Be Excellent To Each Other

Apologies for the blatant plug, and please feel free to ignore.

The lovely Mrs Squirt ( hush it, Grim... ) is attempting to set up a small business on the side, providing CV Review and interview technique training, as well as some slightly more complex stuff like assessment centre training and help with company research. She's done HR recruitment and training for yonks, and knows her stuff.

She's just stuck her stuff up on a free hosting place at the moment, at http://proactivejobseeker.weebly.com/, and it's obviously still a bit of a work in progress, but she'd appreciate any suggestions, questions or feedback on the idea, and if anyone does need any job hunting or promotion seeking guidance, the introductory prices she's using for now are pretty decent.

Thanks all, and we now return you to your normal forum.

P.S. Maybe it's best not to use "Mrs Squirt" if you do contact her...

Goof stuff. I'll take a proper look later, but one thing jumped out immediately as needing improvement: her picture. Go and take a proper one as it'll improve people's perceptions of her no end.

Oh, and good luck to her.

Thanks - yeah, the pick was the nearest one she had at hand, and I think it went through some resizing at some point which made it go a bit wonky.

And raise the prices! £15 to write a CV?!

Yeah, that, too. As Grim... found out with his DJing, cheap is not perceived as good, and you'll likely get more business by raising your prices to match people's expectations of the service.

The plan was to tempt people in with low prices at first, although they may actually be too low - people might assume that they generic boilerplate ones, rather than individually written.

Thanks for the feedback, folks.

I think she'd get more interest if she was referred to as Mrs Squirt on that website.

Discount for Beexers? I could do with a CV that isn't a blatant Word template.

The prices she's got there are pretty much "mates rates", so I doubt she'll be able to do it for any less. Once she puts it a bit more "live", after the launch party, I imagine they'll be some sort of discount available for chums.

Good luck, Mrs Squirt!

I have a friend who works in HR in the city. She charges £2 - 3.5k a day and is working all the time.

Just to give you some perspective on your prices and who you might be targeting, but I would raise those prices by at least 10x. Let people knock you down in price and feel like their getting a deal but don't start cheap. You know what they say about free advice — it's worth what you pay for it.

If you're in London I could do a pic for her.

I'd suggest dumping any free hosting and getting a proper domain. Domains are peanuts and Flump have basic hosting for approx 14 quid a year. To be blunt, free hosting never looks professional and makes you look small fry.

Get a better picture as her picture looks like some cameraphone photo from Facebook. In fact get more pictures on the website.

Do some mystery shopping and find out how much her competitors charge.

I'm not a fan of newspaper advertising, but in this case it might be worth seeing if you can get an advert in or near to the jobs section in your local paper.

The world's a bit of a sick, fucked up place, isn't it?

Research first, then undercut your competitors by 10%, and raise your prices once established.

For me, when I first started, I needed a portfolio of work so I sometimes did jobs for way below the going rate in order to build up a portfolio but also to generate testimonials.

One of the advantages of using LateX is you can knock up a CV that looks awesomely unlike Word.

In fact, Mrs Squirt could do that for added class.


And yeah, too cheap, maybe make those introductory or student prices or something.

Dolescum discount?

Yup. I was completely when I discovered what she earned and she herself feels the same way. However, one of the things she spends a lot of time on is profiling candidates for CEO roles and other big cheeses and these companies want to be super certain they're getting the right kind of psycho before they issue massively expensive contracts.

When I worked for (the organisation with the fountain where Roy Castle tap danced with a 1000 kids - Ed), the head of our division was some city high flyer earning a huge salary. Bought in by headhunters she was sacked for abusing hospitality (tickets to the Rugby World Cup IIRC).

About a year later she was exposed in the Daily Mail for having no qualifications, having spent time in prison and having somehow been hired for high flying jobs by several "reputable" headhunters who were all taken in.

So I'm really not sure what these people do given this woman had managed to fool a number of them and nobody had checked her qualifications or indeed any of her entirely made up history.

Here we go:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_8003/is_2005_Nov_27/ai_n37672664/

Eye watering.

Ah yes. I know this goes on, as Disraeli said, "Ultimately, the world will take you at your own estimation". I've come across numerous people who are clearly fucking useless, are in high paid jobs and think they're awesome. The Beeb is afflicted with more than it's fair share of these people and I know of at least three people who worked there in well paid jobs who were fucking crooks who have since been fired. I could name another 2 or 3 who are a fucking laughing stock in their chosen field but have secure jobs.

I once worked in a shop with someone who stole from the till, then made up a robbery to cover it up (badly) to the shop and the police. The manager of the shop was her aunt.

A couple of years later, I ran into her by chance. Working as my bank manager.


Oh, er, and possibly some samples? I realise it's difficult as you'd have to sub out anything personally identifying, but you could just replace names with made up ones, or do a CV for a famous fictional character or summat.

Otherwise, I'd prioritise the visual layout/style of it, as it's rather generic at present, but I'd imagine you already know that.

The only advantage LaTeX has over Word for doing CVs is the nice font, and you can download the Truetype version of Computer Modern in loads of places.

I know someone, whom my girlfriend used to live with. She was a serial-squatting crusty/neohippy until she was 30 (the upper-middle class kid who ran away to join the circus, you know the sort). After that, she entered the workforce and made up her entire employment history to make up for the lost years. Every time she changed jobs, she sent out an increasingly fictitious CV, and even 'hilariously' slept with her boss to persuade him to provide a reference claiming she had worked at the company for 4-5 years rather than 18 months. Last I heard, she had a very well-paying job in London, and can afford to discard her son to a private boarding school. All that through cunning, deception, and zero qualification.

So, yeah, I assume that CVs can be forged without much comeuppance, if you know what you're doing.

Ho, ho, no.

All the formatting, the pulling of small letters underneath the top of T rather than starting after. The lovely use of superscript and subscript. LateX for lyfe bro.

Are you saying Word doesn't have formatting, subscript or superscript?

Don't forget that most HR people are useless, and most places are woefully understaffed anyway because if the building isn't literally collapsing, most employers seem to think they must therefore have enough staff.

Even without forging anything, I've been given at least two jobs without my references ever being checked (one where she actually sent her reference back, twice, but some incompetent in HR lost both and her phone number, and didn't bother to call me about it. Or possibly he couldn't read or was dead but too dumb to realise it), or a supposedly necessary CRB check. Including one with THE CHILDREINZ OMGGS.

Well, okay, teenagers, but still.

No, it has clunky, shit versions of formatting, subscript and superscript.

Regardless!

You're supposed to do it in HTML. As ny fule no.

On the other hand I know a guy who lied on his CV to get a training contract as a solicitor - he bumped up one A level grade and made himself captain of the school football team.

After he'd been working at the firm for a few months, they phoned up the school to check on his CV and discovered he'd been lying. He got sacked and struck off. A couple of years later he managed to beg the Law Society to let him back into the profession.

Lying on your CV is a fucking risky business.

I imagine in that case, they only checked because they thought he was shit and wanted rid,though.

I wouldn't lie ort exaggerate on my CV though because the dishonesty would bother me. This may have much to do with why I've found it so hard to get a job.

Lying on cv is bad, but thinking "Ah, I did that thing that looks really impressive on a cv for ten minutes one morning out of two year's employment at that place I worked" and listing it as an activity you've experience doing is entirely commonplace. I'd argue there's little difference.

All of which is moot if you spend five years developing a specific skillset then move somewhere there's entirely no jobs in that area going, for months, and all the stuff you used to do before that has no jobs going either. That sucks. Particularly when there were various jobs going there when you made the decision to move. Grumblegrumblegrumble.