Stating The Obvious

You may find this hard to believe, but there are some incredibly bright and outstanding people working in recruitment who are pushing all the boundaries. Truly amazing, inspirational people. On the other hand, I wonder how some recruiters expect to be taken seriously.

Some of the advice that is passed on in articles and blogs is often so staggeringly obvious you do wonder why they bothered writing them in the first place.  Obviously, other recruiters write with great depth and insight – ahem!! – or so I hear anyway....

I thought of this today having just read a really tedious blog post about not bad-mouthing your current employer as it makes you appear unprofessional at interview.  No kidding. Tell me, do you think there is really anyone out there in our sector who would seriously slate a previous employer?   I wonder what the next blog in this instalment will be about – the importance of chewing when you put food in your mouth?  Or maybe a quick guide to washing your hands....the mind boggles!!

Maybe, like many recruiters, the writer just has too much spare time?  Mind you, in direct contrast, I saw a great article a couple of weeks ago from Mervyn Dinner of Jobsite about people who are always talking about how busy they are on twitter:

http://mervyndinnen.wordpress.com/2011/04/19/the-busy-brigade

Does that remind you of anyone??!  I can certainly think of one or two.....

Anyway, I digress... maybe recruiters were put on this earth to state the obvious?  In that spirit, the David Sullivan Obvious Tip for today is this:

Always post your job title on your LinkedIn/ Facebook and Twitter accounts 

Obvious, right?  I thought so too but apparently not.  I do appreciate that some people in our sectors don’t like to share too much information for security reasons (except, maybe, how busy they are of course), but it is interesting to see the number of specialists in the forensics / electronic disclosure space who contact me about finding a new role and yet they fail to have this information readily displayed on their social media profiles.

As a jobseeker in 2011, it really is vital to make it easy for people to find you (hmmm, I reckon that comfortably qualifies for obvious tip number two)!  Increasingly, I would suggest that Facebook is key to your jobsearch strategy and yet it is amazingly underused for this purpose.  For more information about utilising this tool correctly, have a look at a blog post I wrote a couple of months ago which can be found here.

In my next blog post – which hopefully won’t be quite as rambling and unfocussed – I expect to be announcing some very exciting news.  Ok, when I say very exciting, maybe mildly of interest to one or two people is a better phrase.  Either way, watch this space....

Forensic 4cast Awards

Finally, if you haven’t done so already, don’t forget to cast your vote for the 2011 Forensic 4cast Awards:

http://www.forensic4cast.com/forensic-4cast-awards

The results will be announced at the 2011 Sans Forensic Summit in Austin.