Be Excellent To Each Other

Keen readers may have noticed that I'm looking for a new job but I always seem to end up looking on Monster or Totaljobs.

Has anyone got any recommendations of good websites or job hunting advice?

I was offered a job the other day but it doesn't start (if it starts) until April. I'm keeping my options open until then.

http://www.simplyhired.co.uk scrubs from many job sites with the usual interface.

Direct.gov one is ok

sciencejobs.ac.uk is another one.

Check out the local council websites as well.

I got a list form the job centre, which I'll write up for you if you so desire, and if i can find it.

http://www.jobsite.co.uk/ and http://www.jobserve.com/ served me well last time I was looking for employment (nearly five years ago now, mind).

It's worth looking for agencies in your area as well, but as well as jobsite and total jobs there's also fish4jobs and Monster.

I am officially looking for a new job as things are getting silly at my workplace, plus they're offering decent VR packages at the moment. Anyone want to employ me?

If not, what are the best places to look these days? I've applied for one job at Nottingham Trent Uni via Jobsite today.

I could use a cleaner.

I imagine the Nottingham to Reigate commute might not work too well for you.
Shame, I could use the person finding fee.

Pay me £40-50k and you have a deal.

90 mins from my parents house. Would need to be able to work from home Mon and Fri though.

What do you do like?

jobserve.com for IT jobs mainly

I'll check it out. I currently do Service Delivery and Service Continuity Management. Would be reasonably happy to continue, but could be tempted by something else like Networking, considering I have my qualification and all. *buffs nails on lapel*

I was offering £60k a while back on behalf of one of my pals, would've been an absolute shoe-in, I would've vouched for you (even though you think I'm a cunt lol). No-one was interested and job's now taken

I was interested, but not qualified

Sorry mate.

I don't think you're a cunt, I just disagree with pretty much everything you say.

Thanks anyway.

Linkedin

Might not be entirely accurate. I was offered the role of Head of HR at Chester Zoo yesterday.

Edit: offered the chance to apply, I mean

Thanks man, that means a lot

It's not as though I don't realise I'm wrong about stuff though, bark is far, far worse than non existent bite. Sorry I go ott at times though.

Move to London

See my response to Mr Dave.

I would LOVE to work for a zoo!
I would also love any new job in Alphen aan den Rijn, NL as my employer is turning up the pressure to eff off which is causing me a lot of stress.

edit: I do not really want to move to London, lovely as it is...

It works well for me, I update my profile and the phone rings a day later with people seeing if I am intetested in jobs. Which I often am.

Yeah, I'm not actively looking for another job but I get two or three messages a week from recruitment people via LinkedIn. The jobs are usually pretty relevant to my skills as well. Just always either not enough money or too far away or short contracts or whatever. It definitely seems to be worth at least listing your skills on there, though.

This has reminded me to update my linkedin and do my yearly "accept every connection" housekeeping.
A job offer would help my cause in my 20% raise conversation

When I was looking for a job before Christmas, I put my cv on cv library and that was very successful for me, still getting contacts up to about a week ago when I finally remembered to remove my cv. That's for engineering jobs but I think they probably do IT as well?

Put myself forward for a Project Delivery Manager job today. Seems to fit all the right skillsets that I have, except for the small matter of not having my Prince II Foundation or a strong knowledge of Microsoft Project. I don't think they'll be important.

Downloaded MS Project 2010 to my work laptop and started reading Project for Dummies this afternoon. How hard could it be?

MS Project is an abomination. People that think they need a project manager who is good at MS Project say that because they don't know how much of an abomination MS Project is.

Excel does everything you need.

Promise.

Oh I don't doubt it. Just don't want to be caught out if they ask any relevant questions in the interview.

"Do you know how to Project? "

"Where would you find the critical path tool?"

"I've no idea, my version has the ribbon"

"Fair enough"

I don't believe this is even slightly true.

I would show you the project stuff from my last place if that wasn't like dead naughty.

OK the actions were documented in Word but everything else was Excel. And they were some big ass legislative projects (one for payroll worth £500m a year) with completely non-negotiable go-live dates.

If what you need is a false sense of certainty, then MS project will help you get to that quicker and more efficiently

Phone interview! I'm going to show them just exactly how well I can project a management.

No, you need to be showing how to manage a projector; it's like you don't even know the basics.

Make sure to set it to the right sauce!

I know all about sauce working for the company I do, don't worry.

Wow, just spoke to a right cunt of an agent about a Disaster Recovery Analyst job I applied for this morning. First of all said "it's in Birmingham, how would you get there?", to which I replied "it's an hour's drive with good traffic, but if I could work from home one day a week that would be great", to which he immediate said "well there's absolutely no chance of that happening."

Then proceeded to tell me it wasn't enough money for what I was expecting even though the ad said exactly the band I was looking for. And that I wasn't experienced enough because I only spent 25% of my time performing Disaster Recovery work, then proceeded to put me forward for it anyway.

I was too gobsmacked at the time to tell him where to stick it.

Agents are fucking terrible.

I swear my workplace is going to beat me to announcing that I've had enough and I'm off by shutting up shop and getting rid of everyone so I've been frantically looking for a job.

The amount of conversations with useless agents is winding me up terribly at the minute. Some guy called to discuss my CV a few months ago and never called back.

Some guy called me up to see if he could put me forward for a job that was so far removed from what I do that I swear he'd rang the wrong person. That was until I got two more calls from him about jobs I had no chance getting in completely different sectors. I told him firmly for the second time what I was looking for and he's never called back since.

Or they'll be sites you sign up for where a load of other agencies can see your details and then when a job comes along you get four agencies all call you up about the same job like vultures trying to earn their commission.

Even in my job area, which is extremely specific, they can be numpties. The guy I'm with at the moment has found the right jobs, but insists on lying to me about bits that are really quite easily verifiable. But, at the end of the day, he is touting a job I might want, so I put up with it.

I have found some to be great and some to be useless.

Except the guy about the Project Delivery Manager role was brilliant. Kept me informed the whole time and told me all about the company and director I was going to talk to. I realise that is the exception rather than the rule though.

In a bizarre twist of fate, I've now been told that the strategy at my place is to take control of the DC LAN back from the networks team and the reason I got blocked from attending a future manager's training course (one of the reasons I started looking elsewhere) is because they want me to look after the network side of things.

I wish I could take control of the Dreamcast LAN. Good luck with it!

Concentrate on getting Quake back online first. That was ace.

"I couldn't possibly without a significant investment in both my training and my pay packet."

Training has been promised (and I've already done some!). I already earn about the same as a junior network engineer elsewhere anyway. I get a decent payrise every year thanks to the unions, so I'm just going to see where this goes.

I read that as "Thanks to the Unicorns"

God bless those mythical beasts.