Author: Webmaster

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Top tip reminders

Top tip reminders for being proactive in a depressed employment market:

  1. Be positive by staying proactive
  2. Keep in touch regularly with all your contacts – calendarise and be polite but tenacious
  3. Reciprocate – try to help others if you can, they will remember the good deed and return the favour
  4. Make sure you send your CV updates to a saved list of relevant contacts on a regular basis, which is a great excuse to be in touch
  5. Keep an eye on agency, news and job board bulletins, RSS feeds and job feeds
  6. Occasionally, respond proactively and professionally to appropriate blog articles
  7. Keep current on world and industry topical affairs to add texture to your conversations
  8. It is a marathon, not a sprint, keep persevering but treat it like a job in itself by giving yourself down time and breaks
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Job seeker CV reminders

  1. Check your CV – many have typing or formatting errors which mean that email addresses and telephone numbers don’t work.  Some do not even have a name or contact details
  2. Use spell check and visually check afterwards that it has not made any strange corrections
  3. Make sure your online profiles (i.e. LinkedIn or Facebook) are fit for purpose and that your personal profiles do not compromise your professional ones (watch language, images, controversial opinions etc.)
  4. Keep checking your online profiles on each platform you use, check your contact details are up to date and that your security settings are appropriate for your needs
  5. Use WORD format, not PDF for your CV – many databases search for key words and are not able to search PDF documents.  It is a compromise of practicality over appearance
  6. Back up your contact lists and your CVs so that they can be easily recovered if your computer fails (dropbox and similar mostly free online storage can be very useful for that reason)
  7. Keep a system of version control so that you know which version of your CV a specific employer is looking at.  There is nothing more embarrassing than not knowing what is on your CV
  8. Have your name and ‘CV’ or ‘resume’ as your CV file name so it is easy to find and it is clear to a recipient what it is and who it is
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2nd Annual Global Human Asset in Mining conference

Great conference, but plenty of issues in prospect if miners are not clear on their priorities to be simple, quick and efficient in their recruitment.  Companies recruiting were asked to focus on simple, full representation of the key information:

  1. Role
  2. Project
  3. Company and its strategy
  4. Package and grade

This information needed to be available from the start of the recruitment process (it hasn’t been) and clearly communicated in a candid way at appropriate points in the process, revealing more information as familiarity between candidate and company evolves.

Many companies cited difficulty in finding the right people, but the external recruiters present talked about large numbers of high quality applicants who are becoming increasingly discerning and are actively opting out of processes that are opaque, slow or portray an unrealistic company view.

It was emphasised that applicants like challenges, but they also like candour and clarity, so an aspiration is considered more favourably if portrayed as such, rather that communicating an untruth or not communicating at all.  There are plenty of opportunities for those companies that sell it honestly, fully and clearly.