JTL Services, Inc. has decided to implement a program that allows friends, family members and co-workers to benefit by referring a job candidate to them.
This year is starting out completely opposite to last year. This time last year instead of hearing the phone ring you heard the crickets outside! I’m very excited about what I am seeing and if you’re a job candidate it is time to get prepared.
Make sure your resume is up to date and if you need help with that I can refer you to some great resume writers. There is nothing worse for me than having a great candidate to submit to my client knowing that one phone call will get them an interview but the job candidate’s resume or application is not in my hands.
The jobs that we are looking to fill are mostly technical jobs in the IT vertical. If you know someone who you think is a great candidate just refer them to me and if we place that candidate with one of our clients we will pay you $1,000 for the referral. Keep checking back to our jobs page for updates which do change every day and keep in mind not all of our jobs make it on the site.
I just read an article in my local paper called “Jobless Recovery, Fruitless Search”. I would like to point out a few things about this article since many of you are getting the same results.
Perhaps you might want to start thinking out of the box regarding some different types of approaches in your job search. I had the website MyJOBCAST.com made specifically for this purpose. Our goal was to show hiring managers something different to look at rather than the typical resume. See if you can find a recruiter that will work with you. Network until the cows come home. Perhaps submitting an additional 50 resumes instead of calling it quits after the first 50 might be the answer. Customize your resume for each position you are applying for is important. Thinking and believing that the government is going to help is not the answer. It’s not the government’s job to help you even though they want you to think it is.
This is why planning and goal setting is so critical for you to teach your children. The college degree they decide to pursue is vitally important to their future. Getting a degree in something they “want to” versus something that will help them get a job is paramount. It amazes me when conversing with someone who tells me that their son or daughter is having a tough time finding a job out of college. My first question to them is what did they take in school? When they respond with something like “Golf Course Management” I wonder who advised them to follow that dream? And for you parents who don’t parent, plan to have your children living with you for a while because they won’t be able to afford to live on their own!
I don’t believe leaving the greatest country in the world is not the answer either. To me that’s like saying, “Well now that I have lung cancer I’m going to start smoking!” What we need to do is to get people to understand that the government cannot create anything but a mess and they do it with our dollars. Taking money from me and you and then giving it to “Joe” isn’t the answer either. We need the government to protect our borders and to allow us and the free enterprise system to work its magic. And when the government does have a job to do like over-sight for companies like Bernie Madoff’s, then they should do their job. I believe that the people in the SEC who where assigned to his company should also be in jail. Instead, what this government is trying to do is to convince everyone that free capital markets is a bad thing. So their answer is to increase regulations and over-sight and to do this is to raise our taxes. The real crime is that our tax dollars once again went to inadequate people with zero accountability.
My heart goes out to anyone that is having a tough time finding a job and making ends meet. Perhaps a finance degree is in the future for all of our kids so that they can figure out how to live on less money. Sorry for the reality check but CHANGE is coming.
Desperate times perhaps, but there is no need for stupidity! Everyone knows someone who currently is out of work. Hell, I have file cabinets filled with resumes of laid off workers. The issue isn’t that the normal paths of finding employment have changed, its just that the paths are currently closed! Those of us that have clients still hiring and using us to fill their roles, we are grateful for, but it doesn’t mean that some “yahoo” out there who wants to charge you money is going to help you. The problem out there is that there are too few roles and too many sharp candidates to choose from.
Over the past year Career Coaches have been popping up on the internet more than people getting the swine flu! The CDC needs to create a shot to give the unemployed to keep their money in their pockets. I have been getting calls every single week from job candidates asking me about this new phenomenon. The call usually starts like this: “Have you heard of XYZ Career Coaching, Resume Writing, Interview Training, Action Plan Guiding, Branding Me Extraordinaire Networking Guru For a Fee Company LLC? They say that they’ve worked in HR for years in fact, ran the HR department for the whole company so they seem to know about jobs”. My response is “Really, they sound like a home run”!
There are good people out there that haven’t just thrown up a sign on a shingle announcing that this is now what they do. If your talking with a Career Coach or someone who claims they can help you just make sure that they’re not just an opportunist looking to make a quick buck. And just because someone wrote a book doesn’t mean anything other than, they wrote a book. I understand if you’re like me, and can’t write well, that it make sense to pay someone to help you with your resume, that’s fine. I understand that there are very talented people who can help you in that area. I’m talking about the person who claims that they are this guru at finding people jobs. If they are truly good at it then why are they not being paid by the companies?
I’ve been told that these Career Coaches charge anywhere from a thousand dollars and up. Most recruiting agencies will charge a percentage of the job candidate’s first year annual salary, typically 25%. My question is if you are such a guru at helping candidates find jobs, why aren’t you recruiting and making a lot more? Perhaps there are more opportunities in charging people than clients willing to pay a fee for someone. All I know is even in this bad economy we are still in business and doing quite well.
If someone is going to charge you money to help you find a job, there are things you should look into.
1) Check with your State to see if they are licensed with the State to charge job candidates money. I know in the States of Connecticut and North Carolina you need to be licensed and monitored by the State.
2) Ask how long have they been legally in business.
3) Get references.
4) What are their fees? Do they put that in writing?
5) What guarantee do you have that you will find me a job?
Recruiters don’t have guarantees they offer job candidates. I can’t promise anyone that I can find them a job. I also don’t charge them for my advice, preparation, editing of their resume, reference checks, cold and warm calling to my 10 plus year client list promoting their background and to top it off, I will negotiate their compensation package for them.
Some people don’t get it do they. What makes someone an expert? The best way to explain what I mean comes from
movie “Back To School”. Rodney tells the professor how it works in the real world. How does he know? He knows because he has done it, and there is nothing more powerful than actually doing something. You can talk to me about theory until you’re blue in the face! Just because you worked in HR doesn’t mean you can help someone find a job. Just because you wrote a book and have a website doesn’t mean you can help someone land a job.
A free site that can assist you is MyJobCAST.com. This site has been created to assist people that are not getting help from anywhere else. I am taking the knowledge that I have gained over the years and put that into a automated web 2.0 application. We are soon adding the free job portion of the site that will allow small businesses to list their jobs for free.
I posed this question about the rise of Career Coaches in LinkedIn and I must admit the answers were excellent even from the Career Coaches themselves. They have said the same thing about checking the legitimacy of the Career Coach. I would like to end with a statement that came from Charlene Norman from Toronto Canada and she summed it up by saying ” if you can’t do, teach”. Brilliant!
Tara LeFevre, Managing Partner JTL Services, Inc.
If you’re searching for customer service and someone to really focus on your needs then try a small search firm. In today’s business environment it’s pretty easy to find out what other companies are doing. With networking being the “word” of the new century, it doesn’t take much effort to find out what’s going on at XYZ Recruiting Firm. Being in the business now for 12 plus years, I have made some good friends that happen to work at large recruiting companies. All I will say is business as usual is still the norm. I guess that works in a “burn and churn” environment. That’s why the next call you might get is from your “new” recruiter at XYZ, because your old recruiter is no longer at the firm.
When you’re working with a company that’s business model is based on “numbers”, the problem is you as a client are up against their plan rather than yours! I equate this to what happens to be my favorite past time and that’s shopping.
I prefer to shop at small boutique stores that focus their attention on me and quality stuff, instead of filling their shelves with mass produced stuff and no one to be found. These large firms focus on the numbers and less on you. At the end of the day the recruiter on the job needs to show good numbers to their managers. The “good’ numbers consists of how many people did they recruit, how many jobs orders did they get, and how many send-outs did they have today?
Is there anything in there about you? Perhaps you’re the job order that they got, but the focus is not on you, it’s on the numbers. Have your ever heard the expression, “if you throw enough mud on the walls some will stick”? Well mud doesn’t look good under my nails!
When I first started recruiting that’s what I did. I worked the numbers instead of working for my clients. What I found is spinning my wheels all over the place took so much time and not enough progress for my clients! So needless to say I changed my focus on the clients that really want to work with me and their jobs? I started to get focused on finding the best talent for my clients and help them as quickly as I could.
That is why today I work with only a handful of clients and why my success rate is much better than ever before. My clients love the fact that I am always available for them and flexible to work the way they need me to work. Even in this economy it has been a winning year! Visit my profile.
Today more and more resumes I receive have one major flaw. One that I would like to discuss which happens to be the topic of age. Who out there is advising job candidates to hide their age? Has hiding your age on your resume ever worked for someone? Listen it’s stupid to broadcast that you have 20 plus years experience, because all that’s saying is “hey don’t look at me”. Hiring authorities aren’t dumb so listing your first job as being the Controller isn’t tricking anyone to call you. What do you think goes through their head about that? “Oh the dude must be a prodigy” “WOW right out of school he was hired as the controller”. And oh yeah, the big kahuna is when you glance down at the education and the dates are missing. What’s that all about? Perhaps it was just an oversight? Certain dates we don’t forget LIKE WHEN YOU GRADUATE FROM SCHOOL!!! I am aware that there is a recession but this tactic is not going to help you.
So guys and gals listen UP because you are wasting your time. If you happen to get lucky because the HR person is brand spanking new and they call you to come on in for an interview. The gig is up when you fill out an application, or its when you trip over your cane in the interview room.
Listen, I know this is a serious issue and I’m trying to make light of it by pointing out the obvious that doesn’t seem to be obvious to some.
Age discrimination is without question a real issue, however it goes both ways. There are companies out there that want to hire older workers. In fact they prefer it! So use it to your benefit. Don’t play into it by leaving things out.
Tom Watson last week almost won the British open at age 59. I must admit I couldn’t believe that his age was all they talked about. I understand that competitive sports is dominated by the young, but Golf on the other hand??? Granted when you get older your not as strong and you lose some flexibility but after all it’s just a game. He can drive the ball as far as anyone he just needed to sink that 8 foot put. When these guys turn 50 they enter into the senior tour. Perhaps the work force needs a senior tour. Something beside being a Wal-Mart greeter or shelling out samples at Costco.
I personally believe that experience in the work force is more valuable than what a newbie has to offer, except a newbie comes at a cheaper price. Remember that your desire to earn more comes at a cost to the company you work for. From day 1 you and your company have different and conflicting goals when it comes to your income.
So what can you do about this situation?
Keep your resume short to no longer than 2 pages. You don’t want people falling asleep reviewing your resume so keep it relevant to your most recent jobs. Put your dates on your resume including your undergraduate degree. Be aggressive with following up on your resume with phone calls. Make sure that you have high energy when speaking with someone live. If your having resume tracking issues go sign up for MyJobCAST.com and start using it for FREE!
Stop making your age an issue. Make it your strength. Stay current with technology and all it has to offer. Do not avoid CHANGE! Embrace it and be flexible. Lastly, you need to understand that not every new job comes with a raise! You might want to start thinking about cutting your personal expenses and figuring out how to make ends meet with less. I would have to say that 99 out of 100 people do not realize how short careers are. More and more people think that their pay will continue to increase and all I can tell you is it doesn’t. Control what you can control and plan! Unless you work for yourself corporate America does have short term problems for long term careers.
