Please contact Jacqui in Canada for further information (289 313 0118).

It seems a pretty obvious question doesn’t it, however for such a vital component in the process of employment both its definition and purpose seem drastically elusive. Through my experience as both the employer and a recruitment consultant the best CVs are a precise summary of academic and work history. They are in essence, forms of self advertisement, but be careful, it’s easy to stray into self-propaganda. Yesterday I had a 7 page CV which was obviously not a summary. The longest CV that I have ever had was 29 pages long. Now we all like to talk about ourselves but a CV should be clinical and to the point. So for the purposes of this article, the question should really be rephrased as “What Should a CV be?”

It has long been my belief that your CV is a tool to open doors, so that you, the owner of the CV, can be interviewed for the position that suits both your set of skills (from the perspective of the employer), and your ideal vocation.

So consequently; when writing your CV you should start with the end in mind, the art of which is crystallised within understanding the purpose of your CV, its ability to market you as an employee, matching what you can do with the position that you are looking for. You would be surprised by the amount of people I have assisted in the past that have wanted to go for a career in things that they have no natural ability for. So write your skills down and be honest with yourself. If you want to be a brain surgeon but have no experience, you won’t get short listed. You need to find a position in which it’s parameter of expertise fits yours and the way to that is to highlight those experiences in your CV.

Bear in mind, when writing your CV, that when you apply for a position it will most probably be electronically and you’re application will be one among many. So how do you make yours stand out for the right reasons?

The purpose of a CV is to open doors for you to obtain an interview, it is not your life story. With that in mind think of the layout. Look on the internet for templates, create one yourself or use the ones we have prepared. Have your name, address (or just the town that you live in) and all your contact details at the top and even at the bottom too! Do not include national insurance numbers or bank details, and yes believe me people really do. Write a brief outline of your expertise and experience, the skills that you excel at, and your achievements in each role. If you want a job in sales then emphasise all your experience in that particular area and say why you would stand out in that type of role. Your CV should be no more than 2 pages long and at the most 3. Get friends and family to read your CV and see if they can spot any mistakes. Double check everything and save the CV with an appropriate title i.e. not CV version55, this may give away the fact that you have been busy editing your CV on more than a few occasions! Instead make the title your name, this will mean that the recipient can find your details immediately in their email system. There are certain, very common mistakes that I have seen injure potentially good CVs; an unprofessional email address, a CV with no contact details on, (I did try telepathy but it just didn’t work), and inappropriate word contractions (text talk). Remember, don’t give the recipient a reason to relegate your CV to the ‘no’ pile.

Once you have your list in front of you then you can focus on what potential employers are looking for.

So why is a well written CV so important?

In the shipping and freight forwarding industry, one thing is certain; no one has time to wade through a mountain of CV’s. This means you have to get your message over quickly, precisely, and accurately. It has to be surgical rather than colloquial. Your CV represents you; it reflects your work and should be perfect. With many people out of work you have to stand out and you have to stand out for the right reasons. Imagine you had a 100 CV’s to sort through; your first task would be to filter out all the badly presented CV’s. So the ones with mistakes, that have no relevance to the vacancy, that are badly laid out or difficult to understand will all be put on the ‘no’ pile. Don’t let it be yours.

With all that done, you will now be ready to target companies and recruiters with your fantastic new CV.

If you don’t get a response initially you may need to go back to your CV and do a re-write. This may be frustrating but this is your future career and you need to invest time and effort into it.

If you are still not receiving a positive response to your CV then email me a copy and I will give you completely free expert advice. caroline.frostick@redrecruit.com

This article appeared on the IFW website, www.ifw-net.com, on 27th October 2010

What will this mean to the shipping industry and what will it mean to the working environment as a whole? Good question but did you know that over 1.4 million people already work beyond retirement age, no neither did I before researching the facts. That’s 12.8% of the over 65s are in employment, an increase of over 4% in the last decade alone.

The baby boomers are now a large part of the population and together with the fact that, as a nation, we have never had a pension pot but have funded state pensions from the working population will this not be a good thing? A friend of mine who is nearing 65 and running a sizable shipping company, said that he would be working beyond 65 and that basically it isn’t rocket science that he would make that choice. On his second marriage with teenage children at university and in his own words, his generation are materialistic, spending on the good life and not saving for retirement and definitely not in line for a final salary pension scheme. Why would he retire at 65, exactly?

People at different stages of their working lives have a different view point of the scrapping of the retirement age. When asking teenagers, the ambitious ones are all for retiring at 50 and those in their 20’s are hoping that they will be retired in their 60’s. However, as I went up the age bands and retirement was closer a different opinion was definitely changing. Is that because youth gives rose tinted view of the future? A recent survey by one of the leading pension providers of over 55’s showed that over 68% wanted to work past the standard retirement age. And with over 10 million over 65 now and a predicted 18 million in 2050, over a quarter of the population, should we not all be over the moon.

I have always championed older candidates to employers in the shipping industry as they can offer a lot of skills in their chosen field as well as life skills and can add balance in a working environment. However, not all see the benefits of having older people in the work force. And it certainly isn’t good news for those entering the work place and for those looking for career development in their 40’s and 50’s as they may find it frustrating to say the least, as those who would have retired and thus creating an opening, no longer do so.

Mike Saunders, 72 years young and the Managing Director of Wrinklies Recruitment which has been in operation since 1992 that he has seen a sizable increase in employers interest in his service in recent years. All ages of candidates are welcome to register but as the name implies, in the main, it is mainly older candidates that do. Mike, who works with Red on logistic requirements, welcomes the changes in the law and sees it as a positive to be embraced. Many candidates at 65 find the whole retirement process almost like bereavement, getting very depressed in the process as well as having a deep sense of loss of self worth.

The impact on the work force in shipping will not be immediate. As was the decline of the export industry in the UK, it will be creeping but unstoppable. The impact will be for those starting their careers, with fewer openings. Take graduates for instance, with over 60 applicants for 1 position in many cases. And those looking for career advancement within a company will be forced to change companies to achieve this. Will the aging of the working population have a knock on effect on new developments within the shipping industry? On a positive, there is a lack of experienced candidates so this will increase the pool available to the shipping industry, which is no bad thing. Solid experience, together with an in-depth knowledge of the industry will be kept; surely this should be viewed as an invaluable asset almost without price?

With the changing landscape will undoubtedly come challenges that have not even be considered so far, when I was a teenager and a certain Scottish trade union leader used to visit, he was non too impressed with retirees going back to work. His reasoning was at the time, that they worked far harder and were somewhat quicker than the main work force. In the main they had less days off sick and were very conscientious. I did question his reasoning on this and his answer was somewhat surprising to me at the time. He was fighting for better pay and didn’t want his workers shown up. I do wonder what he would have made of the future works landscape. Sadly he now passed away so I am unable to ask him. It would have been a heated debate as it was then all those years ago.

As the work place horizon changes and the seven ages of man now become the eight or even nine, we will need to re align our views, beliefs and reasoning behind hiring policies to the new vista. In my opinion this is no bad thing and by the very fact that 12.8% of over 65’s are already working, I am not alone in that view.

This article appeared on the IFW website, www.ifw-net.com, on 20th August 2010

In regard to recruitment, when the shipping desk goes quiet then the whole country follows shortly after. Shipping and freight forwarding recruitment has always been a barometer of the country’s economy and for us, it is a forerunner of what will happen in the rest of our business shortly thereafter i.e. if no one is buying goods then freight movement drops and circulation of money within the economy slows down, thereafter the effects ripple out to the rest of the economy.

We have had quite a roller coaster over the last 3 years and the stats are very interesting. Taking a one-month window in each year, which was June, this gave us a snapshot of each year and we looked at vacancies in each of those years. The 2010 figures are lower than they would have been as we have introduced a more robust vacancy and client take on procedure. Nonetheless 2010 is still lower than 2008; our own success has been in part down to our higher fill rate of vacancies.

In June 2008 we took on 63 vacancies and in 2009 20 vacancies, compared to 45 in 2010. Of those, 6 were import roles in 2009 and 33 in 2010. Exports were 3 in 2009 and 7 in 2010. Management 0 in 2009 and 5 in 2010. And in 2009 we also had 8 vacancies in other categories, such as wide loads etc.

Our clients were definitely in two categories in 2009, those that were battening down the hatches and predicting mass bankruptcies and those that decided to be bullish and attack the market. This was spread across all of the clients that we recruit for and not just the shipping industry. Those that were the “Hunters” and were aggressively attacking the market for new business did seem to steal a march on those who had decided that mothballing all sales activities was a safer strategy. This in turn had a knock on effect on recruitment both in 2009 and 2010. One of those effects was that some of our clients had diversified into markets that they did not normally enter into. This applies to all sectors that we have been dealing with. Margins were squeezed where more competitors entered specialist markets or fields which they had previously steered clear of. The effect on recruitment has been that the need for multi-skilled staff has become greater.

We have found that the market has changed in other subtle ways. Our clients, new and old, have a greater understanding and acceptance of outsourcing. Does this then mean that companies that are willing and able to embrace alternative revenue streams can survive and indeed prosper? It would appear so from our recruitment view of the industry. Like Darwin’s theory of evolution, the fittest have not only survived but have in fact grown stronger from the their experiences of the crash.

This article appeared on the IFW website, www.ifw-net.com, on Friday 30th July 2010