gun.

That is the Feature - many CVs are full of features and lists. The reader has to figure out how each feature might apply to his recruitment situation or rather discard the CV and pick another up.

Maybe, the chap was caught mid-sentence and he says, "I've got a gun and I shot someone". That is an Achievement, of sorts, but it could also be murder and everyone is appalled and horrified, he is about to be shopped to the police.

And so, many CVs are full of achievements, but who are the achievements for and why?

Then he really gets to complete his sentence, "I've got a gun and I shot someone with it and because I did that, we won the war". Everyone exclaims, "You won the war?" He is feted, honoured, respected and the feature or achievement pale in significance because he used those two to gain a Benefit.

Anyone who reads that benefit through from the feature has his imagination excited about who this person is and that is what your CV should do.

Anything you have done that cannot be quantified as a benefit to the firm you work in is of no great significance.

There is not though that the order you bring into the chaos of change management saves money, time, resources and increases productivity and so on.

People who can clearly illustrate that they have brought benefits to any environment in which they have worked are seen as people who have something to bring to the party even if they are initially not considered qualified for the job.

Work to be done!

Your profiles should be a brief about you which should cover 3 essential things - who you are, what you bring and your pledge to fit in. Eliminate jargon and profession letters from that profile.

Each aspect of your work experience should concentrate on how your contribution helped and benefited, then you can list or analyse how you used the tools to get there.

Use statistical stuff like you halved waiting times, increased success results by a percentage, got people involved in some scheme.

One of my jobs was tough to explain and this is how I put it down "Three teams were combined into one; my role was to make them work as one." - Then I talked about how we got about it.

How do you get promoted at interview? Your CV raised expectations, your presence exceeded expectations.

Only put in the jargon where it helps shed more light on what you have done.

The area where you did temping jobs, you were useful to whoever employed you and achieved and benefited those organisations, spruce that up.

If you travelled, give a general idea of what you did - white-water rafting, crocodile baiting or lion-riding.

Recruiters like unusual, weird, crazy but collected people; they have a great outlook on life. - Statement from Tom Peters the uber-guru.

Close your CV with an idea of where you think you are going career wise and what general skills you have that do not fit in the body of the CV per se.

Do not waste space on old jobs except if they do contribute positively to the whole picture.

Have fun!