Recruitment Advice

More news today as telecoms giant BT have confirmed to lose 10,000 staff by March 2009. The job losses will mainly affect indirect staff including agency workers, contractors and off shore workers.

BT have said that it has already made cuts of about 4,000 staff and will continue with another 6,000 by March from its global workforce of 160,000.  Many of the jobs are in the UK with as many as 4,000 people affected.

The job loses came as the firm announced a 11% fall in pre-tax profit for the July to September quarter.

Ian Livingston BT Chief Executive has said 7000 workers leave the company every year so he didnt envisage any compulsory redundancies.

The total amount of people due to be out of work this Christmas is set to be at its highest level high since 1998 with a figure reaching 1.8 million in the UK. The figures come as another sign of the deterioration of the economy during the global financial crises.

The unemployment rate is now at 5.8% , new figures show that this is up by 85,000 males and 55,000 females. Unemployment amongst 18 -24 years olds has increased by 53,000 and long term unemployment has also increased by 20,000.

Yesterdays news reported that there were to be job cuts at Virgin media at around 2200 and Yell at 1300 and this is seemingly what is happening across other businesses.

The office of national statistics’ show the level of unemployment has increased by 140,000 between July and September and record figures show the amount of people claiming job seekers allowance has increased last month from 36,500 to 980,900. This is the highest figure since spring 1991 and the worst monthly increase since 1992. In the three months to September 156,000 have been made redundant.

Despite the economic downturn, it seems that online recruitment agencies are surprisingly seeing a demand in their services.

Onrec.com have recently published figures that show that e-recruitment is still an extremely effective way for job seekers to find employment, especially in the credit and risk industries.

Brett Marlow who is the director of jobsincredit.com has said that the credit crunch is in fact helping employment in these industries.

“many companies are actively recruiting credit control professionals to ensure that they manage their debtors and cash flow”

Marlow isn’t the only one who has an opinion on this. Clickajob marketing manager, Anders Jensen has also had his say.

“All companies are watching their bottom line. Beyond considering redundancies, they’re looking at staff in place as well - are they the best available, or is it time to up their game?
Now more than ever, employers want best value for money from their employees. If new applicants can provide it, they’re the ones they invest in - and where recruitment demand is really coming from”

Your interviews are all lined up and now its time to develop some questions to ask the candidates that will soon be waiting nervously in your reception area.

The first thing to do is to take the job description and person specification and develop your questions from there. If this says that the person needs to have experience in a certain area, then make sure you ask about that and just work your way through.

Once you have come up with a list of questions its important that you ask them in the right way. Make sure that you dig deep into what the candidate is saying and don’t be worried about asking them to elaborate or clarify their answer.

One of the best techniques for asking questions is the funnelling technique. This starts with an open question then any probing questions then ends with a closed question.

Open questions - Normally start with how, where, when.

Probing questions - These questions ask for further details to make sure that you have all the information you need.

Closed questions - The closed question is simply just to clarify what has been said and a possible answer could just be ‘yes’ or ‘no’.

After wading through the mass of CV’s that have landed in your inbox, choosing which candidates to interview can be quite a task. Some of the CV’s you get through will be good, others will be the complete opposite and deciding between them can be tricky.

In my opinion the best thing to do is to take one CV at a time and work through the job description for the role they have applied for. By doing this, you can match up the candidates experience and skills to the ones that are required.

Whilst you are screening the CV there are  number of things you should  look out for, these are:

• Big gaps in employment - if someone hasn’t worked for a long period in between jobs then it would be good to find out why!
• Examples of previous work - Depending on your industry, it may be helpful to see samples of their work from previous roles, this would let you see how good they are rather than taking their word for it.
• Hobbies & Interests - I always like it when someone puts down that they are interested in a part of the role they are applying for. Not only does this mean that they already know a bit about it but that they aren’t going to get bored of it either!

Once you have decided which candidates you want to invite for an interview, the next step is developing interview questions which takes me onto my next post..