Category Archives: Recruitment & Job-Hunting Tips

Recruitment & Job-Hunting Tips

Salary Surveys

Susan’s Snippets
While researching the topic for this month’s newsletter, I came across a few websites that claim to provide up to date online salary surveys for most places in the world, for free. One of them in particular impressed me with its ease of use and the fact that a few random entries for Port of Spain, Trinidad & Tobago, actually look reasonable. I even signed up with them to provide this service from our websites.

However, when I played around a bit more, I was amazed to find that it gave salaries (broken down by our cities of Port of Spain and San Fernando) for every job category in its extensive list, including such uncommon careers as archivist, chimney builder and horse exerciser. They claim that “these numbers are derived from real, area specific, survey data”.

Perhaps we will consider developing our own salary data instead. Is this something you might find useful? If so, what criteria should we use?

CRS can query our recruitment database for actual salaries currently being earned by candidates with particular education and experience. This has proved helpful to many clients who want to know what to offer to make their jobs attractive to the best talent. Let me know if you are interested in our salary survey service.

Salary Surveys
It is natural to want to know whether or not you are adequately paid for the job you do. Companies also want to know whether they are underpaying their staff so that they don’t lose people to much better paying jobs elsewhere. On the other hand, if staff are overpaid then this is at a cost to company profits. It’s a delicate balance of getting the best resources for an affordable price.

Of course there are other factors that can make a job desirable and I wrote about this in a previous newsletter http://www.crsitjobs.com/Newletters/CRSNews-Retaining%20I.T.%20Staff.html .

Salary surveys are a useful tool to gauge what someone with a given job title and defined education and experience should be earning. Employees can certainly use this information to support their case for salary increases. However, the data provided in salary surveys is just a guide and is subject to inaccuracies.

For instance, how was the salary data gathered and how long ago, and how many were surveyed?

Salaries are rising quite rapidly for I.T. staff in Trinidad because of the booming economy. There is an increased demand for technical staff to create new or upgraded computer systems to help companies compete locally and globally. It’s not helpful to be guided by a survey that was taken a year or more ago, as the data is out of date.

Salary surveys are always organised by job title. Yet, the I.T. industry is notorious for being inconsistent with the meanings of its job titles. For instance, someone may have a title of project manager but he is really a technical support engineer. His salary of TT$6,000/month may get lumped in with a senior project manager with a salary of TT$30,000/month. You can see how the average salary for a project manager could get seriously skewed here.

Salaries also vary widely according to the company and industry that employs people. A network engineer working for a wealthy oil company will earn considerably more than one working for a small manufacturing company – this is just a fact of life that some can afford to pay more. Also, someone working in a large company may well have more complex duties to perform than a similar position in a small or medium-sized company, and this is reflected in a higher salary.

Another important factor is the number of people in the survey. Trinidad is pretty small in terms of population. If there were only 2 people in the survey with the title project manager and they both worked for oil companies at salaries of $20,000 and $30,000, say, then the salary range for project manager would show as $20,000 – $30,000, when in fact there are many earning $15,000 or so elsewhere.

So, while salary surveys are certainly interesting to us all personally and to those who have to decide what salaries to pay, you have to be very cautious about using them as your main source of information. As mentioned above, we at CRS can help by querying our recruitment database for actual salaries currently being earned by candidates with particular education, experience, etc.

Tell Us What You Think

It has been a pleasure receiving your newsletter for the past two years that I have been a subscriber. As a young professional in the IT field, I have found your newsletters to be quite informative while trying to develop my career and would like to ask that you keep up the good work and keep them coming! :o) … Vishard

I always appreciate the encouragement to keep these newsletters going. Many thanks to those who have expressed appreciation …. Susan

We would love to hear what you think of this issue of CRS News. And of course, if you have any suggestions for upcoming issues that you would like to share with us, please send those too.

Posted by on July 25, 2016
Recruitment & Job-Hunting Tips

Ethical Recruiting

Susan’s Snippets
For those of you who recently participated in Carnival in Trinidad, I hope you had as much fun as I did. I have graced this issue with a photo of two of our recruiters having a great time.

Warning to those self employed consultants in T&T who are VAT Registered:
WASA is now levying Non-Domestic water rates on all premises where VAT registered businesses operate. In other words, if you have registered your VAT business at your home, then you will be billed water rates at the commercial rate. You can petition the Regulated Industries Commission if you consider this unfair. Their website is http://www.ric.org.tt .

Ethical Recruiting
You are probably thinking that I’m going to talk about how recruiting agencies should operate in an ethical manner. Actually, I want to reverse this thought and explore how candidates and company hirers work with agencies to get the best out of the partnership so that all parties benefit from the relationship.

What does each party expect from each other?
– the candidate expects the agency to provide appropriate job opportunities and present him/her fairly and positively to prospective employers
– the company expects the agency to provide vetted candidates that match their job requirements, arrange candidate interviews, and help with the negotiations for hire, in return for an agreed fee
– the agency expects that the candidate has accurately and completely represented themselves in terms of their qualifications, skills, work experience and future job goals
– the agency expects that the company gives appropriate feedback on candidates submitted and works with the agency until the recruitment cycle is complete

The above arrangement works very well and only goes wrong when any one party fails to live up to the expectations of another. For example, if a candidate agrees with an agency to meet a company for a job interview and never shows up and avoids all the agency’s calls, or if the candidate agrees to the salary and other employment terms with the agency before the interview, then demands much more at the interview, then they are letting down the agency and wasting the hirer’s time.
A more serious example is when a candidate misrepresents their qualifications or experience on their resume.

Now that candidate has destroyed the trust of both the agency and the hirer who will have a negative view of this person should they come across them when considering candidates for future jobs. Remember that the hirer may move to another company and so the candidate’s prospects may become blocked by that company too.

Hirers sometimes also misuse the relationship between themselves and the agency. This could be a simple case of not telling the recruiter why her candidates are unsuitable so that she could adjust her search to find better matches. Hirers who work closely with their recruiter definitely get the best results, as people are naturally more effective when they have a good working relationship.

There are extreme cases where the hirer deliberately misrepresents the facts! For example, a hirer may get the candidate to agree to tell the agency that he/she had already applied directly to the hiring company, so the hirer can avoid paying the agency’s recruitment fees. Another tactic is to get the candidate to tell the agency that their salary is lower than what was agreed, so that the recruitment fee is reduced.

Any act of dishonesty is almost always found out eventually by the agency staff, if they are good at maintaining a relationship with their candidates. You can imagine how badly this reflects on the hiring company’s ethics and I have known cases where the candidate refused the job because of this. Of course this creates an unpleasant dilemma for the agency as to whether or how to deal with that company again, especially if they are giving a lot of business to the agency.

Yes, the agency needs to be honest with all parties as well, and never knowingly submit a candidate with a negative history or inaccurate resume. I strive to live according to the following code of ethics which you may have heard of:

“In all things that I think, say or do ….
1. Is it the TRUTH?
2. Is it FAIR to all concerned?
3. Will it build GOOD WILL and BETTER FRIENDSHIPS?
4. Will it be BENEFICIAL to all concerned?”

Do you have any experiences to share along these lines?

Tell Us What You Think
We would love to hear what you think of this issue of CRS News. And of course, if you have any suggestions for upcoming issues that you would like to share with us, please send those too.

Posted by on January 25, 2016
Recruitment & Job-Hunting Tips

Hiring Friends

Susan’s Snippets
I am saddened to report the passing of Galba Bright who was a guest contributor to this newsletter about a year ago. He was an expert in Emotional Intelligence and lived in Jamaica. Condolences to his family.

If you, or anyone you know, would like to contribute relevant articles pertaining to recruitment or personal development or the I.T. industry in general, then I would be pleased to discuss this.

Hiring Friends
There’s been a lot of talk and news reports in recent times about transparency in business dealings and the high cost of corruption to a country. You probably skim over these reports thinking that all this is someone else’s experience and of course you wouldn’t behave in such an unethical way.

No doubt that is true when we’re talking about taking bribes and kickbacks on contract allocations, and major misdealings of that nature. Yet can you say that your recruitment practices are entirely above board? If you have ever been in the position to influence who gets hired for a job, and you have favoured a friend or a relative, then you might have been doing an injustice to your company by not hiring the best candidate.

A few years ago, I was asked to be on an interview panel to select an I.T. person for a large organisation. My recruiting company had selected the candidates and I was there on an advisory capacity. The interviews were proceeding well and the panel was interested in one particular lady when one of the more influential panelists realised he had a friend in this lady’s department who he felt would also be suited for the job. To cut an astounding story short, the next thing I knew was that the job was offered to the friend without going through the full interview panel process and my services were no longer required. To add injury to insult, my company didn’t get a sale!

Now the person hired may truly have been the best person for the job, but you could not tell from the process taken. The bias in her favour was extreme. I had a hard time explaining to the original candidate who saw her colleague, whom she thought wasn’t even applying, get the job.

I know there’s a great advantage to recruiting people you know – you know the personalities you’re dealing with, and their attitudes are in line with yours, and of course you can trust a friend, right? Well sometimes not so. It’s amazing how different a person can be in the workplace to how you know them socially.
It’s more important than ever that your friend is put through the same rigorous and open selection process as everyone else so that you can be sure that they are the best fit. You don’t want a mistake returning to haunt you, and this could harm your friendship with that person too.

Relatives are sometimes a different case as family companies may have to hire them even though they are clearly not the best choice. Some large companies like to have members of the same family working for them as that is their culture, and it helps staff retention. But these are known and accepted biases built into the recruitment process, and quite different from hiring the relative as a favour.

I’m not saying that it’s wrong to hire a friend or relative; just that you need to be open and transparent about it and consider other choices fairly too. Always ask yourself “will hiring my friend be the best thing for the company?”.

Tell Us What You Think
(Referring to our last newsletter “”Wait and See” Causes Downturn in Recruiting”)

Congratulations on 12 years of outstanding service.
In my opinion, IT jobs are more in demand in T&T than anywhere else in the Caribbean. The decline you are experiencing may be due to organizations adopting a more direct method of recruiting and/or recruiting from outside. In so doing they are also not doing due diligence regarding the recruitment process and in the end may not have the right candidate. This is particularly common in a booming economy where time is critical and money is not an issue… John

Thank you for this feedback, John. I have found that when times are booming, companies will spend the money to use an agency as they know they get better results. When money is tight they try to hire directly in a mistaken (I believe) attempt to save money. This is far more time consuming for them and they may still have to resort to an agency if they don’t get good enough candidates. We have noticed that the newspaper ads themselves are smaller than usual – a sign that companies are trying to recruit as cheaply as possible… Susan

We would love to hear what you think of this issue of CRS News. And of course, if you have any suggestions for upcoming issues that you would like to share with us, please send those too.

Posted by on June 25, 2008
Recruitment & Job-Hunting Tips

10 Tips for the Interviewee

Susan’s Snippets
Thanks to those who responded about the regularity of receipt of this monthly newsletter. Remember, if you do not receive it every month, please click on reply to let me know this, giving a reason you suspect is the problem, if possible. Many thanks for your help with this. Note – I have found that many subscribers have full mail boxes.

For those who have added its email address to your contacts list or white-list/safe sender’s list to avoid this newsletter being rejected, then please note that the email address has been changed to crsnews2@crsitjobs.com. I apologise for any inconvenience caused.

P.S. I can’t resist mentioning what a great Carnival 2006 all of us at CRS had in Trinidad. I couldn’t find a photo that did justice to our collective beauty!

10 Tips for the Interviewee
There are many sources of tips available for the job seeker. They provide excellent information on how to find job opportunities, write resumes, present oneself at interviews, etc. A good example is http://www.rileyguide.com/. I don’t wish to repeat standard advice but rather focus on what makes the difference between being just OK at the interview and being outstanding. This assumes that the interviewee is actually qualified for the job.

1. Be prepared. Make sure that you know what the company’s business is all about, so you can ask intelligent questions and prove that you are really interested in working for them. You can check their website or even search the Internet for news information on them, if they are a large company.

2. Dress for success! This is so important and often underestimated by the interviewee. The style of dress will vary by company. For instance, be conservative for a bank or insurance company, but stylish for a media or advertising company. Never go in jeans, revealing clothes, slippers, or dirty/old clothes.
Make sure your hygiene is impeccable. Don’t smoke for the morning before the interview as the smell of tobacco will linger in your hair and clothes, and many people are turned off by this.
For conservative companies, wear your hair in a tidy style; women should wear closed-in shoes and perfume should be discreet; men should not wear ear-rings, and any visible body piercings are a no-no.
The interviewer will form a first impression from the moment they see you, and the rest of the interview will be simply to provide support for that first impression.

3. Be on time. Better to get there an hour early than be 5 minutes late. You may be required to fill in an application form so it’s best to be there at least 15 minutes before the interview. If you are unavoidably late, then please call the company with a good excuse and offer to reschedule the time if they can’t wait for you.
Remember that employers often line up several interviews one after the other. So you being late will impact on the whole day, and this will be noted.

4. Be polite. Smile and shake hands with everyone (if possible) while introducing yourself. Remember to stand when someone important comes into the room, even if it’s a man and you’re a woman – we’re all equal in business. It’s so easy and makes an essential good impression.

5. Don’t fidget – it’s annoying and makes you look nervous. Don’t cover your mouth while speaking. Speak clearly and pay attention to your diction and grammar. Never chew gum in an interview. Never slouch in your chair, no matter how relaxed the interview may be.

6. Don’t monopolise the conversation. It’s important that you present your achievements well, but you must also listen to what the interviewer wants to tell you about the job and company. You could come across as overbearing if you take control of the conversation.

7. On the other hand, make sure that you get to say your piece too, should the interviewer be very talkative. He/she may well consider you a great conversationalist if you let them do all the talking, but you want them to learn why you are the best candidate for the job. So, make sure you get a chance to sell yourself too.

8. Be prepared for tricky questions like “if I told you that you are not suitable for the job, what would you say?” Listen to the question carefully before you get angry or upset. The interviewer said “IF I told you …” You reply very calmly that you would be surprised and disappointed and then go on to say why you are perfect for the job. The interviewer was trying to see how you would react.
In all cases, be calm and always steer the answer back to why you should get the job. Have a good answer for that age-old one “what do you consider your faults to be?” Come up with some (genuine) faults that could also be considered attributes.

9. Keep your sense of humour. It’s only a job and others will come your way. So, don’t be too serious and anxious. Show that you are a happy, confident person and people will want to have you on their team.

10. Never, never bad talk your previous employers or anyone else. This will actually reflect worse on you than them. You can make it obvious that you were not happy with a company or a situation but don’t make personal, negative remarks about anybody.

Also check out “the Magic Wand”, a very effective interview technique I wrote about in a previous newsletter. Note that any jobs listed there are no longer available.

I remember one disastrous job interview I had years ago with a certain cola company. The interviewer told me how he encouraged his children to drink bottles of this stuff every day, especially when they were ill. The look of horror on my face must have killed it for me and we both couldn’t wait for me to get out of there.

Remember that an interview is an opportunity for both sides to establish that there is a fit. You are also sizing them up, and these days it’s very much an employee’s market. So know that you are worthy, and enjoy the experience.

Tell Us What You Think
Letters to the Editor:
(referring to our last newsletter – Loyalty – to Career or Employer First?)

Employers need to step out of the box and not only think of the business from their point of view. I have even had that statement “you need to be more loyal to the company” directed at me when I did an assessment of problems a company I worked at was having with an accounting system and I produced evidence to show the problems were more internal than external (the vendor).

But employers need to look at the employee’s perspective….what is it the employee wishes to gain from your company. Is it just a salary or does he/she want to develop themselves personally as well? What is all this training if there is no room in the company for the employee’s growth?

They also need to look at how they treat their employees. They cannot always expect the IT person to always give, give, and get nothing in return. IT people usually have to work long days/nights sometimes with very little remuneration.
If IT persons were not loyal, wouldn’t the very systems they work on never be working?

In some businesses the training of employees only leads to them getting more work/responsibilities with the same pay. Then employers are surprised when there is a high turnover. Employers need to do a proper assessment of why IT persons are really leaving their organisations.

A lot of companies hire IT persons with skills and assume that they would not need to further train them to upgrade their skills. Just as Shelly-Anne said, they incorrectly perceive that training these employees is an expenditure rather than an investment in their human capital.

So it is a two way street. If employers give, they will receive in return … Dwight

It would be interesting to hear an employer’s viewpoint on this loyalty issue … Susan

We would love to hear what you think of this issue of CRS News. And of course, if you have any suggestions for upcoming issues that you would like to share with us, please send those too.

Posted by on March 25, 2006
Recruitment & Job-Hunting Tips

Why Use Placement Agencies?

What is your image of Placement/Recruitment/ Employment Agencies? Are they a god-send for the busy I.T. or HR Manager? Or are they an expensive luxury that only wealthy large companies can afford?

Let’s look at the savings. Suppose you need to recruit a technical professional. Many companies advertise in the newspapers or on internet job boards and the timeline could look like this:

1 week – design, vet and submit ad
2 weeks – time span of ad campaign
2 weeks – wait for resumes to come in
1 week – go through resumes to select short-list of candidates

6 weeks total, and this is a conservative estimate as you have so many other things to do, and the technical person to vet the resumes is also very busy. Who actually LIKES to read through scores or even hundreds of mostly unsuitable resumes! So, it’s something everyone keeps putting off. In fact, it can take months to get to the point where you arrange interviews.

Compare this with placing a call to a reputable agency, such as CRS, that has a readily accessible database of technical professionals. Once the agency has a good profile of what you require and there are candidates available, then they can start sending you a short-list of candidates within a day or two. Certainly it should take no longer than 2 weeks to submit a complete short-list of vetted candidates, ready for you to interview.

Not only have you brought forward the interviewing stage by at least a month but the candidates you have short-listed are already screened for suitability and salary expectations and are briefed about the job, the company and its environment. So your time is not wasted interviewing people who don’t want the job. Time is money!

Best of all, the calibre of candidates will usually be very much higher than those responding to an ad. The reason is that ads work best for inexperienced people perhaps looking for their first job, and also for people out of work or anxious to change jobs for whatever reason.

Of course, some high profile companies would always attract experienced people and their problem would be more of finding these resumes amongst the deluge that comes through the door.

An agency would have access to “passive candidates”. These are skilled professionals who are reasonably content in their job and who are most unlikely to respond to ads. However, if it’s very easy (and free) for them to register with a reputable agency, e.g., on the Internet, then they would do so as they would like to get a sense of the job market out there.

A big advantage of an agency is that a Recruitment Consultant can present the job and the company in the best light, overcoming any prejudices that the candidate may have about certain companies or industries. The Recruitment Consultant works to ensure that there is a best fit between candidates and jobs. When there is a “magic” fit, the agency becomes worth their weight in gold!

We had a case where a candidate was rejected because he didn’t seem to have certain experience. Our Recruitment Consultant asked him about this and it turns out that he had omitted to specify this knowledge in his resume.  An interview with the client company was arranged for the following week. If he had sent in his resume to the company directly then he would have been overlooked!

But isn’t an agency expensive? Consider the cost of advertising – TT$4,000 – $12,000 or more with no rebates if the person hired doesn’t work out. In fact, you may not find any suitable candidates at all, and what do you do then … go to an agency anyway? Plus there’s a huge cost in terms of man hours to process the resumes, and wouldn’t you rather be doing other more interesting work?

An agency usually charges the company a fee based on the recruit’s starting salary. It is just like paying an extra month’s or so salary for that person. There is normally a small or no charge if you do not hire anyone from the agency, and there would be a partial refund should the recruit leave the job within a certain period of time.

When you add up all the costs and benefits of advertising versus using an agency, then it is just good sense to put your money where there are guarantees and better and quicker results.

(Susan Hale, Managing Director, Caribbean Resourcing Solutions Ltd)

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Posted by on June 25, 2005

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Recruitment & Job-Hunting Tips

Counter Offers-Should You Accept Them?

Editor’s Note
I look forward to getting feedback on these newsletters so that I know if I’m providing any useful or interesting information. I seemed to have hit a nerve judging from the responses I’m getting on the question of the work ethics of Trinidadians. See Tell Us What You Think.

Counter Offers-Should You Accept Them?
Suppose you are tempted to apply for a new job. You may not be desperate to leave and, in fact, you are quite happy in your current job; it’s just that you would like a change and a new challenge, and you will earn more money to boot. Your resume will look better if you have a history of good jobs to show your career progression and the breadth of your experience.

Then you are made an offer and it’s time to make a decision. You talk to your family and you decide that this is a good opportunity that you should not pass up. You feel that now is a good time to leave your employer as you’re not working on anything so crucial. You sign the job letter and hand in your resignation to your boss. Then the @#$% hits the fan!

Suddenly you discover that your current employer thinks highly of your talents and that you have great prospects with their company; only they never gave you this impression before. They want you to stay with them and they prove this by presenting you with an equal or better counter-offer! What do you do?

What you should do is think very carefully about the motives behind the counter-offer and also what you may be doing to any future chances of working with the new company should you renege on your signed job contract.

The reason your current employers are so keen to keep you is that your leaving will make life very inconvenient for them – it’s costly to recruit a replacement and it takes time and is a hassle. Plus, a new person has a learning curve to get up to speed and won’t have all that on-the-job knowledge that’s in your head. They are thinking of what’s best for them, not for you.

The fact is that nearly every person who accepts a counter-offer leaves, or tries to leave, that employment within a year. By accepting another job, you have shown disloyalty to your employer. This will impact on your promotion prospects and probably the quality of the work that comes your way, despite their promises to the contrary.
They will never trust you again not to leave them in the lurch. They just wanted you to finish whatever you were working on and give them time to work around your loss. You will find yourself being left out in the cold and you will eventually become unhappy enough to start actively job-hunting.

I have seen this happen over and over again. I know from my own experience what it’s like to be torn between the comfort of your current employer and the attraction of a new opportunity, and the pressure an employer can put on a person to stay. I decided I needed to move on and never regretted that decision. My advice is to be absolutely sure you can resist any counter-offer before accepting another job.

If you have any doubts then by all means talk to your current boss about the reasons why you may consider looking for other opportunities, so that you can explore what potential there is in staying put. But do this before you go as far as accepting an offer for another job. Word of warning – do not resign before you get that job offer in your hand!

Another consideration in a small society like a Caribbean island is that if you turn down a job offer you may be spoiling any chances of ever working with that company again. Also, one day you may go for a job interview with a different company and come face to face with the same person you let down. So, do consider very carefully what’s best for you!

Tell Us What You Think
Letters to the Editor:

In my more than 25 years in IT, 15 abroad, 10 in Trinidad, I do not see more or less commitment from Trini IT professionals than professionals from abroad, UK, USA or otherwise. What I do see is, professionals or even people with personal pride who are committed will always do their best, and even work very long hours/weeks/months to complete the job on-time, mainly due to bad management/planning/short staffing.
However, there is too much poor project management, poor senior management, with a large slant on keeping the bigger boss happy (sucking up, not wanting to say no), a tendency to wait until the last minute to get things done by some staff and using others to get one’s own job done, and reaping the reward for themselves. Most of this of course being human nature. …. Philip.

As an IT manager coming from Germany to Trinidad some years ago I can follow these described problems. My own experience is very mixed if it comes to such issues. I met both, highly educated and motivated Trinidadians working very professional and also the “typical” Trinidadian worker, getting defensive on every suggestion of improvement and having real problems with time management and authorities.
Implementing changes into an average Trinidadian company is a real challenge to every manager involved. The very positive aspect to me is the experience and learning factor.
It is so very easy to change habits and policies in an environment as you find it in Europe, preferable in Austria, Germany, Italy and France where no worker would ever question your order but just run to get it done asap. Yet, you suddenly find yourself involved with staff that want to know why and how and by the way “me was limin so me not doin nothing now ‘cause me tired, boss”.
It is a true challenge and even as an international experienced manager you have to re-think and be creative. Also it can be very tiring – to an European manager it seems there is a lot of time wasted – but let me tell you something: it is not! Job wise there is nothing like the satisfaction of getting the team working and the job done, especially in Trinidad, with Trinidadians.
And PLEASE don’t misunderstand me! There are true and amazing professionals out there I have the most respect for and fun working with!!! …. Dirk

Interesting thoughts. Is it true that Trinis are typically resistant to suggestions of improvement? Do you agree that staff having to work long hours is due to poor project management and bad senior management? What are your feelings on our “carnival” mentality and resulting lack of productivity? ….. Ed.

We would love to hear what you think of this issue of CRS News. And of course, if you have any suggestions for upcoming issues that you would like to share with us, please send those too.

Posted by on April 25, 2005
Recruitment & Job-Hunting Tips

The Magic Wand (Interview Technique)

Issue 2.4
November 2004

Are you receiving CRS News properly?
Did You Know that the new Microsoft XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) automatically strips out and remove images from HTML emails sent to users who have SP2 installed and are using Microsoft Outlook Express on a Windows XP computer? This also happens with Outlook 2003. The idea is to provide safer E-Mail handling but it does degrade your reading experience.

Here are some ideas to get round this annoyance:
1. Add our address crsnews@crsitjobs.com to your address list.

2. Outlook Express – turn off the “Block images and other external content in HTML e-mail” option after selecting Tools and Options and clicking on the Security tab.

3. Outlook 2003 – right click on the suppressed image box, and choose to display it.

Another way to ensure you receive our newsletters every month is to “white-list” our E-Mail address with your ISP if you can, or add it to your “Safe Sender’s List” if appropriate.

In any case, all back issues are published at http://www.crsitjobs.com

The Magic Wand
While researching the recruitment business in the UK, I attended a seminar for recruitment specialists, and was particularly impressed by a session entitled “The Magic Wand”. It’s a simple technique to dramatically increase (40% claimed) a candidate’s chances at a job interview. So, if you would like an extra boost in that regard, read on ……

1. Write down on a pad at least 6 questions to ask about the job or company, e.g., career prospects, training provided, etc.
2. Make sure that you carry the pad and a pen to the interview.
3. Take notes of at least 2 things said by the interviewer (shows interest and is flattering).
4. When the interviewer asks “any questions?” there ought to be a couple of your questions still unanswered. If all are answered, say you had questions prepared but they were all covered during the interview. If you don’t get asked for questions, then politely say “May I ask some questions?” This shows that you are prepared and keen.
5. At the end of the interview,
make sure that they know that you want the job.

That’s it! It seems so simple and of course, you must do all the other good interview things, like research the company, dress smartly, be on time, etc., (see www.rileyguide.com for lots of tips). We have passed on this technique to some of our candidates and it certainly boosted their confidence, impressed their interviewer, and I am sure that it contributed to their getting job offers. Try it and tell me how you got on.

Tell Us What You Think
Letters to the Editor

We received no comments on last month’s article on contracting vs. permanent employment. If you’re thinking of seeking contract work, we at CRS would be happy to advise you on how to go about it ……….. Ed.

We would love to hear what you think of this issue of CRS News. And of course, if you have any suggestions for upcoming issues that you would like to share with us, please send those, too!

Posted by on November 25, 2004