On Mon, 2003-02-24 at 22:18, Bill Corr wrote:
<snip>I might need a London job...</snip>
Well, as everyone else has said, the market ain't what it used to be.
I'm currently looking for work myself at the moment and have found it
to be quite tough. I have my CV with about 50 agencies, and feel as
though I'm getting no where. As someone else said, the best strategy is
to speak to humans, not inboxes. When you send your CV[0], make sure you
ring the agent/employer/waste-of-space you sent it to and discuss the
position. This is possibly the only way to guarantee that they will look
at your CV as they get flooded with CVs for each position these days.
Also, make sure you apply for jobs that exist. Gone are the days of just
firing your CV at any old agency and having them respond with job
possibilities. Agencies are getting selective on which skill sets they
are handling, perhaps because employers want them to be slightly clueful
about the CVs, so it might take time to find an agency who regularly
deals with Perl people.
If you've got J2EE, EJB, JDBC, VBA, .NET or C# on your CV you'll go a
lot further than if you don't. I've applied for numerous jobs that I
know I have the skills for, but I'm failing to get considered because
the employers are putting weird requirements in. One job was for a
Senior Unix/Perl/C developer, but unless you had VBA and .Net on your CV
they didn't want to know. It seems to me that any senior Unix/Perl/C
developer would be able to pick up .Net/VBA in no time as a no brainer,
but unless you can show "X years experience" you won't get a look in.
Like the front-end web designer, with extensive Photoshop and Flash
experience, who also needed to be a senior Solaris admin and security
expert. ... It's a strange market out there...
... Sorry, I'm ranting, aren't I? ... Think it's time I rang another
agency to create a feeling of doing something....
Good luck with the job hunting.
Ian
[0] Don't delude yourself about the cluefulnesss of agents/employers:
they are not and will never be clueful. If your CV doesn't open in
Word then they'll probably just bin it. If you're lucky, they'll ask
you to resend in a "standard format" which does not include PDF.
Others may chime in with war stories about sending two non-editable
versions of your CV, one with and one without your contact details,
but from my experience, that's not working anymore. If the agent
can't play with your CV to "help you get the job" then it's too much
trouble and they won't do it.
--
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