It’s a dog eat dog world out there, especially if you’re on the hunt for a job.  I’ve written a number of blogs over the past couple of years offering advice to people looking for new employment opportunities or getting ready to attend interviews and I always encourage people to be as proactive as they can.  This means being alert to opportunities as they come up, using your networks, sending carefully crafted emails or letters & cvs to organisations you want to work for, etc.  As we all know, a large percentage of jobs are never advertised – so it’s important that you get yourself on the radar.

However, you can go too far.  When that happens you can be in danger of either being disqualified for canvassing or you can just annoy someone so much that they put you on the “no thanks” list before you even get a chance to shine.

Recently I’ve started to receive large numbers of Linked In requests from people I don’t know.  Many of them are people that are looking for work.  Guys – this isn’t going to do you any favours.  First of all, I only connect with people on Linked In that I have met in real life & know and like.  I joked when David Cameron joined Linked In that he needn’t bother sending me a request as I wouldn’t accept it.  It’s the truth.  In my mind, it’s pointless being professionally “connected” with hundreds of people that I don’t know.  Twitter’s the place for that.

Sometimes, before I click the “ignore” option, I do take a look at the person’s Linked In profile.  Call that what you like – nosiness, curiosity, even politeness.  I live in Northern Ireland so if it’s a name I half recognise or someone that I think I may have met, I look at the profile to find out more information.  Surely that’s the point of having profiles.

I don’t then expect that person to send me a public tweet thanking me for looking at their Linked In profile & saying they hope Learning Pool will be in touch with them shortly. 

This is so wrong on so many levels:

1.       If we’ve advertised job vacancies, we’re in a process and using social media in this way to promote yourself to people in the company could be construed by some to be canvassing, and that can result in your application being disqualified from the process.  In Northern Ireland we work within very strict recruitment guidelines in order to meet legislation around equal opportunities in employment.

2.       I might sit in on interviews from time to time and I might meet people before we offer them a job, but it will be our team leads that are driving the recruitment process at Learning Pool not me.  If you contact me outside of the process, I am unlikely to know anything about the particular process you are in (we advertised 10 vacancies in the press on 27 December) and even if I was interested in your experience and skillset, I’m unlikely to mention you to one of our team leads – they’ll pick it up themselves as part of their shortlisting activity.

If you’re looking for a job & want to work at Learning Pool, spend time & effort instead improving your cv (most of the ones I see are dire) and writing a decent covering letter.  Or spend time getting onto our radar before we actually go out to recruitment – so that we already know you.  There are many ways you can do this – intelligent commenting on our forums, writing an interesting personal blog & making us aware of that, conducting interactions with us on Twitter or coming along to our events & chatting to us.

I know that many of you will have opinions or questions about this topic and I hope we can have some debate in the comments section.  As always, love to have your input.

A few of my contemporaries were surprised to hear that I was at the CBI Conference this past week and given the demographic amongst the conference attendees I’m honestly not surprised.  We had a laugh on Twitter about how only 5 of 1,000 or so delegates were tweeting – but that’s a subject for another blog.  From my perspective, it was worth the time & effort just to hear Fiat & Chrysler Group CEO, Sergio Marchionne, speak about how he’s wrestled Fiat back from the brink of oblivion, kicking & screaming – again a subject for another blog.

My real interest was in hearing what the CBI, the Prime Minister & the Foreign Secretary had to say about helping SMEs with potential high value overseas opportunities get started with and be more successful at export.  Just to give you some background, we at Learning Pool have had what could be described as quite a frustrating experience of export as a UK based SME.  Our online learning content has been created exclusively for the UK public sector, and as such is of value & immediate interest to any of the former British colonies, especially those that have adopted the UK local government model.  Here in the UK, we have 500,000 public sector employees & stakeholders (primarily school governors, elected members and government “partners” such as community & voluntary sector groups & charities) making use of our learning environments & sharing great content.  However, despite displays of strong interest from overseas governments in our products, we have spectacularly failed to convert any of that interest to tangible sales – and I promise you we’ve tried really hard.

Learning Pool completely gets that the economic future of some UK based SMEs will be dependent on their ability to sell to the emergent BRIC nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China) who together are forecast to import goods & services valued at $4 trillion over the next 10 years (source, Jim O’Neill of Goldman Sachs, CBI conference 21 Nov 2011 – he also coined the BRIC acronym a decade ago).  Our issue has been that it is incredibly difficult for overseas governments to buy from a “foreign” SME – no matter how fabulous & suitable their product is.  Our experience of this is that the type of export assistance our own regional development agency here in Northern Ireland, Invest Northern Ireland, has been able to give us (up to 40% financial assistance for trade missions overseas, paid after you’ve spent the money) is not what we need.  We’ve repeatedly explained to our contacts at Invest NI that what we actually need is some assistance from their people based overseas – but unfortunately those people are tasked with bringing Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) into Northern Ireland & are therefore unable to help us.

I was therefore very heartened to hear from first the Prime Minister, then the Minister of State for Trade & Investment Stephen Green, then from William Hague that the current government has helping UK SMEs export firmly in its sights.  They each described how training of UKTI employees is taking place to make that team more commercial (I was a bit dismayed when someone said this consisted of forcing their people to read the FT every day – but hopefully that’s just a start!), how 30 and 50 new business-focused employees have been brought into the UKTI offices in India & China respectively, and how the new UKTI Chief Exec Nick Baird (appointed September this year) has a remit to encourage more UK SMEs to move into the international domain.  William Hague specifically described how the role of the Foreign Office has been reshaped to place more emphasis on commercial diplomacy and David Cameron reminded us that our overseas embassies are there to help UK businesses host launches and win orders.

I am pleased to have seen David Cameron lead trade missions to India, China & Turkey since he became Prime Minister and as a co-owner of a small SME fail to understand why he has been so publicly criticised for this.  Governments of the BRIC nations understand how important it is to build relationships with other countries and take a long term view of commerce.  The UK has been swamped with visits from teams from the emergent nations and the lack of reciprocal behaviour is leaving the UK behind the curve.  At the moment, the value of UK exports to the Republic of Ireland is greater than total export value from the UK to the BRIC nations...surely everyone can see how that path isn’t sustainable?

We are serious about growing Learning Pool and seizing our opportunities so what does that look like for us?  We’ve accepted that it’s nigh on impossible to achieve from a Northern Ireland backwater so we’re grasping the nettle and opening a London office in January that I’m going to be heading up.  We’ve also asked our contacts at the Cabinet Office, on the back of Learning Pool’s success in the Innovation Launchpad competition this summer, to request a meeting for us with Nick Baird so as we can talk directly to him about how UKTI can help Learning Pool get started in India, selling to their local and central government.  I’ll keep you posted on how we get on.  Interested in your comments or advice as always.