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.