Blog-stylings from the Chinwag team with news, site updates, online recruitment industry snippets and other new media tidbits that catch our attention.
I was chatting to a friend of mine the other night, who shall remain nameless. She was telling me about all the wonderful things she includes in her CV. It’s a CV that’s almost a work of fiction.
“They expect you to lie on your CV!” Companies look at your CV and think “is that all you can come up with even after lying?”
Do they really elaborate? - yeah. Exaggerate? - maybe. It’s a tricky field to navigate, but lie? You’d think not but it happens more than you think.
For those of you who missed it, (and there were only a few because viewing figures tipped the 10 million mark) thirty three year old Lee McQueen, a recruitment sales manager from Buckingham, was crowned Sir Alan Sugar’s latest Apprentice last night.
It was Bordan Tkachuk, the CEO of Viglen, who caught Lee out in the final interview stage. Lee claimed he’d spent two years at Thames Valley University whereas he was only there for 4 months. As much as CV-gate (as I like to call it) shows the recruitment industry in a bad light it’ll make interviewers more aware of little CV foibles for the next few months.
Suffice to say, Lee admitted his mistake, managed to turn things around and win in the end. It was probably based on a niggling insecurity more than anything and he had the business acumen to carry him forward anyway. Now with a new job that pays £100,000 a year I’m sure his girlfriend will be delighted with her fancy new shoes. He’ll just have to make do with a Porsche.
Chinwag can be a tricky beast to define at the best of times. Having grown up from an email-based community, the company is evolving alongside and with the help of the community.
In February, I was invited to speak at Enhance Media’s annual conference, The Year Ahead in Online Recruitment looking at the lessons learnt, and still being learnt, from building Chinwag Jobs. As our team begun to think about transforming a basic email list into an all-singing, all-dancing jobs website, we aimed to keep the community at the heart of the development.
As always, these presentations fly by in the blink of an eye. Fortunately, the lovely Louise Triance from UK Recruiter managed to grab some notes, which she’s posted up her blog. If you want a bit of insight into the background to Chinwag Jobs and how we try and keep the community at the heart of our development, have a read.
A recent piece of research by Bristol based Recruitment Consultancy Just Adlib has probed into our happiness levels at work with illuminating results. An interesting read, the research was conducted by people living in the west of England and working in the Digital, Marketing, Advertising and Creative Industries.
Just Adlib found that, 37% of participants said job satsifaction was the most important factor to ensure their happiness at work, closely followed by the people they worked with (17%) and a nice environment to work in (12%). Surprisingly being well paid only accounted for 5% of the responses and additional benefits only 1%.
I can’t help but wonder if the results would differ if respondants were asked the same thing in London or Manchester? I suppose there’s one way to find that out!
By Harry Fowler - Group Digital Recruiter for AMV Group.
Since 3GSM has recently finished in Barcelona and I never made it, again, I thought I’d give you my user experience on mobile recently.
It’s taken a while, but eventually Orange and T-Mobile are finally getting round to it.
Recently I signed up for Sky Sports TV via my N95 whilst I was sitting on a train heading to Edinburgh. £5 per month, cancel any time you want - not a problem you think. Then you get to the quality. It’s shit. Now I was on a train admittedly so I gave it the benefit of the doubt and tried it again when in a fixed position and with full connection - still shit. The sound is brilliant, but the picture morphs between static players and that really trippy bit from the end of Space Odyssey 2001. Not exactly the premiership quality I wanted (and not the bottom end of the league you understand)
I can’t work out whether it’s the machine or the signal but neither seem able to keep up with the pace - and as the old joke goes - “he/ she has a great face for radio” - let’s hope the digital radio stations are better quality (hoping the GCap haven’t ditched all of them by then)
Must remember to cancel that Sky mobile subscription.
Moving swiftly on Android looks like it has the capability to stretch even the most brilliant tech genius. If you are technically gifted then please get your head round this and maybe, just maybe people will start building applications into phones that we, the customer, the consumer and the payer of bills actually might need.
Chinwag Jobs has been named as a finalist in the Onrec.com Awards 2008 for the Best Technical Innovation Award. You can see the full list of finalists here. (Is it just me, or are there a *lot* of finalists..?)
We’re very happy to have made it to the finalists stage, and fingers crossed we’ll win!
It took us a while - well, all of 10 seconds - to weedle out of Thayer why she was wearing a Cheshire cat grin. Check out the article in its full glory and get her insight on getting into the games industry, whatever your qualifications.
Chinwag will be having a stand at the Adobe Live event happening in Islington on the 5th and 6th June. We’re really excited to see everyone there, so do swing by if you’re planning on attending.
From Adobe:
“Feed your imagination at Adobe Live. June 5- 6, London Be inspired. Learn how Adobe® Creative Suite® 3 will change the way you work and create. Turn your creative visions and designs into reality – on the page or screen, in print or on the web.”
This morning Chinwag Jobs received a press release letting us know that today Aquent is annoucing the aquisition of Pricejamieson. This is huge news for anyone in the recruiting industry:
“This acquisition brings together two highly efficient and successful companies from within the UK market, the industry areas of focus for pricejamieson are extremely complementary to Aquent’s current offerings, and the level of relationships pricejamieson currently has will enhance Aquent’s position within the senior levels of the UK’s top companies.” - Stefan Ciecierski, Aquent’s Managing Director Europe
The union of Aquent and pricejamieson in London creates the largest Aquent market globally and the largest single provider of marketing, communications and creative recruitment solutions in any city anywhere in the world. It also creates the UK’s largest database of prospective candidates – in excess of 150,000.
We saw a landmark in our history today, as for the first time since our January 2006 launch, the site held over 1,000 jobs!
We might have to celebrate with half a pint of shandy tonight - thanks to everyone who’s been advertising with us for making the site such an exciting and varied place to find jobs in new media.
