Often as a recruiter I will receive a CV / Resume from someone which is a very poor representation of their career history and abilities. Whilst I will often point out to the individual that the CV / Resume itself lets them down and give them some pointers, more often than not I am left with an initial impression which is poor and typically am always in the situation that I will invariably end up with several appropriate candidates from which to choose. My task is to find the best qualified candidates for my clients and a CV is an example of the quality of someone’s work, isn’t it.

I recently had such an experience, where a candidate on paper possessed some of the experience and had a relevant background however given I had many other people from which to choose – chose not to select this person. Like every person he wasn’t perfect and had a flaw, by itself I could have over-looked however in conjunction with a poorly written CV, just couldn’t get my head around the fact he was poor in comparison to others.

When writing your CV, do consult the opinion of others and ask for frank feedback – otherwise you could be wasting a considerable amount of time, end up on the shelf, and find you pass your sell by date!

When I say pass your sell by date, what I mean is that, if you are out of work for a long time – you will loose your currency/value! And may not be able to get back in at all either at your level or into your industry type!

For most people job search isn’t a competency they possess, so looking for a job isn’t going to be something they excel at.

Job seekers don’t suffer from too many job opportunities (if you have too many, the natural thing is to focus on those which are best and let others drift) but they do suffer from too few job opportunities.

 How do you open more doors, quite simply you need to look to use more job search methods, make more applications, talk to more agencies and use jobs boards like Monster. You need to scale up your activity, do different things, spend more time in job search.

If you were stranded on a desert island you might not know of the severe recession we have been in, otherwise its old news. However whilst government statistics indicate we pulled out of recession last month the jobs market remains depressed, there are ever increasing gigantean scale redundancies (this week a pharmaceutical company announced 4K+ job losses) and the outlook remains rocky.

Shares in the Eurozone companies tumbled yesterday despite these countries faring well with other first world countries.

So where do you look if you are a job seeker, when hunting for a new post in a low demand hiring market?

Of course look at the obvious companies but understand, many obvious companies are large, well established and looking to trim headcount not hire. The major players in any industry can redeploy people from one area to another – so not prime hunting ground.

 You need to pay close attention to at the small, medium and niche players in your industry sectors, and look to those niches within the sector in which you have expertise which are bucking the trend, challenging the norm – disruptive players. Furthermore, often skills built in one market can be applied to others in which similar business dynamics mean your skills may be relevant to them – to do this you need to brain-storm. And one good way to brain-storm is to seek the input of other people who may be able to help you look outside of the square.