Weekly roundup - 8th October
Plus a scathing review of AI Assistant for LinkedIn Job Adverts
Hi there,
I’ve published a few posts on LinkedIn you may find helpful in the past couple of weeks, copied below.
If you find them insightful, please jump on the post and leave a reaction or comment, to give it a boost, in the hope it may help others.
Then stay to the end for my -2 out of 10 review of the new AI Assistant upgrade for LinkedIn job advertising. Spoilers: if anything it makes my advice on effective CVs more relevant, and despite what the review alludes to, writing for humans has never been more important.
What you need to know in your job search:
1. Career grief is real. You’ll go through many emotions. Take time to heal and process, to help you figure out what the next move should be.
2. Eliminate negative self-talk. If you don’t believe in yourself, why will others?
3. Ask colleagues what your strengths are. Gain testimonials. A great reflection of your capability – you are not your job search.
4. Celebrate wins, no matter how small.
5. Don’t compare your success to other job seekers.
6. Focus on what you can control – the steps you take, not the outcome. Detachment is key.
7. Be focused, accountable and proactive. No spray and pray.
8. Use your business skills. Everyone has different strengths. Work to yours.
9. Offer support to peers around your expertise. Common knowledge to you may be uncommon to others – it’s a great boost.
10. There’s no shame in taking any work to pay the bills. I’d stack the shelves if I needed to support my family.
11. Only take advice from people who can show insight into your context.
12. Your employment market is specific to you: generic advice can work against you. Understand your market by talking to peers, industry figures and recruiters in your field.
13. Learn how recruitment works. ATS compliance and hidden jobs are not what you think.
14. Use these insights to build your strategy.
15. Tell your real-life network you’re available for work. Who do they know that’s recruiting for a project, consulting, fractional, temporary or permanent role? What problems can you help them solve?
16. Use job boards, CV databases, networking, recruiters and LinkedIn. Research companies you’d like to work for and approach them directly. Who are local employers to you that you’d never heard of and might be a great place to work?
17. Don’t rely only on job boards. ‘Appropriate multichannel’ is best.
18. Make your CV objectively good, not perfect - the chase of perfection is not helpful. Don’t spend much time customising: your CV should stand on its own merits with only minor tweaks per application.
19. Update your LinkedIn profile in the same way. Focus on being findable and showing your credibility. What keywords and phrases do recruiters use? EEAT is key.
20. Improve your odds at interview through suitable and sufficient preparation.
21. Bookend your job search day with exercise, meditation or something else, so it doesn’t bleed into the rest of your life.
22. Make sure your search is sustainable. It may prove a marathon, not a sprint.
23. Look after yourself.
24. Ask for help when you need it.
25. Sometimes the market is the main reason you aren’t getting a job – not you.
Don’t forget: your role was made redundant, not you.
Click for the insightful shared post from Kristen Fife.
Why a bad experience should be expected in recruitment.
You are far more likely to have a bad experience in recruitment than a good one. Let me explain why in broad terms.
Let’s assume the quality of agency recruiter sits along an even scale.
At the top end you have a peerless recruiter who fills 100% of vacancies.
At the bottom end you have a recruiter with a 10% fill rate doing just about enough to keep their job.
In the UK the industry average is estimated to be between 20% and 33%, according to science facts.
At 20%, a recruiter doesn’t fill 4 out of 5 jobs, yet still does a similar amount of work (though they will prioritise on ‘better’ vacancies). Ironically this means successful placements fund their 80% failure.
They’ll need to work on 5x as many vacancies as the peerless recruiter to fill the same amount of jobs.
Both these fill rates are a consequence of process, boundaries, contractual agreement and skill.
At the bottom end, the focus is on speed and volume, and KPIs will take a funnel approach achieve this (number of calls, meetings, vacancies, interviews, etc.). This has to be transactional, to derisk the process.
At the top end, the focus will be on quality and specificity, given the time allowed by fewer vacancies.
We are in a world of more, quicker - look at swipe right, AI and so on.
At the top end, relationships often have mutual obligation to reduce risk and enable our work. We have the time to work in depth, write compelling commercial messaging and build relationships. The priority isn’t to fill jobs, but find the right people for the long-term. We can be transparent and have time to be responsive. We may recognise that there is commercial opportunity in treating everyone decently.
At the bottom end, the ‘no win, no fee’ model means it can be seen as advantageous to work with multiple agencies concurrently to get more quicker at lower cost.
In competition, with fastest to the trigger, corners must be cut, information must be hoarded, automation to list generic message as quickly as possible. The priority is to feed the funnel and perceptually non-profitable work is set to one side - why reply to all applications, why close the loop?
Because of speed and volume, more people are processed at scale, with less attention, commitment and detail. Recruitment as transactional commodity management.
Leading to the huge amount of job seekers experiencing a disproportionate amount of resentment compared to the recruitment market as a whole.
This couldn’t happen if it weren’t demanded by the people who pay the bills: employers who want more volume quicker.
If you want to shift this disproportionate balance, and you will have hiring authority in your next role - be the change you want to see.
How can you differentiate in a market where everyone promises top 1% talent and disruption with AI powered tomfoolery?
Comment below, or ask me, and I’ll show you how.
Why you should be aware who’s watching:
An interesting post with strong reactions the other day: why it’s so important to target passive candidates.
Here ‘passive’ means someone not actively looking for work, but possibly open to a good opportunity from the right message. Often it’s estimated 80% (why is it always 80%?) of the market is passive, and in a down economy these may be more risk averse.
The reactions were from many excellent out of work job seekers in that niche.
The general view being the very fair, ‘What about us?’
And perhaps it was both myopic and inconsiderate, but there’s a point worth raising.
This was a sales post for employers, alluding to why the recruiter is the right partner. Were it to land well that recruiter might pick up new vacancies.
Who’s to say they wouldn’t consider the right active job seeker in their shortlist, irrespective of the pitch?
Given at least part of a recruiters view on candidates is that they are an advocate for that recruiter, consider that if they are defensive of critical comments they may not want to represent someone who is otherwise a great candidate.
Their concern might be, ‘If this is the comment, what will they say about us at interview?’
Probably not fair, but it may be an unspoken rule of the recruitment game that’s worth considering.
-
In a comprehensive, ‘no stones unturned’ recruitment strategy, good recruiters will consider every potential candidate irrespective of their status.
Sometimes it’s the case that doing the work proves that active candidates are indeed most suited, with all the benefits that immediacy allows.
It may also be the case that the passive candidate is most suited, where the active market also proves this. Or that the internal candidate they were concerned might not be right is the best hire after all.
Whatever the outcome, building relationships with recruiters you don’t agree with is a smart move (if we reply at all that is).
While there is a lot of bad behaviour from employers and agencies, this is out of our control. All you can do is try and put yourself in the position where you can say no, rather than have them do so for you.
Then if you do get that job - use your authority to drive change in your recruitment.
Be the change you want to see.
Just depends on your appetite for bitter pills.
My review of AI Assistant for LinkedIn Advertising
This offers automated filtering of candidates, and other features including finding profiles on LinkedIn and inviting them to apply (which I didn’t try).
As an ‘upgrade’, negative 2 out of 10.
Because it introduces complexity, inconsistency and may prevent advertisers seeing good candidates.
Compared to the previous version, which was 6/7 out of 10. Good for candidate attraction, but clunky with poor communications built in.
…
Some background on how it’s configured and what it does.
After writing the advert, the next step is to complete knockout questions - these are standard for most job boards and ATSs. If you fail them you will be automatically rejected. Nothing new.
These are typically yes/no questions. I use “Do you have a valid work permit?” and “Can you commute to Cannon Street?”.
Following this a page of (hidden from applicants) essential and nice to have criteria for filtering applications. This is taken from the content provided in the advert and can be edited - I left them intact for the purpose of my experiment. 6 essential, 3 nice to have.
When applying, candidates are then filtered against these criteria prioritising essential, then nice to have.
These are split into three pots for review: Good Fit, Maybe, Not a Fit.
Filtering appears effective for wholly unsuitable candidates, a small win, yet not much of one, since we double check anyway.
Herein lies the first problem:
Suitable, maybe and unsuitable applicants were deemed Good Fit, Maybe and Not a Fit, at times arbitrarily.
Good candidates were ending up in Not a Fit.
And now the second problem:
In Not a Fit, the list is set by priority of criteria - 8 out of 8 at the top (which were typically ones I set as unsuitable having reviewed them), then 7, and so on.
Within each score bracket, they are then ranked by date applied.
But good candidates were turning up in 4 out of 8, needed to be scrolled down to, to find them, yet not clearly marked as new.
In a high volume application base, this will lead to good candidates being overlooked, given the need to manually refresh and scan down the dashboard.
For my 65 applicants, it caused me no end of frustration, and added time to my work, though I did review all CVs.
…
How much of a problem is this?
It depends.
If CVs show strong context fits to my advert, they scored higher - it was candidates who had weaker CVs that slipped through crack. Weaker CVs, not necessarily weaker candidates.
However, it appears that if the advert is integrated into an ATS, which most larger companies will have - this filtering doesn’t happen automatically.
It also appears to be specific to the LinkedIn dashboard. If I choose applications by email, it would be far easier to administer compared to the dashboard - not my preference from admin perspective, where there a choice of not having AI Assistant at all.
It’s more likely that small companies who don’t have an ATS will miss good candidates, and these are the ones who’d benefit most from reviewing them.
That’s right - the ATS will improve your odds.
…
However, whichever way you cut it, given I could see no way to turn it off - this upgrade is an additional barrier to viewing candidates, with a terrible UX, requiring multiple clicks to read a resume (you see an AI overview first).
And it’s dangerously close to the ‘AI is rejecting you’ narrative, although technically this requires human intervention or lack of intervention for a good candidate to be missed.
It also requires that you use additional technology to solve the problems their upgrade introduces. Madness!
…
And so, a big step back for usability, for recruiters and for applicants.
It can only get better.
…
Nonetheless, by effectively writing your CV for humans, this will still give you the best odds of having your CV read by a human - the best way to start a conversation.
Principles of a good CV is a good starting point. You’ll see Lee offers a free CV template, which is good, or you can email me for mine.
Thanks for reading.
Greg
Great one Greg! It feels reassuring that someone is really creating some value for people navigating the job market in the UK.