Applying for Jobs
Can the new Facebook jobs application, Glassdoor, add anything to the online jobs hunt? Surprisingly, we think it can…
Glassdoor is the latest online jobs service to flash its way on to my radar. Primarily a Facebook application (although you can sign up without Facebook), Glassdoor allows you to tap into your Facebook ‘friends” professional information (where they work etc) and their friends’ data and so forth. Much like BranchOut, it transforms the social capital of your Facebook connections and makes it professional.
Having recently signed up for BranchOut only to forget about it within a few days, the idea of subscribing to yet another app which has the potential to bug my Facebook friends – most of whom are actually friends rather than simply contacts – was somewhat unwelcome. But, what the heck, I thought, let’s just take a look.
The jobs and connection information is fairly basic which means that Glassdoor, unlike BranchOut, will not be mounting any challenges to Linkedin. But it seems this is not the company’s intention. The real value of the app lies in the other services they offer: shared insider information on companies.
Glassdoor describes itself as a “free jobs and career community that offers the world an inside look at jobs and companies”. In effect, this makes it a professional ‘kiss and tell’ network where people share their own experiences of a company – anonymously, of course. Information is pooled about specific corporate cultures and working environments, salaries and the sort of interview you can expect. It makes for interesting reading. (Surprisingly, most of the reviews are positive, which means that this site, thankfully, is not just a vehicle for aggrieved former employees to bag their old bosses).
Glassdoor should not be relied on simply to find jobs or attract the attention of a potential employer (although there is room for this to happen). However, it could certainly be useful for investigating a company with whom you have an interview or if you’ve been made a job offer. You could also use it to identify companies worth targeting proactively for employment.
Unfortunately, job seekers in Australia will need to wait a little while before they can enjoy the benefits of this employment peep show. While there is a generous amount of information on companies in the US, there isn’t much going on for the rest of the world. Type ‘public relations’ and ‘Australia’ into the site and you go straight to reviews of US companies. The same happens if you change the location to ‘UK’.
So, there is work still to be done. But as a community portal, the responsibility for this lies not so much with the site but with its users. And if the details start being filled in for companies in our part of the world, Glassdoor could prove to be a valuable tool.
Marjorie Solomon is the founder and editor of CommPROs. She has 15 years communications experience and is currently enrolled in a Masters in Creative Writing.
Using an infographic CV could be just the ticket to make a big impression with recruiters and get you a step closer to landing the job you want.
If you are involved with social media then chances are you will have seen countless infographics over the past few months – done with varying shades of quality and creativity – as they just seem to be all the rage. But have you ever thought about tapping into this current trend to promote yourself and your resume by creating an infographic CV?
Recreating a text-heavy resume as an eye-catching graphic is an interesting way to present your professional background and experience and to mark yourself out from the pile.
If you skilled in design software, then you have infinite possibilities before you, but if your Adobe skills are limited or your creative juices are just not flowing then there are other, pre-fabricated (and free) options available to you.
Mashable discusses 4 Simple Tools for Creating an Infographic Resume. Before I posted this piece, I had play with kinzaa and vizualize.me – the former because it told me the process would take only three minutes (it didn’t) and the latter because the comments below the article were enthusiastic about the service.
Interestingly, neither really worked for me.
Although kinzaa‘s presentation was clear and flexible, its graphics were dull and, for me at least, rather uninspiring. It might be interesting to present your CV in a different kind of way, but really, if you are going to go to the trouble, at least make it fun. Having said that, kinzaa gives the option to turn your online infographic CV into a pdf, which is definitely useful.
Much more interesting in terms of presentation, vizualize.me fell down because it’s pre-set education fixtures did not allow me to include the fact that I am currently enrolled in a Masters Degree, which is, in my opinion, quite an important for me to include in my CV. Granted, it’s not such a big issue, but it changed the feel of my professional activity.
Both vizualize.me and kinzaa were also US-focused so some of the details were not quite right, but ultimately, they weren’t bad (especially as they are free services), they just weren’t amazing.
If you Google infograpics CV there are a host of amazing design and ideas which you could use to adapt to meet your own needs. Some of them are suitable for remodelling using Microsoft Word if you know your way around the program.
Using an infographic CV could be a great way to get noticed. I will definitely be including a link on my Word CV to the kinzaa infographic CV that I built or perhaps include it as a complementary document. And, should I have a moment of inspiration, I might even try building a unique one with Adobe Indesign. But I won’t be throwing out my MS Word resume just yet!
Having a personal website is an innovative way for a PR/comms job seeker to put themselves ahead of the game. Here are some of the reasons why you might want to take this step…
Job seekers should always be looking for ways to put distance between themselves and their competition in the job market, particularly when the market is as tight as today’s. One easy way to achieve this is to create your own personal website – an online portfolio which showcases your skills, experiences and creativity.
I recently started a discussion on LinkedIn about the value to job seekers of having a personal website. There were a range of opinions contributed, but the majority supported the idea for people working in the creative arena. And Smashing Magazine contends that it is essential for people working in the creative industry to have a good personal website.
And while I consider PR/comms people to be creatives, what would a personal website really offer someone in this industry when compared to a graphic designer or web developer? Let’s look at some of the benefits:
1. Show your innovation and creativity immediately
Personal websites are still a fairly new idea, particularly for people in PR and comms. Having your own online portfolio already marks you out as enterprising and creative and that you are pushing the boundaries in the development of your skills-set and career.
2. Make things clear and easy for employers
A personal website allows you to demonstrate your skills and experience in one place, so a prospective employer can gain a comprehensive overview of you as a professional in a way that is quick and easy for them. It is also a great way to show your experience writing media releases or publications, rather than simply list them as part of your experience.
3. Present the best you
You can easily highlight your best work and achievements rather than rely on a recruiter to read through the descriptive text you have on your experience and achievements. Choose the best examples from your portfolio so that a prospective employer can see for themselves the quality of your work and the variety of your experience.
4. Utilise form and function to your advantage
Websites are a much better way of illustrating your depth and breadth of skills. You can organise your personal website to ensure that you project the professional persona you want people to see. You can use pages, categories, social media interfaces, videos, blogs and other tools as a way of best presenting your professional background and talents. A website, with its flexible structure, is a more effective tool than a two or three page Word document. And it beats hoping that the person reading through you CV is paying attention to lists of experience from each of your past positions – or that they read to the end of your CV for things like ‘additional skills’.
5. Give yourself freedom to break the mould
Personal websites are still new concepts, which means that you can be creative in the way that you present yourself. Resumes are written in line with standard expectations of what they should look like and what they contain. But there is no such thing as a standard personal website, so you have more freedom to make it look and behave in a way that best suits you.
Using a personal website is just another approach to getting yourself noticed in the hurly-burly world of the PR/comms jobs market. They should not be developed at the expense of keeping your Word CV fresh and relevant. And there is no doubt that some of the points discussed above could be applied to ensuring that your paper resume is as creative, innovative and representative of the best professional you as it can be.
Marjorie Solomon is Founding Editor of CommPros. You can connect with Marjorie here on LinkedIn or follow CommsPROs on Twitter or Facebook.
If you are interested in finding government communications jobs in NSW, you need to target the right agencies. Here’s a good place to start…
Everything the public service does is governed by strict protocols and guidelines, including the way that it recruits for government communications jobs. For comms jobs seekers interested in finding a public service position one of the best places to start is to register with one of the authorised recruitment agencies used by the NSW government HR people for comms jobs.
Government communications jobs – like many public service positions – are sought after. They are well paid, the working environments are generally comfortable, they have reasonable job security and offer a real work life balance. People want to work in government, so targeting the right agencis can be a good way to get your head start in finding your next government communications job before the competition gets it first.
For government communications job in New South Wales, the list of relevant recruitment agencies is short. The following companies are preferred recruitment agencies for the NSW Government dealing with recruitment of areas of expertise which (roughly) incorporate communications:
As is often the case with recruitment companies, none of these agencies specifically list communications or public relations categories. But they do have loosely relevant fields and they are certainly the agencies that NSW government recruiters use, particularly for short-term contracts which are not advertised on the larger job boards like Seek or Mycareer.
It is worth sending through your CV to each of these agencies (and follow up with them if you don’t hear back from them) and checking their websites regularly for listings.
Like with all recruitment companies it is not just about whether they have the right jobs on their books, it is also about whether you are on their radar. Recruiters sell job placements. They are dependent on successful placements and on turnover. As a result, they are busy filling one position while working on getting the next one in place. And they deal in volume. So, if you are not on their radar then it won’t make a difference that you may be the perfect person for the job.
Marjorie Solomon is the founder and editor of Talking Comms Jobs. She has 15 years communications experience and is probably still a job seeker.
Your CV can take on a whole extra dimension – and can make things easier and more impressive for recruiters – if you add hyperlinks to show examples of your work experience…
Back in 2009 I volunteered to help promote a Twestival in Jerusalem, where I was living at the time. Due to the social-media-cutting-edge-communications nature of the event it was agreed that we would use all the latest promotional innovations, which at the time included a social media release.
Now, at first I was intimidated by this concept, but for the purposes of promoting the event, it turned out to be little more than a media release with hyperlinks, including links to the Twitter ID of all the volunteers, sponsors and other notables, as well as a few other relevant social media links. (Social media releases often also contain embedded videos or such like, but we didn’t have any of that sort of material to hand.)
This work got me thinking that my CV should really be more interactive, and so, over-time, I have worked to ensure that it is more like an eCV than a straight forward paper version.
This conclusion has since been reinforced by discussions with recruiters and from reading CV and application requirements for more online-focused jobs.
As one recruiter explained recently, if you make a claim about something on your CV, you need to be able to back it up with examples via links from the page. These links could mean the difference between you making it to interview stage or not.
So how do we go about making our CV into an eCV?
It is simple enough and you have probably already worked it out (if you don’t already have it in place). But in case you need a little bit of guidance…
- Insert hyperlinks for all the companies where you have worked (going back to real basics, this means that in MS Word, you highlight the area you want to create a link for, click on ‘Insert’ and then ‘Hyperlink” and then add the URL for the company)
- Link as many projects/achievements etc to online examples as you can. For example, if you have media releases, publications or websites, link them in to where you have listed them.
- Make sure all your social media IDs are included with hyperlinks.
This is an ongoing process. Only a couple of days ago I visited my CV to update the hyperlinks and make sure everything that could be linked was linked. I am already thinking of a few more things I need to go back to update.
Hope this helps!
Marjorie Solomon is the founder and editor of Talking Comms Jobs. She has 15 years communications experience and is probably still a job seeker.
For almost two months I have been back in the job market, trawling through the various online job sites for communications jobs in Australia. I haven’t been in the business of looking for work for around seven years – having been self-employed since leaving my last full-time position at the end of 2006 (with a bit of ‘maternity’ leave thrown into the mix) .
Surprisingly, the job search process for PR and communications jobs in Australia has changed very little in that time. In my recent searches, I have relied on Seek and MyCareer (as I did when I found my last job back in 2004) and poked around some of the government and recruitment sites but have found the whole experience unfulfilling. (Despite being a Gen Xer - or perhaps because of it – I now rarely search for jobs in newspapers.)
I think the problem I am experiencing comes down to the fact that the process is neither focused nor contained. In between sifting through irrelevant job ads (and note to recruiters, I don’t believe there is an overlap between communications and media sales) on the general employment search sites, I am also plagued by the notion that I am constantly missing something.
What’s crazy is that more than ten years ago I was searching for jobs in the UK in a much more focused, concrete and reassuring context. To find a PR job (my comms speciality) in the UK one would simply search on the Guardian Jobs site or visit PR Week’s jobs pages. The process was simple and one could be sure that between the two sites you would have access to almost all the advertised positions in your specific field – because if an employer doesn’t advertise on one of these sites, they are not serious about filling a vacancy or they don’t know what they are doing – both of which sound alarm bells.
I think the communications industry in Australia is big enough to justify its own jobs website and I am prepared to put this to the test in the form of this new site. My aim is to provide a comprehensive listing of communications jobs around the country together with a useful (and maybe even interesting or entertaining!) series of posts on subjects concerning the comms job search in Australia and beyond.
Readers will see from the job categories the specific fields that I have denoted as belonging to the comms family, but roughly they include:
- Marketing
- PR
- Government Relations
- Advertising
- Copy Writing/Editing
- SEO/Website/Social Media
- Community/Stakeholder Relations
I am open to ideas about how this site should evolve and would love to hear what people would find useful in their job search.
In the meantime, good luck and happy hunting!
Marjorie Solomon is the founder and editor of Talking Comms Jobs. She has 15 years communications experience and is probably still a job seeker.
It’s much harder applying for communications jobs; not because the application process differs so much from other types of industries, but because an application for a communications job is subject to unusually pronounced scrutiny long before the interview stage.
What do I mean exactly? Well, I’ll share my impressions as someone who has been in search of a comms job in the past few months. Talking up my strengths and talents is not something that comes easily in either a personal or a professional environment. So I often find myself squirming in discomfort as I draft an application. For a start, I feel terribly self-conscious when I expound about my ability to write well. Now, strong writing skills are definite essentials for any worthy communications practitioner, but it just feels so wrong to have to spell it out. Every time I write on this subject (including now), I feel I am opening myself up to extra scrutiny, resulting in eventual professional humiliation. After all, shouldn’t it be clear from what I have already written that I am (or am not) a good writer? I experience this recurring moment of paranoia: what if the person reading my application has one eye-brow raised thinking ‘you call this good writing?’.
Then there is addressing such concepts as ‘creative thinking/approaches’ which makes me cringe as I piece together my application thinking that everything I am saying about my employability is formulaic. And to an extent it is, but I think that there are levels at which the HR people reading our applications have expectations that our CV and cover letters will conform to some sort of standard (I welcome any HR views here) so it just becomes another uncomfortable claim that grates when included, but feels glaringly absent when left out.
Having ‘an ability to meet deadlines’ makes me smile. Meeting an application deadline seems a worthy means of illustrating one’s ability to meet – or not meet – this requirement. (Every time I submit an application I feel I should put a footnote at the base of the application pointing out that I have illustrated my ability to meet deadlines…or, alternatively, “See, I told you so!”.)
But ultimately my worst one is ‘attention to detail’. And this is not simply because for me personally this professional attribute has not come naturally, but has in fact been an acquired skill – following some horrifying post publication discoveries and many years of painstaking double, triple and quadruple checking of copy (confessions of a typo queen). I live in constant fear of my own self-destruction and, even now, writing about this very subject, I have a disturbing metaphorical itch that tells me there is a stray word in this copy or an inelegant expression that will be instantly recognisable to all who read this and completely missed by me. I am groaning as I write this…
But this is the disadvantage of being a comms practitioner. It is a joy and a privilege to be able to write for a living, but as writers and communicators we are subject to an additional burden of expectation. Job hunting puts us on the line. We become vulnerable and exposed as we aim to sell ourselves, our experience, and our talents. And while all jobs seekers share this vulnerability, there is a unique awkwardness experienced by those of us in the business of words and spin.
The aim of this blog is to try to lighten the load a little by providing a forum to share the moment, the pain and the self-consiousness. I look forward to sharing the journey with you.
Marjorie Solomon is the founder of Talking Comms Jobs. She has 15 years communications experience and is not sure if she is a job seeker.
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