I spoke with a client of mine today chasing a job offer which has been verbally made to a candidate of mine – “what’s the status of the written job offer for Katherine” I said.

My client responded, yep it has three of the approvals so far and should get the other 3 approvals this week!

When interviewing understands, once you’ve got to a verbal job offer it’ll often take 1-2 weeks for them to raise the paperwork – the good news, most of them are happy to email details as well as post the hard-copy.

It’s those people, who get up early in the morning and are at their desks for 7.30 who are to blame. Driving Cabriolet’s, drinking champagne and snorting Charlie. Making the rest of us drown, my Dad’s savings have halved in value and where’s it gone – in their pockets. The investment bankers, I’m thinking investment xankers. Or is that just my jealousy that they are the smartest, the pick of the crop and rolling in it. But the fact of the matter is, pure and simple – it’s their actions which have cost 1 million jobs in the UK since this crisis began.

If you’ve had several employers in recent years, odds are you won’t get very far using recruitment consultants! If a prospective hiring company is paying a recruitment agency fee anywhere from 15% to 25%, this is no insignificant sum and especially when that company may also have the choice to hire / promote from within or of other candidates who may come direct and at no cost.

Today I received a CV from someone, who’d has three employers in the last three years for a reasonably senior role and there are two implications about this, firstly I always meet concern if I am to field such a candidate because invariably the client has reservations the person is not a stayer and secondly if someone has moved around so much, more often than not they can’t show any real success because they’ve not stayed there long enough (and experience tells me it’s a complete waster of time).

Whatever someone says to justify job-hopping and even with good excuses like takeovers, companies don’t want to pay recruiter fees for this kind of candidate – If I were in this predicament I would focus my efforts on applying direct.

I met this guy this morning at Starbucks, I’ve met him before, a reasonable candidate – sales guy selling software for data centres & networks.

 I noticed his eyes were a bit bloodshot but put it down to the early time of day. As we chatted he said he’d have a sandwich, he’d a heavy night and so he had one of those toasted panini’s. During our meeting of some 45 minutes I must have smelt the alcohol on his breath perhaps 7/8 times!