Greg Campbell comments on the Jobs market in Housing

The recruitment market nationally remains buoyant, with most senior vacancies attracting good numbers of well qualified candidates. The most challenging roles to fill are those in strategic asset management and in corporate finance. Regional differences in executive salaries now appear less evident, though they still remain relevant at more junior levels. Regions such as the south west where there are fewer housing organisations to generate local jobs churn, are seeing pay levels for senior roles often comparable to London and the south east in order to attract candidates from further afield. Salaries are not rising uniformly,we are aware, for instance, of some CEO positions where the new appointee has been recruited on a salary up to 20 per cent less than their predecessor.

•A growing trend to seek finance director candidates with housing sector experience, reflecting the growing complexity and risks inherent in social housing funding streams•Strategic asset management director roles created in some organisations, bringing together responsibility for asset management, maintenance, and development•Growth and new business director roles in other organisations, commonly combining development, new business streams, and inorganic growth.•Commercial sector experience growing in popularity for customer service roles, and for new business roles where a range of business streams are to be explored..This article first appeared in Social Housing magazine,January 2014. Greg Campbell is Director of Campbell Tickell

Power up your networking skills - workshop

 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

If your resolution is to get out more....

If you need to develop your confidence as a networker...

 

Are you a networking virgin?
Do you loath the thought of it?
Are you keen to start but not sure how?
What is networking?
How do successful networkers do it?
Is it critical to career success?
Are you just wishing you did not have to?

If you are asking those questions but don't have the answers then this workshop is for you!
22 January, Central London, afternoon and at a bargain price.

By the end of the session you will have a strategy which will be comfortable to you, you will have

• developed your own unique approach to extending your network- not everyone subscribes to the philosophy of 'Never Eat Alone'  - work out what will work for you
• planned your strategy on how to extend your contact list - the more 'weak ties' you have the better your chances of finding the information or opportunities you want
• developed and practised your elevator pitch - in other words know what it is you want others to know and how to say it
• learned how to change your mindset, what's holding you back? how can you develop a positive mindset towards this strategy?
• integrated social media into your strategy- does one have to tweet? blog? poke? put oneself onto the www?

Come and learn these techniques and find new confidence in your strategy.
A special half day workshop for networking innocents or the reluctant networker. Only  £125

contact me on www.maryhopecareersuccess.com/contact/

 

Related articles

• The power and potential of networking
• How to Perfect Your Elevator Pitch For Your Business - 5 Tips
• How to network with the best-connected people at an event

Ensure fairness in your restructuring processes

I was interested to see in an article in the Housing press, that there is a thought that BME middle managers lose out in restructuring.  If they can get into middle management in the first place, what is happening in the internal competitions?  The implication of the article is that the sector is not giving these candidates fair treatment. The article then goes on to talk about the lack of BME representation in the top 50 most influential people in housing.

 As the top 50 was dominated by politicians the two issues should surely not be conflated. The politicians and civil servants (David Cameron, Mervyn King, Eric Pickles, Iain Duncan Smith, Fiona Reynolds) in the list are actually in housing more by chance than choice and owe the sector nothing for their elevation to senior levels of influence in policy making.

I am not disputing the veracity of either piece of research but suggest that the two issues should be tackled separately. In the case of internal re-structures, I really believe that organisations need to do much more to take ‘the luck of the day’ out of their re-organisation procedures. Just because Tribunals accept interview processes as fair does not mean they are the best way to choose managers. We all know that interviews favour the extroverts and the articulate. They favour those that are well versed in the art of being interviewed. For that reason I deliver ‘selection preparation’  training sessions for staff, either in groups or one to one. I advocate objective testing and line manager’s references. And I advocate that all these sources are given equal weighting in the selection decision by an independent panel.

And if the sector is concerned that BME candidates are failing in these processes, use the powers of positive action to make sure that those candidates are given additional training and coaching to get through the selection process. If they can improve their interview skills we may see more people get through the selection process to be an MP and onto that list of influencers in housing.  

www.maryhopecareersuccess.com

How to be interviewed.. 8 different types of interview

In the rich and varied  tapestry that is my life,  as well as career coaching, I do recruitment interviewing and experience what it is like to interview job applicants. And often what I experience is a real mismatch between what people appear to have done (on their CV etc) and how they perform in interview.

I wonder how they prepare for their interview and what they actually think the purpose of the exchange is.

First you need to understand what kind of interview you are having. Ask if it is not clear from the invitation. this is a guide to the main interview types you might encounter. They may be one on one, they may have two or three people interviewing at the same time. 

If it is a competence based interview or a behavioural interview you need to be able to describe your achievements and the way that you have overcome challenges and difficulties in detail. You will be asked to 'tell me about a time when...' The interviewer wants to hear about what you do, about how you achieve things. They want to hear about the way you operate. So your preparation needs to focus on unpicking the things  you do, making those things you 'just do' explicit. You need to understand how you influence others, manage your team and achieve results.

If you are having a technical interview then the emphasis is less about style and more about knowledge. The interviewer wants to know what you know and what you are able to do. You are likely to get asked about your opinions of 'hot topics', you will be asked 'how you would ensure...'. You will be asked about what you would do. The interviewer may well ask you to substantiate your opinion or the theoretical answer by an example. You need to know your stuff, you need to be able to evidence that you really understand what is happening in your trade and what is coming over the horizon. The difficulty of answering these questions orally means that some organisations, such as Judicial Appointments Commission,  will set written tests to see which candidates have the best knowledge. At a more practical level you may be asked to complete a relevant task or exercise which mimics the job. 

The critical incident interview is a mix of both of the above, you will be given a scenario and asked how you would respond. If the incident is relevant to the job, then your technical knowledge and behaviours are being tested at the same time. So in an HR interview your might be asked what you would do if a manager phoned you and said they had sacked someone they had caught stealing. Your ability to understand the legalities of this and your style in dealing with the manager are being tested. 

The bio-data or biographical  interview is one where the interviewer will take you through your biography and seek to understand your motivations and drivers. they will ask you what you learned, felt and what motivated you to do what you did. Whilst this interview is exploring your experience and precisely what you did, how much responsibility you had, it is seeking to understand what makes you tick.

The stress interview. Another way of testing you out is to deliberately put you under pressure in a stress test. This rather contrived and manipulative way of relating to candidates seeks to see how you will re-act under pressure. 

The phone interview. Phone interviews can be brief or they can be the substitute for a face to face interview. the short version could be a quick interview to see if you meet some key criteria. They may want to check out your ability to travel to the location, your salary expectations and your motivations. Often these interviews are used to screen out candidates who don't have the required interpersonal skills, diction, verbal ability etc. It is so easy to apply for jobs online that employers use this device to check out that you are really interested in the role and do have the relevant experience.

The video interview. This is a recent innovation and is growing in popularity, especially in high volume recruitment where interpersonal skills/appearance matter. You will be invited to submit your videoed response to either standard questions that the computer will give you, or in some cases you may be asked to submit a 60 second video saying why you want the job. You will usually be given an opportunity to practice answering and employers can watch your answers when they choose to. 

The lunch interview or as I call it, trial by knife and fork. An employer may want to give you an opportunity to meet key stakeholders of the role, or the team you will manage or the colleagues you will work with. It is probably not possible to know whether this is part of the formal selection process or not. I have been involved where all participants have had to talk to all guests and then the guests score the candidate or asked for an opinion. On other occasions the guests go away without having an influence on the process. Never do anything but take this sort of occasion as an opportunity to launch the charm offensive. And you do that best by listening.

Whatever type of interview you are having you must prepare and you must, must, must think about what your audience want to hear you talk about. Which experiences, which opinions and what key stories you need to tell them. What will impress? What is most relevant to the audience? the answer to my question, what is the purpose of the exchange is - to convince and persuade the interviewers that you can do their job. So think about what they will want you to do and tell them about similar things that you have already done.. that is what will win you the role.

For more interview tips and techniques visit www.maryhopecareersuccess.com  and discover how to turbo-charge your interview confidence!

Fast changing job search world

Our world is changing faster than we can realise it is. No sooner have we learned new skills and new ways of doing things than some new idea comes along.
I spent a lot of time last year learning about social media and starting to use it.. twelve months later I find that things have moved on.. and not always in a way that is helpful! Google keep altering their algorithms, Linked In have stopped putting my Twitter feeds through to their site  ... And the challenge is that the recruitment market is changing all the time too. Employers and recruitment agencies are constantly looking for new and more cost effective ways of attracting the candidates they need. And whilst lots of that effort is targeted at attracting passive job hunters, it also means that those who are actively job hunting need to shift how you do it.
Major employers, including those in the public sector no longer spend their recruitment budgets on print but on social media. In 2005 UPS spent 90% of their budget on print and now they spend 97% on social media. Deloittes have a dedicated career website which is populated with blogs from their staff and has three distinct sections targeted at graduates, young professions and professionals. The site is content rich and attract traffic through well managed twitter streams, facebook pages, and Linked In company pages. Employers seek to build long term relationships with people who have common interests with them rather  than waiting until they have a specific job to advertise. They want to hook your interest before they recruit you by building communities of interest, what is known as 'crowdsourcing' (I think!)
The recruiters placing a single advert in a magazine or newspaper are in the minority and nowadays on line advertising is much more common. So if you are looking for a job you need to be on line as well. NB yesterday's Telegraph had a single page of jobs! But where to start?
To make life easy there is a brilliant tool called 'indeed.co.uk' This is a web crawler, you set your search parameters and then let it do the work. By 'crawling the web' it will bring you the jobs that you have specified by salary, location and title.
You need to sign up to major jobs boards and post your CV, CV Library, Monster, Total Jobs, JobsGoPublic. And whatever professional Boards apply to your work. Again set your parameters, search, press email alerts and wait for the vacancies to drop into your in box. Job Boards are the second largest source of hires.  And don't forget Linked In. For professionals it is the 'go to' source of candidates for head hunters. It is also increasingly a place where vacancies are advertsied. get into the Groups and see what is happening and what openings you can spot.  At least 90% of recruiters are already using social media to find, source and connect with talented candidates.

English: Infographic on how Social Media are being used, and how everything is changed by them. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

What you do need to do is to ensure that you have your target list of employers and that you have a routine of checking their job sites and if you can register for alerts from them. See if you can register your CV. Follow them on Twitter and on Linked In.
Sadly, the public sector seems to be lagging behind the other sectors in embracing all this technology. When I checked half a dozen County Council's in the South East, only one was posting vacancies on Linked In. However there are new products around that are designed to catch your attention even when you are not job hunting. JGP have developed 'smart search' which uses digital marketing to place a vacancy in front of  people who are looking for information and not just for jobs.
I can remember laughing when they told me that people would use their phones to job search,  (well I also laughed at the idea of mobile phones back in the 1980s) but there are now Apps which will help you search and bring alerts to your door. eg  Jobs.ac.uk,   this free international jobs board has launched on the Android and iPhone platforms with more than 3,500 employment opportunities in universities, research institutions and commercial organisations.
It s not all bad news for the job hunter.. as long as you are looking where today's vacancies are to be found and not using the tricks from twenty years ago.

The rise of social recruiting

• 66% of recruiters have used Facebook to find new talent
• 54% of recruiters use Twitter
• 93% use LinkedIn
• 71% of HR and recruiting professionals consider themselves moderate to exceptional social recruiters

Source:2012 Social Recruiting Survey, Jobvite (base: 1,000 HR professionals)

Interview questions that spell danger.....

Interview questions that spell danger.....

When you apply for a job you fill out a form or maybe prepare a CV, you do a covering letter  or sometimes a longer ‘supporting statement’. You send it off and if you’ve been persuasive enough on paper you get to an interview. So you set off in best suit and shiny shoes and someone; maybe an employer or maybe a recruitment consultant sits you down and says:

So give me a quick trot through your career... or tell me about your career, or give us an overview of your career, what have your career highs and lows been.

And this is a dangerous question because your answer can say more about you than you realise.

Now the sharp and alert candidate may just be tempted to say ‘you’ve got my Cv, need i say more?’ But interviews are very disempowering to  individuals (all the power seems to be on that other side of the desk) and I’ve rarely come across someone who responded in that fashion.

But why do the interviewers ask that? May be they have not read the paperwork. It does happen that the person who screens the applications is different from the one that is interviewing.  I did once go to see a recruitment agency/consultancy and discovered that actually they had not read the Cv properly and seemed to have started reading at page 2 and thought I was working in a job I’d left 10 years before!  So help them out with a précis.

The way you answer can, just as your CV and letter does, reveal a lot about you that you may not have intended to reveal. My heart always sinks when a candidate starts with job number one and then takes me through their life history brick by brick. Dry, tedious and full of information that i already have infront of me. (and I do read the paperwork) It often takes forever. So top tip number one, clarify with the interviewer if you can, is this a bio-data interview or a warm up question.  And the best way to do this maybe to ask ‘where would you like me to start?’ If they say at the beginning it is more likely to be  the former and then they will be looking for a detailed analysis of what you did where, what you achieved and why you changed jobs. If it is a bio-data interview the interviewer should be probing and prompting, giving you a steer about the sort of detail they want.  If the latter they will be listening to what you select to mention and include.

So what can emerge from ‘the trot through the career ? patterns about why you moved on;

·         repeatedly being made redundant  (smokescreen for sacked?),

·         deciding to leave because of differences of policy, (awkward customer does not get on with people?),

·         looking for ‘new challenges’ when the moves have been between similar jobs (low boredom threshold?)

·         moving around very quickly for more money (no loyalty)

·         staying a long time in jobs (lacks appetite and drive)

There are numerous permutations and not all of those are negative indications. A thirst for variety is no bad thing in a job that offers considerable variety or an organisation that does not expect people to stay long.

But you also reveal how you look at the world. If you take a linear approach and describe  each job etc you are suggesting that that is your approach to life. It’s linear, it’s detailed, it’s prosaic. If you give chapter and verse on every employment when not specifically asked for it, you really do risk boring the interviewer to death!

So if you are grey hair/no hair, going for a senior role and someone asks that question, what is it that they really want to know?

Well they may be trying to understand your career drivers or motivators, what is it that makes you tick ? are you the sort of person they want on board? Do your motivators align with their values.

They may be looking to see if you can helicopter and identify themes and patterns. Well of course you can and you can ensure that they are the ones you want them to hear about!

If they are looking for someone with strategic thinking ability, give them a strategic answer.

Most interviewers have read your cv and don’t want to hear it all again they want to hear more and different so think about what you want them to hear.

The danger is that you take the interviewer too literally and ‘trot’ them through your career until all they want to do is put you out to grass. Take a thematic approach and you can be enthusiastic and energetic, succinct and enlightening whilst retaining their interest. If they want to probe they can do so but please, what ever you do: be interesting!

Get in shape for career success

SUCCESS SEEKERS BOOT CAMP BASICS - serious about wanting
to manage your career better? want ideas of what you are doing
right and where you are going wrong? interview tips? CV update?

Fast, furious and fun a two day guide to the 21 essentials of
career success


Sat 18th and Sun 19th February 2012  BOOK NOW for your January price!

www.maryhopecareersuccess.com/services

Please read between the lines…

Please read between the lines…

I have been coaching a great chap who has been looking for a new job. He wants to be a Chief Executive and he works in local government. So we have been smartening up his presentation and applications.

Last week he rang me as he had seen a role for a CEx in the midlands, lovely part of the world.  So could I review the application. No problem.

The first line on the person specification was ‘senior management  experience in a large, complex, public sector organisation’ . My client duly started his application with a description of the senior civil service  role with 3500 staff, big budget and lots of departments, computers etc etc. Well that is a large, complex  public sector organisation. But is it what the £17m turnover district council is thinking of?

Probably not, they are more likely to be scared off by the scale of this. I can hear the phrases ‘oooh would he know how to operate in a district council? Will he be hands on enough with so few staff? How would he cope with the little budgets we have here? He probably had a chauffeur there; won’t be like that here!’

You see when people write person specifications they may not mean the same thing as you or I do. When they wrote this they probably (I don’t know who did write it but have sat in the room when such things have been discussed) were thinking; we don’t want someone from a Parish or Town Council, we don’t want someone from a small housing association, we don’t want someone who has not managed a range of services… There are quite a lot of public sector organisations that are smaller than this District Council. I don’t suppose they wanted a self employed accountant or a manager of a corner shop, or the marketing manager of a food manufacturer, or even the production manager of the local cheese factory.

Another client was thinking of applying to an international human rights pressure group. He felt he could meet the criteria ‘have influenced opinion formers and politicians at all levels’. And whilst undoubtedly they had done that in a local charity.. had they done it on the  international stage, had they been and done presentations at the UN? The context of the job was not really described by the person specification.

So when you are reading the person specification just read between the lines. What will the people in that organisation be thinking about? What do they mean by small? Who are the politicians that need influencing?

With my first client we were able to identify a different experience which was in another District Council, similar turnover, rural, tourism dependent and in a National Park that was going to press the buttons of the prospective employer. In the second, she was not successful in getting an interview.

When reading person specifications you have to read between the liens and understand the context of the job, anticipate the mind set of the authors and put yourself in their shoes. I could yet be proved wrong.. maybe they were looking for a former senior civil servant with a multi million pound budget and 3500 staff… but I suspect they will like my client whose experience is very directly relevant.