]]> Many project managers get their positions without the need for a professional certification in the field but will a PMP or Prince2 qualification improve your project management job prospects? Will it make you more employable? Will you be able to demand a higher salary?

There is no doubt that sitting a course and gaining the relevant project management certification will actually improve you as a project manager (the amount obviously depending on how good you were and how much experience you had in the first place). Yet, with many project managers doing a very good job without any formal certification, what reasons are there therefore to study and sit the exam? Will having one actually get you a better project management job?

It makes you more employable

While no-one knows who will be the better manager, a PM with 15 years experience and no certificate or one with 1 year’s experience and a professional qualification under his belt. If both candidates have similar experience and only one has certification, it makes it easier for an HR department to make a choice. While sitting the course and scraping through with the lowest pass rate may only have slightly increased your ability as a project manager, it does demonstrate to employers that you are committed to your profession and interested in personal development. It therefore makes you a little more employable than the next candidate who doesn’t have it.

It shows you are the right kind of employee

While demonstrating on your CV that you have 15 years experience managing complex projects cannot be underestimated. Showing that you also have a qualification indicates how serious you are about your profession. It shows that you take your career seriously and have the necessary drive and determination to succeed, it shows that not only are you a good project manager but also a good employee – someone who is interested in wanting to improve themselves.

It is a good indication of your experience and training

The PMP certification for example requires that you have between 3 and 5 years practical experience running projects and you have a thorough experience of the PMI Body of Knowledge. While this can be demonstrated on a CV, a certification is always better. In fact many companies require it and will not interview candidates without it and often offer existing employees financial incentives to take the exam.

In the recruitment process they do it as a simple way to screen unsuitable candidates. Yet, with any system, it is not perfect and may unfortunately screen out PMs with many years of good experience who may just not have had the time to sit the tests, and, who may ultimately be better than those with the credentials.

So, is it worth getting a qualification?

In short, yes. It will get you more interviews and in some companies even get you a higher salary. Whilst getting certification may not make you a much better project manager it is clear that it will make you more employable as it gives HR departments a way to gauge your experience and knowledge and to make a judgement on your attitude and dedication to your profession. While this may not seem fair to those highly experienced professionals with an excellent track record it is the way many HR departments work and therefore should be considered if you want to further your career in project management.

In the UK the standard certification in project management is Prince2 and in the USA PMP.

For more information on how to get work in project management and to view the many project management jobs we have available please contact us at ISL.

]]> We all know how to write a CV, in fact we spend hours proof reading it, tweaking it for each job and perfecting the layout. It might come as a bit of a surprise then that a recent survey showed that recruiters will decide if it is good or bad in just 6 seconds. In this article we look at how you can write and layout your CV so that recruiters don’t bin your CV before they’ve had a chance to read it.

People make decisions in a blink of an eye. A study in 2006 showed that web users judge a website in just 50 milliseconds forming opinions of aesthetic quality almost as fast as their brain can process the image. And from that initial judgement users form opinions of the rest of the site without even seeing it.

Whilst you can’t take a snapshot of a CV and form an opinion, a recruiter can skim read it and decide if it is worth reading on or putting it straight in the bin. In a recent article in Business insider   on research done by TheLadders it showed that “recruiters spend an average of six seconds before they make the initial ‘fit or no fit’ decision on candidates.”

They used eye tracking on 30 recruiters over a 10 week period to see where the recruiters looked at on the CV and then produced a heat map of the eye movements. In the short time they spend on a CV they look at:

Name, Current Title and Company, Current position start and end dates, Previous title and company, Previous position start and end dates and Education

And interestingly, they spend more time on CVs that were better organised and easy to navigate.

In the two diagrams below you can see the areas where the recruiter looked most with the better organised CV on the right.

How do you write the perfect CV?

Organised

From this research it is clear that the better organised your CV is, the more it will be read. So split it into clear sections with bold titles, horizontal lines to demarcate it and maybe a background colour to the header for each area.

Make important information clear

Recruiters want to know what job you are doing, who you work for and how long you have worked there. Make this information easily accessible (unless you don’t want them to read it).

Make section titles clear

in addition to your job history, recruiters look for experience and skills. Make sure these are clearly labelled and organised.

Do not put images or visual elements in your CV

Visual elements distract the reader and make it harder to extract the key information and therefore hamper decision making.

Once you have built the structure of your CV you can then add all the text you require to sell yourself. But remember if you want the recruiter to read all the detail you need to persuade them that your CV is worth looking at so make it organised and clear.

At ISL we will of course spend more than 6 seconds looking at your CV, but if you follow these tips then it will help you stand out!

For any more information on CV writing or interview tips do not hesitate to contact us here at ISL.

]]> With Social Media now an integral part of most people’s lives it seemed obvious that sooner or later businesses would start to use it to assess candidates. However how are they using the social networks and what can candidates do to make sure their social profile benefits their application rather than hinder it?

OPP, the publishers of psychometric tests such as Myers Briggs, have just released a report on the use of social networking sites in the recruitment process. The conclusions may not be totally surprising but they are nonetheless important for those looking for jobs.

They report states that “56% of respondents said that they were likely to check out the social media presence of potential employees (although 27% of those surveyed said they would be uncomfortable with the same being done to them). On the flipside, 37% of people said they change their persona online – so looking at their online presence may be misleading anyway”.

What should candidates be doing?

With employers recruiting through the social networks it should come as little surprise that those who use it to advertise also use it to find out something about potential employees. Bearing this in mind there are a few basic rules that candidates should adhere to.

Make your Facebook profile private.

There have been many high profile cases  of employees who have been caught out by the social networks, being sacked for lying about being sick or posting uncomplimentary posts about their employers. By locking down your Facebook account, only your friends can see what you are writing and not employers or future employers. This may seem common sense but check your privacy settings on Facebook as many people are posting to the world much more than they think they are, and whilst your friends may find your unruly university antics amusing, potential employers will use that as a way to, maybe inaccurately, form opinions of your personality.

Be professional on LinkedIn

Those subscribing to sites such as LinkedIn presumably want people to view their profiles, if only for networking, as opposed to job search purposes, so they need to be written accordingly. Basic advice would be to behave on LinkedIn how you would do in any business situation. Again this may seem obvious but employers when they view your profile will make assumptions on what they see, not how you really are.

OPP’s research shows that “those who are least cautious about using social networking sites score higher on the 16PF measures of Liveliness (more spontaneous) and Abstractedness (more likely to daydream), and lower on Rule-Consciousness and Perfectionism.” So, be aware, if you are not so careful about what you post on Facebook outsiders may form inaccurate opinions of you.

Employers

Employers need to be careful as to how they use information gathered from these sources as there is a potential legal minefield out there. Browsing social profiles is often unstructured and undocumented and as a result later decisions may be subconsciously influenced and may lead to sexist or racist prejudice. And, if, for example, an employer makes a decision based on information on a social network they could be open to accusations of discrimination, unfair dismissal in addition to invading on their employees privacy.

So, in summary, even though employers may not actively tell employees or future candidates that they will be browsing the social networks, those looking for jobs would be well advised to recognise the growing reality and avoid putting themselves in an awkward position. A situation where they can be challenged about what they have published, and consequently having to justify something that is probably not on their well crafted and carefully formatted CV.

For any further information on the latest trends in recruitment and how we can help you in the recruitment process please do not hesitate to get in contact with us.

]]> There has been discussion for a long time about the use of video in the selection process as an alternative  to telephone and face to face interviews and now as voip technology and internet video are standard in many households and businesses, new companies are starting up with the idea of changing the way we do recruitment.

Intern Sushi

Intern Sushi is one of many new video recruitment solutions. It sells itself as “a new way to find, apply for and manage internships in industries that are hard to break into by providing a multimedia platform for interns and companies to present themselves through one-minute videos and digital profiles.” Basically, it is a website for candidates who want to be interns in tough to get into industries such as TV and music. It offers them a way to promote themselves online however they want, whether it is via a serious monologue or even a song and once the intern has uploaded their video they can then send it to any one of the 1300 companies registered on the site. It argues that it is difficult to judge a person’s personality from a written CV and this will offer companies a better way of assessing candidates.

Are video CVs better than regular CVs?

Historically, the availability of reliable video phone technology has been the key barrier to extensive use of the interactive video interview. But now, as Skype is commonplace, it is clear that that wasn’t the only barrier for video CVs and there are still many obstacles preventing video CVs becoming the norm.

The difficulties in preparing the video CV itself is as big a barrier as any to the development of the video based CV.  How do you structure the video? How do you ensure that your video gets the message across that you want to portray? Nowadays there are 1000s of websites and consultants who will help you prepare the perfect written CV, but few for video CVs, so if you do publish your own video you will have to rely on your own judgement and you cannot count on the experience of friends and relatives or even experts.

However even if you manage to persuade Steven Spielberg to help you with your video CV you will still be presented with the main obstacle.The time it takes the selector to watch the CV as opposed to read one whether on paper or electronically. Experienced HR departments can skim through 100s of CVs an hour and most will not have the time or patience to watch hours of video, especially as saving it or commenting on it will be foreign concept.

So, on the face of it,  even though there seem to be many merits to the video CV, it is unlikely it will replace paper in the near future and if it does it will only become useful when supporting a written one. Yet before we confine the video CV to the technological scrap heap, remember Steve Jobs famously once said no-one would ever watch videos on a phone so maybe Intern Sushi is about to prove our assumption to be wrong.

For any advice on preparing for interview or advice on recruitment please do not hesitate to contact our team at ISL.

]]> In our January article “Companies now hiring based on attitude not just technical expertise” we looked at why companies are starting to recruit based on personality and not just technical expertise. We saw that candidates with the personality most suited to the company were much more likely to succeed. However accurately judging a candidates character from their CV, covering letter and even interview is notoriously difficult so firms are looking at alternative ways.

Ever since school we’ve been taught that the only way to get a job is to write a good CV accompanied with a personalised covering letter. Nowadays many companies are looking a new ways of recruiting candidates. New ways which they believe give the companies a better insight into the candidate themselves than a standard CV. Companies are now looking more at candidate’s social profiles on LinkedIn, Twitter and Delicious to see what they are like and what they are interested in and hopefully see, not just how qualified they are for the post, but how they would integrate into it.

In our post in November 2011 we looked at how software development company IGN recruited workers by inviting them to the summer camp Code Foo to show off their coding skills and learn more about gaming programming. In the end 28 candidates were invited on the project including a full time dad and a telesales marketer who both had only programmed as a hobby. Both candidates, admitted the CEO, would probably never have been hired based on their CVs alone, but by seeing candidates performing real tasks and interacting with each other they could more accurately judge their skills, personality and how they would integrate into the company.

Union Square Ventures who have invested in Twitter, Foursquare and Zynga recently posted an opening for an investent analyst, but instead of asking for CVs they asked applicants to post links to their social networks that demonstrate their web presence. They also asked applicants to post a video showing their interest in the post.

Seeing a candidates web presence allows companies to get a much more accurate view of what the candidate is really like and Union Square says its process nets much better quality candidates than the normal recruitment process. Christina Cacioppo, who blogs about the hiring process on the company website says that a CV doesn’t give much insight into a candidate. She herself had been hired based on her Twitter feed, LinkedIn profile, Delicious links and her Tumblr blog. “We are most interested in what people are like, what they are like to work with, how they think,” she says.

John Fischer, founder and owner of StickerGiant.com recruits using an online survey tailored for each position. He argues that a resume is not a good way of determining if a candidate would be a good social fit so each survey has questions which will allow his recruitment team to understand the candidate better. In a recent post for internet marketers it asked to rate various skills and asked how friends or colleagues would describe them.

However despite a trend towards new ways of recruitment I don’t think the CV is dead quite yet. Google, who pride themselves in being different and ahead of the game receive 2 million CVs every year and read every single one of them. Yet even at Google they don’t do everything by the book and Todd Carlisle, director of staffing says he reads CVs backwards from the bottom up. “Candidates’ early work experience, hobbies, extracurricular activities or nonprofit involvement—such as painting houses to pay for college or touring with a punk rock band through Europe—often provide insight into how well an applicant would fit into the company culture.”

So don’t bin your CV just yet but be prepared to be interviewed or assessed in other ways as well.

For more information on the recruitment process and how companies in the UK are recruiting feel free to contact us here at ISL.

]]> In a recent article by Tony Schwartz on the energy project blog entitled “why appreciation matters so much” it was argued that positive feedback in the workplace from managers improved wellbeing and productivity. But is it really that simple?

We’ve all worked for different types of employer. The strict boss who makes it clear when you’ve done something wrong and keeps you on your toes, the laissez faire manager who just leaves you to do your work on your own and the more interactive manager who recognises good work with positive reinforcement. But which is best? and why?

What makes us perform to our highest standards?

According to a worldwide study conducted by Towers Watson, “the single highest driver of engagement in the workplace is whether or not workers feel their managers are genuinely interested in their wellbeing.”

In its simplest terms being appreciated frees us from worry and liberates us to get on with the work at hand without being pre-occupied with external problems. It allows us to be creative and productive and use our energy for what we are employed for. When unhappiness in rife in the workplace, workers spend too much time mulling over their problems in their head and wasting time discussing it with their colleagues when they could be being productive.

So, if it is so simple to increase productivity why do so many managers find it so difficult to praise their workers?

For most, praise or positive reinforcement is totally un-natural behaviour in the workplace. It is much more natural and therefore easier for managers to criticise their workforce than praise them. Praise is something we are not used to and therefore tend not to do as it feels both disingenuous and awkward. Criticism or negative feedback is much easier and almost expected. Unfortunately it seems to cause the opposite results of what we expect.

The effects of praise and criticism in the workplace

Health. In the most extreme cases worker’s health can be significantly affected. In one well-known study workers who felt they were not appreciated for their work and crticised unfairly had a 30 percent higher rate of heart disease than those who felt they were treated with respect and care

Researcher Marcial Losada has discovered there is a direct relationship between positive praise and performance. They found that in high-performing teams, positive feedback outweighs negative feedback by a ratio of 5.6 to 1 yet in low-performing teams negative feedback outweighs positive have a ratio of only 0.36 : 1 (positive : negative).

If we are to follow the suggestions of the the author, a manager could take 5 simple steps:

Try not to criticise even when you think it is necessary
Negative feedback, however little can have serious effects on a workers wellbeing and therefore productivity. Instead of saying “don’t do that ever again, it is bad and not what we want” to “next time why don’t you try doing it this way, it is better and what we want.” Instead of criticism show how they can improve their work and perform better in the future

Look for opportunities to praise
Actively seek out examples of good work and offer genuine praise. Everyone likes to feel they are appreciated for their work and to know that they are performing well. Find a reason to tell them you are happy and it will be appreciated

Look at situations from another point of view
Try to put yourself in other’s shoes, think about what they are doing and what aspects of their work they value the most and need the most encouragement and then praise them for it

Practice praise
For many, giving positive feedback is un-natural and therefore difficult. If you find it hard to give praise, start with yourself and those close to you. Think of things you have done well and mentally work out how to improve what you’ve done. If you think you have done something badly think how you could improve the way you do it next time and if something hasn’t gone well, think why and what you have learnt. Try to get a positive out of everything.

Overall, according to this article providing positive feedback to others will encourage them to work harder for you. The top companies to work for have a very low staff turnover for a very good reason. If the boss works for the employees the employees tend to work for the boss.

However is this really the case? Steve Jobs was well known for being very negative to his staff at times, publicly berating them and at times humiliating them if they did not perform to his exceptionally high standards. And look where Apple is now.

I don’t think the answer to high performance is quite as simple as presented in this article. It can definitely be argued that positive praise will increase productivity, but is this the answer all the time? Please let us know your experiences and what you think.