New Term underway banging on about jobs and placements

A new term is under way at the Liverpool Business School, mostly induction this week. I have taken the chance while going to the cohort meetings with the 2nd and final year Businesss Information Systems students to go on about my key rants.

These are born partly out of the my experience recruiting over the summer. Namely the necessity of getting something that gives evidence of your greatness on your CV.

While reading new graduate CV's in the summer I was horrified to see people who began with a splurge of waffle about what a great team player, self starter they were, backed by no evidence. Then they list the modules and technologies they covered on their courses, which they and everyone else on their course has covered. And then they finish off telling me that they like to socialise with their friends, watch a movie, play computer games and possibly stay up to date with technology.

They must think this separates them from the crowd but it is rare to come across anyone who doesn't like spending time with their friends, or at least admits to it in a CV. And the other three things are basically sitting in front of a monitor of some type, watching movies, playing games and web surfing. Employers mine included are not going to expect this on its own to push the company forward in these tough times.

We all encourage the students to think about these things, but of course we are often frustrated that the students don't take this seriously until it is too late. As it stands the universities societies fair was just a hundred yards away so I desperately tried to push the students in that direction in the hope that their being treasurer of the university plate balancing team might put some evidence behind their inevitable claim to be a team player, by showing that a group of peers in the team were prepared to trust them with something.

Meanwhile Matthew Baxter-Reynolds writes in the Guardian noting how in the software industry recruitment companies were creating a largely inefficient barrier between the 'talent' and the companies. Roughly suggesting that more candidates should send their CV's direct to potential employers.

I had commented to my colleagues in my day job that we don't seem to get unsolicited CV's anymore, once upon a time we kept a file of them as they accumulated. But now they don't appear. This article seemed to confirm that this was not just my experience. Whereas I get dozens of unsolicited emails from recruitment agencies every week and probably about 150 phone calls a year from the same.

My conclusion is that my students should get out there sending out their CV's looking for jobs and placements depending on their position on the course. The other rants to my (Information Systems) students were that they should get a black belt in Microsoft Office particularly Excel but also Access, so that they can do things that others can't do once they get that job or placement.

When I complete these rants, I am always optimistic that the students will have heard the urgent message and set themselves on a path to a solid career, I choose to ignore the evidence of previous years. Still as Tesco say every little helps.