Hmmm, these are tough questions, but speaking from my personal experience as a ‘professional job hunter’ (and getting better with every attempt!); there are a number of things that I have found can help to keep you going.

For me, these have been:

• Knowing that there are many opportunities out there and it will take a number of attempts to get the right role. The UK employment market has been improving over the last three months, and while it may not be at the heyday of a couple of years back, it is better than the first six months of 2009. Each interview attempt will better prepare you for your next go.
• After an interview, always seek feedback. If you get the call that you haven’t been successful, remember to ask the recruiter why – you deserve it! Don’t take anything personally – remember, there are multiple candidates and only one person can get the role. If the recruiter doesn’t have any feedback from the client, ask them nicely to follow up with the client. You don’t need a detailed report – just a couple of key points that you can work on for next time.
• Reflect back (in a positive way) as to what you can do better next time. What was it that you need to focus on? This is where a little recruiter feedback can go a long way!  Was it the questions you are asked about the role, your description on how you would manage something or did you not demonstrate enthusiasm about the company and opportunity?
• Keep and develop a support network. No one person is an island and it is incredibly important to share your thoughts and to support each other. Your network can consist of other job seekers, family and friends. Consider mixing your network – meet people both online and in the real world. I keep in touch with a number of job seekers who encourage me when going for an interview, and I in turn do the same to them. A win-win situation!
• Consider practicing your interview technique. Practice by writing up half a dozen likely questions and having a family member or friend question you in a mock interview. There are also some brilliant online videos which ask questions which you can practice your responses such as jobsite. On the flip side, if you have a computer with a web camera, give some consideration to using it to film yourself giving answers to some likely questions. You may feel a little silly, but it can reduce any feelings of anxiety and it could help you to spot some of your personal traits when nervous such as “ums” or “ahs”, playing with your hair or touching your face. When you are conscious of these, you can work towards minimising them.

There are many other tips out there that can help, but these are some that have worked for me. Of them all, I think the most critical is making sure you have a support network and remember, this network is a two way street – if you support others when they need it – you will be supported in turn!

If you are interested in discussing some of these further, look at joining the 7C Alliance discussion group: http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=1542397, where some great discussions are taking place with regard to the type of help that people need to secure their next contract.

Written by Stuart Brown, a member of the 7C Alliance

About Stuart Brown:

Stuart is an Associate Member of the 7C Alliance.  He provides services to the 7C Alliance on a voluntary basis for facilitating sharing of knowledge about Social Media, including raising awareness of its value, as well as currently being on a part-time contract to 7C Alliance Limited where he is working as a CRM Business Analyst reviewing and refining the Contractor Support Analysis and Contractor Resource Administration functions.  He can be contacted at 7C Alliance Limited by email to stuart@7c-alliance.com or found on LinkedIn through clicking on http://uk.linkedin.com/in/stuartkbrown

About The 7C Alliance:

The 7C Alliance is a Professional Association of IT, Telecoms and other independent technology contractors and consultants who come together to support each other through coaching, mentoring and marketing activities based around each and every member’s set of 7 C’s – which is what they have realised and accept as being what each and every contractor needs to be aware of for survival and success on contract.

About 7C Alliance Limited:

7C Alliance Limited is the company, incorporated by Matt Miller – the inventor of the 7 C’s concept – to provide services to The 7C Alliance.  This includes the setting and management of online forums,  facilitating the provision of coaching and mentoring services, industry-level and professional meetings, events and training as well as other activities to support the professional development and lifestyle of the independent technology contractor.

Presentation background

These challenges are from a number of market observations gathered by Matt Miller in recent years of working with IT contractors who have been brought together through the 7C Alliance, a professional association of contractors who are supported through Matt’s contractor coaching and supply chain support business, 7C Alliance. I verified these challenges through first-hand experience in my own job-hunting as well as from relevant information sourced from discussions taking place on LinkedIn and other online forums and blogs that I have participated in over the past three months since becoming a member of the 7C Alliance.

I thought it would be useful to summarise the feedback received from attendees at the workshop and to present this using the same key topic areas that were shown during the presentation and in the discussion that followed.

We identified the top 5 challenges as:

1. Agencies’ keyword-driven tools
2. Multiple agencies handling one job
3. Bulk recruitment – first come, first served
4. Lack of quality assurance of candidates
5. Lack of quality assurance of contract requirements

Agencies’ keyword-driven tools

The audience seemed to strongly agree with the first challenge – that there is an over reliance on keyword searches and the process is geared towards simply matching these keywords against given requirements, often without further checks being performed to ensure these matches are indeed correct.

A couple of stories shared included:

- A friend of a participant was in the Special Air Service (S.A.S) and received a call for a SAS Programmer role.

- Another participant was aware of a chef getting a call for an SAP role. The end-client was bemused with receiving such a CV and contacted the agency to find out how. After much head scratching, it was worked out that the chef’s CV had noted ‘interested in jobs starting ASAP’ – and so the SAP of ASAP had been picked up by an automated keyword matching tool as making the chef “relevant”.

- Finally, my own experience with getting a Monster job match alert based on the fact that my CV contains the term NGO. I received an alert that I was a match for a job with Transport for London (TfL), and this seemed to be purely driven by a single keyword match. I did not meet any of the seven key criteria necessary for the role and was left wondering why I had received it in the first place – the power of the keyword!

Multiple agencies handling one job

There was very little feedback with regard to this area, although there was an overwhelming agreement that it was a problem. With multiple agencies handling one job, it was often hard to know which agency to deal with.

One experience mentioned was from a Business Analyst, Heather, who in the past had been told she was put forward for a job. She hadn’t heard back and in the meantime received a call from another recruiter who asked if she had been put forward for the role. She stated that she had but hadn’t yet heard back. The second recruiter offered to follow up for her and subsequently she found out that she hadn’t been put forward for the role as she had originally been told. The net outcome was that the second recruiter put her forward and she successfully got the role.

Bulk recruitment – first come, first served

With the sheer numbers of applications, recruiters have to manage responses in bulk which leads to a number of qualified candidates missing out on opportunities. Indeed, anecdotal evidence from some LinkedIn discussion groups indicates that some recruiters operate a ‘cut-off point’ and simply take the first 10 or 20 through the gate.

Further discussion arose from the fact that the recruitment process seems to be based on “how to reject a candidate” rather than how to accept ones based on meeting requirements. Often these rejections can be driven by arbitrary requirements and the process of rejection is performed by administrative staff based on a check-list of criteria, as they otherwise lack the technical experience to determine a genuinely suitable candidate.

An example was cited by a workshop participant who helped recruit for his replacement. 200 CVs were received and these were worked through by a secretary who discarded any CVs with a single typing mistake, incorrect grammar and the like. This resulted in a total of 12 CVs which were used to determine a shortlist. When the participant looked back on some of the discarded CVs, there were a number which would have been even more suitable than the 12 selected CVs. It was also noted that two of the 12 CVs were widely inappropriate and should never have got through this process of ‘selection by rejection’.

A further example was given by a workshop participant of applying for many roles where the skills required were a 100% match with her skills. Despite applying for many roles where this was the case, she never heard back from recruiters and there was no follow up. This has led to her simply playing the numbers game and sending off applications for many positions without necessarily following up with these applications.

Lack of quality assurance of candidates

With recruitment agents being rather busy, it was noted that there seems to be very little time for recruiters to assure that a candidate can perform as they say they can. As an additional thought, there was unanimous agreement that the lack of feedback from agents is also a big problem. It is very hard to make improvements ‘for next time’ without feedback!

Lack of quality assurance of contract requirement

This area focused on what is done, by either recruiters or end-clients themselves, to make sure that their vacancy or job description lists the complete set of skill-sets, experience, training and soft skills needed for doing the job.

Research has noted that a lot of time can be wasted in searching for the right people due to poor vacancy listings or poor job descriptions. Indeed, in some cases, no job description is available and a few lines on the advertised vacancy are all that the contractor has to go off!!

Often the contract requirements, which are the key things to be done by the contractor and stated on the vacancy advertisement or job description, are discovered during the recruitment process to be either:

- Insufficient for covering the scope of what needs to be done by the contractor; or

- Too broad for a single contractor to necessarily have the experience or capability to do.

Indeed, often these types of requirements are posted at a ridiculously low rate for capability expected – and so expectations of the end-client are unreasonable.

Where the contract requirements are insufficient, this has led to a lack of quality candidates. By contrast, where the requirements or over-stated – that is, demonstrate too many expectations for the role – and, worse, state a rate for the contract that does not reflect value of the capability in the market, there are often too few candidates. A few comments arose along the lines of:

- “The people who make the choice about which CVs are to go forward do not know enough about the role. Agents do not know the technology used in the role.”

- “There are often unreasonable requirements in job adverts”

- Mike, an Information Security Specialist, felt very strongly about the need to educate the end client in setting up contract requirements

- Often it can mean a long wait for the candidate who has gone for an interview – and only to find that the end-client has realised, in the course of the process, that they needed a different type of person or that “someone internally is capable of fulfilling this role” (and hence the ubiquitous response received “role has been filled internally”)

General Discussion

- Everybody was very keen on the idea of increasing human interaction and the feeling is strong that this interaction is widely lacking in the current recruitment process.

- There should be a version of CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration) for recruitment which is open source .

- Mike had received the suggestion to include your personality in business terms on your CV with focus on the following aspects:

1. Who you are as a person so employers know what to expect
2. Describe your personality
3. Ensure your key skills are included, but these should be throughout your CV
4. Make sure that your personality suggests a fit with the business culture

I hope the above information is useful and provides an insight into both the top challenges facing contractors when applying for roles and the type of workshops held at a 7C Alliance Job SAW. If you would like to know more about Job SAW, take a look at this earlier blog post.

If you are interested in attending a future 7C Alliance event (either a networking opportunity or a  specific event) please visit the contact us page and submit a London IT Contractor Alliance Meetup request. There is also a 7C Alliance discussion group on LinkedIn, feel free to join if you are a contractor or are interested in contracting and want to participate in some great conversations around all manner of topics.

Finally, I’d like to thank Matt Miller, Adele Coetzee and Allan Keyzer for all their help in preparing for the presentation as well as their invaluable support and advice – thanks guys, I couldn’t have done it without you!

Written by Stuart Brown, a member of the 7C Alliance.