How To Use Employment Services Organizations

Employment services organizations include private employment agencies, state employment agencies, temporary help organizations, career counselors, contingency search and executive search.

Most people get confused about who provides what service in this area and usually lump everyone together under the term "headhunter." It can be a source of frustration if you don't really understand what each of these groups can do for you. First, let's clean up the terminology and definition of the services that each of these groups provides.

Private employment agencies are for profit. Their source of income comes from either the company (employer paid fee, EPF), or from you (applicant paid fee, APF). Those that receive income from the employer always have the company's needs in mind. They search on behalf of the employer, but usually in their own databases, and they only market a person to employers if that person is seen to be in high demand and can be used as a tool to develop other fee-paying assignments.

When working with an employment agency, the caliber of the individual and company you choose could affect the caliber of the job you eventually take. If you choose wisely, he or she could become a lifetime counselor who could guide you up the ladder of success. They are also not headhunters.

The applicant paid fee group of private employment agencies is a significantly smaller percentage of the private employment agencies. They are one of the only resource that works completely for you. This is also a group that doesn't have a particularly great reputation in the marketplace, based mainly on incompetence and shady business practices.

Nearly any employment services company that asks you for money falls into this category, regardless of the classiness of the decor. It is wise to stay away from these type of employment agencies. They are mainly staffed by executives who couldn't find other jobs. They are not headhunters.

State employment agencies are staffed by government employees. Their job is to assist you in finding a job; they are the only other groups whose entire focus is on assisting you. They receive funding from the state labor department and usually carry names like State Job Service, State Division of Employment Security, or Manpower Services. Although the names may vary, the services they provide remain the same.

They will mail résumés on your behalf to interested employers who have positions listed with them, as well as make efforts to get you lined up with appropriate jobs for your background and skill set. It is not required for employers to list jobs with state agencies, but more and more companies are taking advantage of these free services. Once the fortress of minimum-wage jobs, these public agencies now list positions having salaries of $100,000 per year or more, so they are a resource that should not be ignored.

If you are moving across the state or across the country, your local employment office can plug you into the national job bank or you can connect yourself online at http://www.nationjobs.com, which will allow you access to jobs all over the country. This is the largest job bank in the world. They are not headhunters.

Temporary services companies get their funding from employers and are not not particularly concerned about filling temporary assignments for those clients. They are not headhunters.

Career counselors and job search counselors. Their funding comes from you, but while there are a few shady figures in the business, there are also outstanding, dedicated, and talented professionals in this group. Generally, counselors work alone or in small companies, and they can assist you with job search, career choice, résumé preparation, and interview preparation. These career counselors can be deciphered from the disreputable APF crowd by finding out their number of years in business, their professional associations, the degrees they hold, and their professional accreditations. Ideally, they should also have a background as a contingency or retained recruiter. They are not headhunters and they would never tell you they were.

Contingency recruiters get paid by employers and are actively involved in finding employed professionals for hard-to-fill positions. They perform this service on a contingency basis, the contingency being that they only collect a fee when they fill the position. Usually, contingency recruiters search their databases and actively recruit for a percentage of the jobs they have to fill. The majority of contingency recruiters will market an "in-demand" professional to target companies for a couple of days and as a tool to develop other fee-paying assignments Contingency recruiters are a hybrid, more sophisticated than employment agency staff but not working on a retainer basis. Some of these people can be considered headhunters, some cannot.

Executive search firms are also paid by employers. They are the only group that is completely focused on the employer's needs, with precisely zero interest in you unless you fit an existing requirement. The reason for this is that they receive money up front, more when a candidate is hired, and the final allotment when the person starts work. They are almost only interested in people who are currently successful in their positions, not unemployed professionals seeking work.

These people almost never deal with salary levels below $100,000 per year. They are are more interested in accessing your résumé from their database than seeing you unless you fill a particular job they are trying to fill for a client. Executive recruiters are there to serve their client, not to find you a job. These people are where the term headhunter came from.

The term headhunter is often used to refer to anyone who provides employment services, but in actuality it only fits executive search consultants and a few contingency recruiters. A headhunter will have very little interest in you unless you match an existing assignment.

Searching for best top headhunter,do visit the list at The Recruitment Guru @ dougleschan.com.

How to Write a Resume - Two Easy Ways to Show Off Your Skills

The first thing most hiring managers look for is a set of skills that meets their needs. They're looking for the right tool for the job. As they pick through the slush pile of resumes they're trying to figure out if your skills can tackle their problems.

Here are a few quick pointers for how to write a resume focusing on your skill set:

1. A recent graduate or a career changer can best showcase themselves using a functional resume rather than a chronological resume. Focus on the skills you've gained through your education, and jobs you've held so far. Don't underestimate your "transferable" skills - these include skills with equipment or software, data or information, and communications and people.
Don't get pulled into the trap of trying to breakout what you've done chronologically or by activity.

Your resume will look clean but feel as though it jumps around. Instead focus on the transferable skills the company needs for the job they're advertising. So, for example, if the position asks for mastery of Office software, mention the classes you've taken in high school and college, the tracking system you put together when you ran the mentorship program at the Boys and Girls Club, and the mailing you did for your church. You'll be giving evidence that you come up to speed fast in all kinds of environments.

The same goes for changing industries later in your career. Collect the skills you have that will be relevant in your new job and showcase them. A solid set of skills combined with additional experience in other industries may actually make you more attractive as a "fresh set of eyes"

2. It's often a good idea NOT to list all the jobs you've held. Remember that the recruiter is looking for specific skills to meet the job. Better to go into depth in the jobs that illustrate those skills. Find an example of how you applied your skill to solve a particular problem and highlight it.
Do include non-paid positions with your paid ones. Very often the skills and character traits you demonstrate in unpaid positions are as important as what you do for a living.

Searching for a job in Singapore, you can source a list of available jobs at jobsbank sg.

An article by Dougles Chan - A recruitment coach that speciliased in recruitment training and recruitment mentoring in Singapore and globally.

Contact Dougles Chan @ +(65) 9388 0851 or email to dc@dougleschan.com for your recruitment training and mentoring needs.

CV Tips - Writing a Professional CV

In today's fast moving and competitive world of recruitment, creating an effective job CV can often mean the difference between success and failure. It can take time and a great deal of effort to produce something which sells your skills and abilities in an inspiring way and gets you the interview within 2 pages. Yet by following a few simple rules and advice, you can maximise your chances and stand out from the other applicants.

Rule 1 - Get inside the HR departments head

Imagine the busy personnel or HR administrator that suddenly has a vacancy because someone has decided to leave for whatever reason. Now filling the role will take up quite a bit of his or her valuable time which they would rather spend doing other things. Finding the perfect person immediately would be so much easier than ploughing through loads of CV's. They have a job description in front of them that was given to them by their boss. It includes experience or qualifications that are essential for the job and some attributes that are desirable but not absolutely necessary. They start going through the pile of CV's on the desk scanning each one for about half a minute and makes a judgement.

Put simply they don't have the time to read the CV that is more than two pages and all the relevant information is hidden in long paragraphs. - Its filed, in the bin!

Fancy formatting, coloured text or multiple fonts do not impress. They ask themselves, is this person trying to hide something? Are they trying to cover for their lack of experience for the job behind a flashy CV? - Its filed, in the bin!

Are there spelling mistakes or poor punctuation? This person is just sloppy! - Its filed, in the bin!
They get to the end and breaths a sigh of relief, as the pile of CV's on the desk is much smaller already. Time for another coffee and then starts reading....

Rule 2 - Think about how your CV will get through the initial stage.
Make sure your CV is concise and to the point. They need to see your experience, skills and achievements in the first half a minute.

They know what they want and you have what they want so why distract them by adding in lots of unnecessary information.

Simple is best. Plain formatting, properly laid out under clear headings. The recruiter will want to see what you have done, when you did it and where you did it. Fancy formatting will make your CV more difficult to read. Don't make a CV stand out for the wrong reasons.

Make sure that you keep checking your spelling, punctuation and grammar. It is the first step in your personal presentation to an employer. It says a lot about you. Also, poor English will distract the employer from reading the content of your CV.

Rule 3 - Clearly define the headings for your CV.
This is the list of headings that you should include on your CV
Contact details
Personal details
Interests Profile
Work experience or Career history
Education
Skills

Rule 4 - Make it easy for them.
Remember, they have very little time and they don't know you yet. They are only interested in what you can offer the company.

Searching for a job in SG, you can find a list of latest jobs at job bank Singapore.

A recruiting article by Dougles Chan - A recruitment coach that speciliased in recruitment training and recruitment mentoring in Singapore and globally.

Contact Dougles Chan @ +(65) 9388 0851 or email to dc@dougleschan.com for your recruitment training and mentoring needs.

5 Tips to Better Recruiting

Having gone through the worst economic period of this generation and now beginning to see a light at the end of the tunnel, it is quite possibly the most interesting, exciting and difficult time to be a recruiter. As with all other aspects of life, recruiting and HR are increasingly turning to technology and automation, moving away from manual processes and paper piles. A focal point of technologies being leveraged are applicant tracking systems (ATS), software applications designed to help organizations recruit more efficiently.

But if you're a recruiter that doesn't consider himself particularly tech-savvy, how can you be sure you're making the most of your applicant tracking system? These systems are capable of managing so many different aspects of your workload that you might not even be fully aware of its vast functionality.

Here's some insight into that vast functionality to make sure you're using your recruiting technology to the max.

1. Did you know your ATS provides... you with one central database to store candidate information for all your myriad sources? You have CVs coming at you from all directions: university recruiting, job-boards, referrals, LinkedIn. Your ATS can efficiently manage all of them.

o The tip: Leverage your ATS's analytical reporting tools! Don't just manage all your different sources; use the ATS to determine their value. These reporting capabilities can determine which sources are most effective, where your top talent comes from, what job boards convert poorly, and more.

2. Did you know your ATS... Are you inundated with CVs right now and don't have time to visually scan through the hundreds flooding your desk daily? Most applicant tracking systems give you the ability to create knock-out or screening questions, thereby automatically filtering out unqualified candidates, saving yourself more time to spend on the eligible applicants.

o The tip: Are screening questions powerful tools? Absolutely- but don't abuse them. It's best to create only 1 or 2 broad, overarching questions, such as education level or work eligibility. You risk eliminating valuable candidates if you get too much more specific.

3. Did you know your ATS has... powerful mass communication tools, also known as Candidate Relationship Management (CRM), to facilitate communication with candidates? This not only makes your life easier, but also vastly improves the candidate experience by keeping the lines of communication open.

o The tip: Be sure to make use of email templates. Instead of re-writing offer letters or rejection notifications over and over, utilize templates. Once you create a template, you can access it at the click of a button and save yourself an enormous amount of time.

4. Did you know your ATS can help... Piggybacking on these communication tools, you can use different folder statuses to manage your pipeline of top talent. If you have the ideal candidate that you know would be a great fit for your company, but there just aren't any positions at the moment, your ATS can help you maintain engagement with these contacts.

This makes it easier to get them on board once an appropriate opportunity does arise.

o The tip: Manage your talent pipeline and keep them interested in your company by sending them your most recent press releases and newsletters. This way they stay abreast of what's going on at your organization, and also stay interested.

5. What the ATS can do: The resume parsing tool of an applicant tracking system is a highly useful feature that eliminates the need for laborious manual data entry, automatically parsing and inputting CV info into your database. Not only does it decrease administrative work, but the ATS can profile candidates by skills cited in their resumes.

o The tip: Within the applicant tracking system, create saved searches of the hottest skills sets at your company in order to continually scan your database for CVs with matching keywords. It's also important to keep in mind that when these matching keywords appear higher up in a CV, it indicates the candidate has recently been involved in or enacting these skills (as opposed to lower on the CV, which indicates experiences in the past). Therefore, set your resume parser to rank those CVs as better matches, and you'll be left with better quality candidates!

These are just a few tips on how to use your applicant tracking system, but there are plenty more which your ATS vendor should be able to help you with. If you're not leveraging HR technology for recruitment, it's time you did; and if you are using an ATS, it's time you make the most of it!

If you are sourcing for a recruitment consultant Singapore job, you will need to obtain the CEI basic to be qualified to operate as a license recruitment consultant in Singapore.

Jobs Search Websites - Do They Work?

Are jobs search websites really effective and can you really find a job quickly and easily?  To answer this as accurately as possible, here are a few things to consider.

First, you need to know how jobs search websites operate and why they exist.

There is a need, especially now more than ever with a soured job market, to help people find employment in their respective areas.  Due to this fact, dozens of web sites have sprung up all over the Internet as a means of trying to connect employers with new employees with an excellent success ratio.

Years ago, finding a job was all about looking in the Sunday newspaper classifieds for that special career you had dreamed about.  Slowly but surely, job-hunting turned to the direction of networking and making contacts where you would put the word out to your friends, family, and social circle.  This worked for quite a long while and today, the Internet is all the rage when it comes to getting a new job that fits your needs.

You see, employers are constantly looking for new hires and the easiest way to fill these jobs for many of them is to use job search sites as a means of putting the word out quickly and efficiently.  They know with today's technology, they stand a better chance to hire the right people while spending less money to do it.

So, all you do is visit these sites, create a free account, then you start searching for jobs in your area.  Many of these job search sites offer other services, for a fee of course, for supplemental things such as creating resumes and distributing them to various companies based on your profile and preferences, and this can speed up the hiring process drastically.

Job search web sites do work if you take the time to use them but they work best when you use it with the combination of every resource you can think of.

Search for a Singapore job, you can always check out the latest jobs in Singapore WDA jobs bank where thousands of jobs are available.

4 Simple Things Never to Do If You Want That Job

THE ALL IMPORTANT JOB INTERVIEW

You have a job interview all lined up and you are ready to go and give it your best shot. Here are some very basic things to consider when going for that all important job interview. So simple in fact they are often overlooked by many people going to an interview. They concentrate on the knowledge they have for the job or all their past experience and of course desire and ambition for a promotion or better position.

Often the little things that can be so very important when going to an interview for a job get missed because of the bigger picture or the technical aspects of the job requiring certain skills to do it. We sometimes forget about basic good manners and showing respect and concentrate on all the things why we feel we should have this job. However, don't forget you are dealing with another human being. Someone who does not like to be kept waiting or shown disrespect. Someone just like you really who wants the same basic level of importance around them that you would expect for yourself.

Consider then these 4 Simple things never to do at an interview if you want that job:

1. Never turn up late for your job interview. It Sounds so basic, doesn't it? That's because it really is but you would be surprised at just how many people kill job prospects and their careers for that matter because they seem incapable of this punctuality. It is basic good manners to arrive on time for your interview. Always give yourself ample time to arrive at your interview. It's best to arrive a little early in fact but not so early that you have time to get too nervous. You might even consider it wise to make a dry run to make sure you know exactly where you are going and how exactly you will get there.

An interviewer will not want to hear any excuse as to why you may be late. It will tell them a lot about you. They want to see punctual people able to keep an appointment scheduled for them, dressed accordingly and well manned individual. That is unless your job interview entails going for the part of a crazed axe murderer in the latest blockbuster movie or something.

2. Never say you have had no time to check up on the company and what it does in its business. It shows lack of interest on your part. You should at least have done some research on the company and know what they do and what the job entails that you will be interviewed for. It's not a great way to get the job if you know nothing about the company and products they offer etc... After all, if you get this job you will be representing this company so you need to know what they do and how they tick. It will also give you some prompts to as your interviewer some questions and show them that you have been giving some consideration and thought to this new position.

3. Leave all your belongings like bags, coats and other such things that you don't need for the interview in the waiting room. There is nothing worse than watching someone struggle in the door to an interview with all their worldly possessions jingling around them. It makes for a very awkward entrance and exit to your interview. They will understand you will be a little nervous. Most likely the interviewers themselves will also be a little nervous but you don't want to look like Jerry Lee Lewis, Norman Wisdom or George Formby when you enter the room. You want to look composed and professional.

4. Never argue with Interviewer. This is a basic thing really as you are never going to get a job from someone you rub up the wrong way. They are testing you to see if you react and how you handle the situation. If you argue it shows an aggressive side. Never rise to the bait. You can make your point but be tactful without attacking the other person.

These are 4 simple little steps that could make a difference to your job interview prospects. Stop and consider them for a moment. They may seem so basic that you don't think you will need them but have you ever been guilty of any of them before?

Good Luck with that job interview. I hope these simple little steps often overlooked by so many will help you secure the position you want, helping you get that job you have been waiting for.

Seeking for a Singapore job, you can always check out the updated jobs in Singapore job bank WDA where thousands of jobs are available.

Answering "Why Are You Looking For A New Job?"

Basically they're trying to figure out what is wrong with you, and suspect they will get a clue by looking at your relationship with your last job.

So your task is to not give them any ammunition to rule you out of the game.

1. Never, ever, ever speak ill of your current employer, or any former employers for that matter. Everyone knows that one reason for this is because your interviewer will envision you badmouthing them when you decide to leave, and nobody wants to think about bad rumors about themselves traveling through the industry. Another reason to avoid dissing your past employer is that in this very small world, they could be a friend, relative or even your potential client at this new job. No person works on an island and you must always be conscious of the seemingly invisible threads that connect so many people.

2. Another never is to speak ill of the tasks you were asked to perform at your past or current job. ANY tasks. You may think that this new job would provide a blissful escape from the tedium of your last one, and so gleefully explain to an interviewer all of the mind-numbing things you were asked to do. However, your interviewer is thinking about the similar (but different) mind-numbing tasks of this position, and decides that you would quit after the first month. There's no reason to hire you if you've already given them a reason for you to quit.

3. Also, you don't want to speak ill of your co-workers. Those were or are your teammates, and the same rule holds true as reason #1. This world is too small, and good jobs are too few to take the chance.

So what CAN you say?

1. You can say that you wanted a new opportunity. That you felt that you had taken your current or past position as far as you could within the company, you had achieved X, Y and Z, and now feel that it's time for you to learn a different aspect of the business, or to work for a bigger (or smaller) company. The key here is to focus on the future. Focus on the opportunities you see in this new position, how it will help you grow and learn and not what was wrong with the last company you worked for.

2. If you are applying for a job that touts flexible hours, work from home or excellent benefits in the job posting, you can mention those qualities as a reason to look into this new position. Again you don't want to speak ill of your current employer, but say that you understand why they need to run their business as they do, but if the working arrangements at this new company are better suited to your lifestyle at the moment then it might be a good fit. You are showing the employer that there is a natural fit between their needs and your needs.

In the cases where you were let go from a position, all of the above rules apply. If it's the truth, you can say that you were laid off as a result of a company-wide restructuring or budgetary cuts. If it was due to a disciplinary action you can say that at the time you were having some time management issues (if you were fired for being consistently late), but you have learned your lesson, that you take an employer's requirements a lot more seriously and have taken proactive measures (which you can briefly describe) to prevent yourself from getting in that situation again. Show that you have made your mistake with your past employer and have absolutely no intention of making the same mistake twice. Sincerity, an action plan and great references are necessary to counteract any remaining issues.

Looking for a Singapore job, you can always check out the latest jobs in Singapore job bank WDA where thousands of jobs are available.