Are Recruitment Agencies Getting Greedy and Ripping Off Contractors?
January 28, 2008
A number of contractors have recently reported that a few of the bigger agencies are now insisting on 30 day payment terms from the date that they receive an invoice. Read more
Job Outlook worst for over 10 years
January 27, 2008
A new report from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development says that the credit crisis will take a real toll on the economy during 2008.
It suggests that unemployment will rise steeply exceeding any level since the Labour Government was elected. The institute thinks that unemployment will rise by 150,000 next year to 1.8 million. There will be an overall rise in the number of people in work to 0.25 per cent. That is just 75,000 throughout the year. This is a third of the average in the previous two years.
John Philpott, the institute’s economist, considers that the financial services sector will be badly affected, as it is already feeling the fallout from the american sub-prime credit market.
He said: “This will present a challenge to those human resources professionals who have not had to walk the tightrope of laying off large numbers of people while ensuring that people who keep their jobs remain committed and motivated.
“Many HR professionals will be dusting off redundancy manuals in the coming months to re-discover best practice on trimming staffing levels,” Mr Philpott said.
The Treasury has forecast a 12 per cent rise in the number of people claiming unemployment benefits, bringing the total to 910,000. Coupled with almost all recent jobs being absorbed by immigrants, this is likely to have a severe impact on the British economy.
Mr Philpott said: “With jobs also harder to come by this could reinforce the impact of the economic slowdown, possibly necessitating bigger cuts in interest rates than currently anticipated to head off the threat of recession and a worrying prolongation of the slowdown into 2009.”
Much of the job growth in recent years has come from a combination of provate and public sector recruitment with the lion’s share coming from the Government. This is being cut back as Gordon Brown struggles to cope with a vast and expanding public debt explosion.
Mr Philpott said: “But 2008 will be the first year for a decade that the engine of job creation will be spluttering right across the economy”.
How do you create a Video CV and Video Resume?
January 26, 2008
There are many types of video CVs and Resumes. The easiest to create is the PowerPoint format.
Typically your CV will be broken down into a number of distinct sections:
- Summary
- Key Skills
- Current job
- Previous jobs in age order.
- Educational history
- Hobbies & interests
It is worth taking your current CV and using this to provide the text. The next step is to create a template for your CV in PowerPoint. Create a new presentation (File –> New).
You will need a copy of Microsoft PowerPoint to do this. If you don’t have one, Amazon is usually one of the cheapest legitimate places to buy this. Another alternative is to use Open Office, a free alternative. Please see http://www.openoffice.org/ for more details. This suite contains an application called Impress that is directly equivilent to PowerPoint. More details of this can be found at http://www.openoffice.org/product/impress.html.
The next stage is to create seperate sections that mirror the format of your CV. So setup a page for each of the sections above as well as a page for each of your jobs. Now you need to produce a rough draft for each of these sections. Extract the key details from your CV and condense these down into bullet points. This stage usually takes a while to complete. It is important to use single sentence type bullet points. The skill is in summarising the key points.
The next stage is to make the powerPoint look impressive. There are some very good PowerPoint templates available on the web that can redically transform a drab background into something much more impressive. Here are a few good sites to try:
- http://www.presentationpro.com/Products/Templates_Designs.asp?gclid=CN6H9oezk4wCFRcTgQoda3Jz5A
- http://www.soniacoleman.com/templates.htm http://www.brainybetty.com/
- http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/templates/default.aspx
- http://www.poweredtemplates.com/
- http://www.graphicsland.com/powerpoint-templates.htm
- http://www.awesomebackgrounds.com/
- http://powerbacks.com/
- http://www.indezine.com/powerpoint/templates/freetemplates.html
One word of warning, don’t choose something too bold or overpowering! You need your document to look impressive, but still need space for your details.
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