Wednesday, 23 February, 2000
@ BBC News online
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/446324.stm
Script
Searching for a job
online has a lot of benefits - no incriminating CVs lost in the
printer, no agonising over whether to handwrite your covering
letter, no traipsing for miles to dingy recruitment offices.
Instead, you can call
up a huge range of national and international vacancies, find
the perfect match for your skills, shove your CV online and wait
for the job offers to flood in.
At least, that's the
ideal picture.
In the real world,
online job-hunting has proved so much less than ideal that the
government is cracking down on "cowboy" internet recruitment
agencies.
Disasters happen "all
the time", according to online recruitment consultant Sue
Hill. People apply for vacancies which do not exist, or which
turn out to offer a much reduced salary than that advertised.
And there have been numerous examples of people in hot water after
their CV was sent to their manager by a less than circumspect
consultant.
Ms Hill says there
is a "mountain to climb" before UK online job recruitment
matches that of America, where a recent study found about 15%
of jobs are filled through the net. She pinpoints two major problems:
Firstly, the unwieldiness
of the recruitment sites; secondly, a lack of security which could
mean all sorts of people posing as potential employers or employees.
"I'd say 99.995% of it was totally safe, but you can never
avoid the fact that there are some lunatics out there," she
says.
Nightmare scenarios
aside, there is still the headache of finding the right website
and the right company - and getting them to see you.
There are currently
about 300 online recruitment agencies in the UK, which offer wildly
varying services. "The best way to go about it is to know
your subject area and do the research to find a specific site,"
says Ms Hill. However, she added there "aren't that many
good sites", and that the experience often proves unsatisfactory.
Even the big corporate sites do not on the whole make very good
use of their recruitment sections - with the exception of the
IT industry.
But the situation
could be radically different by this time next year. Monster,
one of the bigger UK online recruitment sites, with about 50,000
CVs and 6,000 vacancies on its database, agrees. Nicolette Pollock,
an executive with the company, says that is partly because of
the jobs market - in which vacancies are beginning to outnumber
suitable candidates. So Monster has tried hard to make itself
more attractive to the jobseeker - as have many of the new breed
of job sites, such as Stepstone, Big Blue Dog and Jobzone.
It encourages "passive"
job hunting, where the user may be perfectly happy in his or her
current job, but is casting the net just in case there is something
better. It also tried to offer "career management",
rather than just a "job shop". It offers CV writing
tips, interview advice, background information on employers and
the jobs market, and general help with the entire structure of
the jobseekers' career. Most also boast a high degree of protection
for CVs and other details, thus avoiding the nightmare CV-on-bosses'-desk
scenario.
The much-bemoaned
domination of IT jobs on such sites is diminishing. At Monster,
26% of vacancies are now in IT compared with 37% one year ago.
About 18% are in finance and 12.5% in law, while engineering and
sales have 10% each. But how do you make your CV stand out from
the estimated 4.5 million others out there? Sue Hill says the
same principles apply to online job hunting as to the traditional
paper chase method. "The secret is preparation, preparation
and preparation," she says. "You must have a good CV
and a good covering letter. There's no point in vaguely firing
off CVs all over the world. They will just go into an electronic
wastebin, rather than a paper one".
(650
words)
Top 10 online
CV tips
Be concise
Use industry buzzwords
List all skills, qualifications
Include personality
Use nouns if possible
Use a plain font
Use 10-14pt font size
Include job reference code in subject line
Always check spelling and grammar
Never Ever lie
