recruitment

The importance of work experience was underlined at Chinwag's recent Careers Day (see our round-up blog for some top CV tips). There's plenty of competition for the choicest work experience or intern positions, because they provide such a powerful point of differentiation for candidates, not to mention heaps of useful job-hunting contacts.

So, with London's biggest collaborative event, Social Media Week returning to London in September (24-28), what better time to offer a lucky few the chance to get their teeth stuck into one of the largest digital events to hit London? Find out more about what's involved and how to apply below.

Come along and join us on Wednesday 23rd May for our Digital Careers Day, part of the Digital Shoreditch Festival 2012.

The day links leading employers to candidates seeking a career in the digital sector and gives HR professionals a unique opportunity to meet a large number of well-qualified candidates.

Job seekers will benefit from mentoring sessions, portfolio reviews and guidance offered by premier agencies, brands and start-ups. There will also be a networking lounge where recruiting companies and job seekers will be able to network, check emails, have a break and a chit chat.

We are very excited to announce the launch of Chinwag's first ever Careers Day on Wednesday 23rd May in association with Digital Shoreditch 2012 and supported by Vitamin T. 

Chinwag has teamed up with the lovely people at Digital Shoreditch to bring you the very first Chinwag Careers Day, focused around jobs in Digital. The day centres on getting a job and building careers including mentoring, CV/social media advice, portfolio reviews plus a careers fair featuring leading employers.

The Careers Day will be free for all you job seekers to come along to, just keep an eye out on @Chinwag and on our blog for the sign up form. 

If Zuck gets his way, every breathing moment will be automatically captured in a Facebook timeline. OK, so a slight exaggeration but ever more information is aggregated on social networks.

According to a recent survey from Reppler, whose service helps candidates manage their online reputation, 91% of employers are using social media to screen candidates with 67% making a decision based on the info they find, whether it's their personal triumphs to sordid bloopers.

The world of work, or rather the search for work, is under-going a revolution at the hands of social media. A recent study, Kelly Global Workforce Index, shows one in 5 of US respondents are using social media for their job hunt (see below for infographic).

The recruitment landscape is still dominated by online jobs boards, with word of mouth mouth, recruitment agencies and direct approaches proving the most widely used methods.

Whilst only 1% of the survey respondents found their jobs through social media (the survey ran Oct '10 to Jan '11), this looks set to change, with 24% of respondents searching for jobs using social media.

Facebook and students: A happy marriage, or a receipe for disaster?

As you'd expect, the answer isn't so simple. A study and rather lovely infographic (see below) produced by OnlineEducation.net ponders this question from several different viewpoints.

As those tied to email all day can testify distractions hurt productivity, and the same is true when studying. Unsurprisingly, flicking between Facebook and studying results in 20% lower grades. Sound obvious? Turns out 79% of students don't believe it.

They're also less likely to be paying their way whilst studying, with Facebook user's working less than 5 hours per week, whilst their social-media-phobic counterparts clocking in an impressive 16 hours per week. Still, that's what student loans are for, right?

When it comes to telephone interviews you'd think that something as simple as talking on the phone would be easy but with a lack of visual signals and having to rely just on auditory feedback it's difficult to stay focussed. They can be tricky things.

We've put together a few pointers to get you in the right frame of mind before taking that career-changing call:

1. First off it would be helpful to record a mock interview so you can detect any little niggling things that could work against you. You'll be able to hear any "ums", "uhs" "ehs" that you might not realise you're doing.

If you're in the mood for a change or want to try a new direction, this is the place to be.  Below are some of our Featured Jobs, if nothing takes your fancy, there are plenty more opportunities to be found on Chinwag Jobs.  Happy hunting!

In the last few months we have seen a marked shift in the number of clients requesting cutting edge programming languages like HTML5, Ajax and CSS3. This is great news for candidates but how many can capitalise on this burgeoning area?

Hiring companies are moving away from jobs boards and recruitment companies and moving towards social media as their dominant recruiting tool.

Between current economic conditions, the evolution of the internet and dwindling HR budgets, the traditional approach of finding a candidate is becoming increasingly redundant. Are we counting down the days to the demise of the recruitment consultant?

A recent online survey, the Jobvite Social Recruiting Survey 2010 asked 600 participants between May and June if they plan to use social media. 92% of those answered that they were planning on using social media to find future candidates.

As a recruitment company we're lucky enough to get great visibility on what's going on in the digital sector as a whole - where the demand for talent is greatest, which roles attract the most interest, and more besides.

We thought that a lot of the information we see would be useful to a wider audience, which is why we recently published our inaugural Digital Salary Survey. Using our data from the second half of 2009, and the first half of 2010, it shows some interesting trends in the sector - some of which I thought I would share here on Chinwag (thanks for the invite guys!)