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Friday, January 12, 2007

The Big Job Hunt

The job hunting is great fun. I've posted my CV to a couple of sites, and contacted the most excellent Andy Hammond from Siptus, who got me this job.

I've been bombarded with phone calls from agencies, and my favourite was from a lady who told me I shouldn't have posted my CV on jobsites, and just use one agent (her), not that she calls herself an agent, and that I wasn't good enough for investment banking, and that she deals with lots of places in the city. I'm not looking for a job in the city, so why she even called was a mystery, but it was a fun conversation trying not to laugh!

A good thing about us all being told at the same time is that we don't have to be surreptitious with agency phone calls and say "Hi Mum" to the agents. We've also been passing job specs around and recommending people.

Thanks to Helen, Ian and Sven, who saw my last post and gave me some job details. One of the jobs was entirely suitable for a guy in the team, who's got a "dentist appointment" with them soon.

There's a real team spirit here, which I've only seen in the 2001 floods and the 1987 gales, where we're all clubbing together in the face of a large problem.

posted by Simon at 12:44 PM. Permalink  

4 Comments:

Colin Mackay said...

Good luck with the job hunting. Talking about odd agents. A couple of months ago while at the pub with some of my colleagues the topic of recruitment agents came up.

We found that we'd all been approached by, among others, the same agent that we unanimously agreed was either nuts or on something illegal. He'd phone us up for a position that had absolutely nothing to do with any of our core skills, tell us that we were the best in the world at it and he wanted to put our CVs forward. No matter how much we said it was only a minor skill he'd still insist that we were the best he'd found and that we shouldn't be so modest in the interview.

January 14, 2007 11:36 PM  
Colin Mackay said...

Forgot this bit: And why did we think he was taking something illegal?

Did you ever see the scene in Trainspotting when Spud goes for a job interview. He wants to fail it so he takes speed just before he goes in. He then answers all the questions in a cloud of verbosity at break neck speed. One of the questions was on one of his non-existent skills. He replies that he put that on the CV just to get his foot in the door. The rather exasperated interviewer replies that he was sent by the job centre, and that there was no door he needed to get his foot into.

January 14, 2007 11:42 PM  
DH said...

Good luck with the job hunting, and dealing with recruitment agents. Most of them are [insert expletive] who know very little about technology, and don't care about candidates at all.

Don't expect them to return your calls or emails, and be wary when they call you about some dream job; often it's all a load of BS to get your details onto their database, which they then use to find more companies stupid enough to use their services.

On of the best things to do is network. Make sure your profile on LinkedIn is up-to-date, and keep in touch with your colleagues. You never know what the future holds, and opportunities will come up in future where you can help one another.

January 31, 2007 4:30 PM  
Simon said...

Thanks Guys,

I did have an agent pronounce C# as "C hash" once! Today, I had a recruiter who just graduated from the same CS course at Exeter as I did. He even knew two of my lecturers.

My networking has been quite good recently - largely because I enjoy it. I didn't realise I'd need to call on it for work though! I've been to loads of events, and I organise geek dinners. I've had one interview already as a result of "The Network".

January 31, 2007 5:26 PM  

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