A Job You Love

In the Uk and now in France, recruiters organisations and governing bodies have tried to avoid discrimination through different measures. In the UK, you don’t have to put a photo, your address, your age or your marital status on your CV.

In France, in 2006, the Anonymous CV has been created to prevent any discrimination but it has not been used so far or only on a small scale by some French corporations (Loreal, Axa…).

All these efforts have been made to avoid precisely any kind of discrimination whether it … Continue Reading

Do you still use a Cover letter and a CV (or Resume)? Do you still use the network of your close friends and only the network of your close friends?

Guess what, you look for a job like in the 70s!

My dad is 60 this year, and just retired from his company after almost 40 years of good work. He started working there in 1971.

When he arrived in my city, he only knew my mother and had no contact at all. But at the time, he had a GSCE … Continue Reading

Everyday I receive emails from people asking for free advice. I don’t know them, they don’t know me but they hope to get something for free.

Even if time is short, I always try to reply back to all the emails…Sometimes I just say I won’t be able to help you (if it is something too big as reviewing a CV or a profile).

But the worst case is when someone ask for a piece of advice and once I send an email does not reply back.

It happened to me … Continue Reading

I have been reading CVs lately and I am always surprised by the lack of punchy sentences at the beginning of CVs. Recruiters don’t spend more than 10-20 seconds reading your CV, so you need to grant some time to do your profile properly.

So what is a good profile?

Actually let’s start with a boring profiles on 90% of the CVs I come across.

Most of CVs have this kind of profile:

“I am a committed and rigorous person who strives to achieve the best results. I am strongly motivated by the media … Continue Reading

The other day, I was waiting for a train at my station…and I was at the same time observing the pigeons hanging around on the platform (the idea of this article came from reading this awesome story, Job Search Tenacity through a blind dog)

There were 10 of them, 3 were really rawboned, and the other ones were not that great either.

A guy in front of me just dropped a crust of bread, and all of them rushed to grab that piece of food…they were fighting each other … Continue Reading

In a Career change and a job search, not only you can, but you need to be creative and approach the market in different ways.

I will go much farther with radical steps based on an article I saw on Seth Godin’s blog. These steps won’t land you straightaway a job, but it will help you to get new ideas and develop your brand in the long run:

• Spend time running a project for a non-profit: volunteering is one of the best way to network and to develop and apply your skills

• Teach yourself … Continue Reading
  

A couple of years ago, I was working in a recruitment fair…At the time, I was recruiting for positions in Australia and Middle East.

During the fair I received a candidate…he was brilliant, he was coming across well, nice suit and good speaking skills, a nice portfolio, quite convincing as well.

The only problem was that he was working as a kitchen designer and wanted to work in Australia as an Architect.

SO he thought that by putting a nice suit, preparing a brilliant portfolio would be enough to impress the recruiter.

But he was … Continue Reading

An article about the importance of values inspired me a couple of reflections about values.

What do you believe in?

When I was young, I used to laugh at people values. For me it was: “Values don’t matter, it is just an excuse to show off”.

Now I am 34, and I see the world differently.

I ran an exercise about values and sorted out my 5 most important values.

Learning always learning, Autonomous, Respect, Communication, Authenticity are the values I most value.

But why it is so important?

Do you like money? Do you … Continue Reading

When they recruit someone, they apply a very simple method: if you have worked in the same industry for a competitor of their client or something very similar, you will be selected.

If you have worked for someone else or a different industry, your CV will stay aside.

It is what I call, the “copy/paste” selection…

Same industry, same level, same company.

They only recruit me-too or clones because it is the simplest way to please the client.

When I was myself a recruiter, the candidates I selected were candidates I had to copy/paste from the … Continue Reading

I do remember the first executive I coached…it was back in 2005.

Here was his time schedule:

7.30     He gets up and has his breakfast (and kisses his wife…not all the time)

8.25     He switches on his computer

8.30     He checks his emails

9.10     He goes on news websites and other websites

9.40     He starts scouting through job boards

11.00   After identifying a couple of ads, he reviews his CV and starts elaborating

a cover letter for each position (10-20 positions)

12.30   It is time for Lunch

13.30   Back to computer and some readings, finishes off … Continue Reading

My article about Why your CV is boring and ineffective brought a lot of interest and comments especially from people on Linkedin (I had more than 400 views cumulated for this article!).

After 1 of the comments on the blog, I decided to give an example of what (for me) a boring CV looks like:

2003 -2006 Marketing Manager – Cuca Cola

-        Launching a line of product for Cuca Cola

-        Coordinating a team to achieve this product in time

-        Creating a range of products after the launching of the line

-        … Continue Reading

In my previous post I explained why I think Your CV is boring and ineffective
The CV is boring because it is a list of duties and it is so boring to read for a recruiter, and it is statistically inefficient because now all the recruiters receive hundreds of CVs for each position advertised so your odds of getting a job through the “normal” market is quite low.

Just to give you more insight I will quote this part of the book of Seth Godin:
“Odds are that the last time you switched … Continue Reading

When we complain a lot about our situation, our job or the crisis, it is always good to put things into perspective.

It is time to take a step back, and reflect about our real situation…is it so bad? What are my options?

I have heard a couple of times lately, financial executives complaining about the loss of their bonuses. YES it is something tough especially if you took a mortgage on and have a family of 5 to feed…but at the the … Continue Reading

After reading the book of Seth Godin, Purple Cow…several ideas and thoughts came to my mind. In this book, Seth Godin explains that companies need to be remarkable to be successful nowadays…beforehand companies could create boring products and put a lot of ads on TV, and that was pretty much it! And It was working well!

Now the audience is more demanding, has less time and the number of choice is bigger…so you need to be remarkable to get noticed. You need to create a purple cow (because all … Continue Reading