LinkedIn Archives - Mansell Recruitment Group

2017’s Most Requested Skills – #HowToGetHired

So what are the top skills of 2016?

It’s nearing the end of October and according to LinkedIn and their vast data resources, there’s a good chance that you or someone you know is looking for a new job! This is the month that they see the highest amount of job applications made.

In today’s post, we’re going to be revealing the top skills of 2016 for you, as well as comparing them with last years results.

If you’re preparing yourself for a job search (or are already in one) then maybe it’s time to focus on learning / improving your knowledge of one of the following skills. Who knows, it might even land you a job!

Cloud and Distributed Computing – no change
Statistical Analysis and Data Mining – no change
Web Architecture and Development Framework – up 6 places
Middleware and Integration Software – up 1 place
User Interface Design – up 5 places
Network and Information Security – up 1 place
Mobile Development – down 1 place
Data Presentation – not recorded in 2015
SEO / SEM Marketing – down 5 places
Storage Systems and Management – down 2 places

2015:

Cloud and Distributed Computing
Statistical Analysis and Data Mining
Marketing Campaign Management
SEO / SEM Marketing
Middleware and Integration Software
Mobile Development
Network and Information Security
Storage Systems and Management
Web Architecture and Development Frameworks
User Interface Design

So as you can see, there were quite a few changes, both positive and negative.

A demand for SEO / SEM Marketers has slowed down quite a bit, with its rank being dropped from 4th to a worrying 9th. Marketing Campaign Management (seen in the 2015 list) has completely dropped off! LinkedIn says:

Demand for marketing skills is slowing because the supply of people with marketing skills has caught up with employers’ demand for people with marketing skills

Data and cloud continue to clutch the top spot, being comfortably planted at #1 for the last two years.

These skills are in such high demand because they’re at the cutting edge of technology. Employers need employees with cloud and distributed computing, statistical analysis and data mining skills to stay competitive.

Data Presentation has made a first-time appearance on the list, achieving spot #8. Statistical Analysis and Data Mining didn’t move from its second spot either:

employers need employees who can organize data so it’s easy for people to understand

User Interface Design is absolutely smashing these ranks, being placed at #14 in 2014, #10 last year and #5 this year, that’s the second largest jump on this year’s top skills list!

Data has become central to many products, which has created a need for people with user interface design skills who can make those products easy for customers to use

That’s the end of this years look at LinkedIn’s top skills of 2016 data breakdown, you can view the entire report here, which even features statistics for top skills by country (including the UK).

If you have any of these skills, then make sure you’re featuring them on your LinkedIn profile. That’s going to be the best way of telling Recruiters and Hiring Managers what you’re capable of and (more importantly) you’ll up show in their search results!

If however, you don’t have any of these skills, but some of them stand out to you and sound interesting, then why not take some time to learn about them, and invest in some paid for training / certifications.

How to Create a Winning LinkedIn Summary

Your LinkedIn Summary – Your Best Weapon

Working on your LinkedIn profile can be quite overwhelming at times, there’s just so many different elements you can add to it which can have different (and mostly positive) effects to it.

But, the one that people should really give care and attention to is the LinkedIn summary section. This is a part of your profile that is really going to help your LinkedIn ranking and get you profile views!

So whether you’re brand new to LinkedIn, or just updating your profile and need some new ideas, here are some tips to help you out.

Don’t Leave It Blank – Never, ever leave the summary section blank! Unless you want the reader to see your work experience first, then get something in there. Give your profile an introduction and tell the reader about yourself.

Save That Space – Ensure that you fill your summary with the correct words and not just a load of generic phrases that a Recruiter has seen a thousand times over. These words and phrases aren’t going to do a thing for your profile and certainly isn’t going to make you stand out from the crowd. Use your summary to showcase your impressive skills and achievements, not to tell the reader that you’re an “enthusiastic team player” with “remarkable typing skills”.

That being said, you should fill it with some words to excite the reader and keep them on your profile, just make sure you’re choosing the right ones.

Tidy It Up – Space it out with paragraphs, headers / sub-headers and links! Think about it, would you enjoy reading through an unformatted 2000 character block of text?

Sell Yourself – Just as you would with your CV introduction, sell yourself to the Recruiter / Hiring Manager reading. Tell them a story, share your achievements, make it interesting and engaging! The summary is your opportunity to grab their attention and get them interested in you, don’t mess it up.

Keywords – I’ve discussed this topic quite a few times, and it’s certainly something you can’t afford to ignore. The best keywords for your profile are going to be things like skills and tools that you’ve used in the past, for example:

“I’m a very experienced Mechanical Design Engineer, who has worked extensively on AutoCAD Inventor and Solidworks Visualize Professional. I also have skills in PLC programming, automotive engineering, powertrain design.”

Don’t overfill this section with keywords though, that will become obvious very quickly if you have and will most likely turn the reader away.

Making use of these tips will result in a much more successful and attractive profile, which will lead to more opportunities for your career!

The Best Websites For Your Job Search #TechTuesday

It’s Tuesday and It’s Time For Some Tech!

Today, I’m going to be going through some of the best websites that you should be investing your time in while conducting your job search!

Oh and yes, the titles below (almost) all link to our pages within those sites, so make sure you check them out!

Let’s begin:

1. LinkedIn – We’re big advocates of LinkedIn, I’m sure you’re already aware that you should be using LinkedIn as a resource when job hunting, but if you’re not, then you’re really missing out!

Use it to directly contact / connect with Recruiters and Hiring Managers, follow companies to find out what positions they are currently trying to fill, showcase yourself through your personal profile (recommendations are a must have), and to network with others in groups and on company pages. We post on it multiple times a day, often with new vacancies that our clients have assigned to us (that’s a good reason to check us out, right?).

2. Twitter – “Twitter?!” you might be saying or thinking. Yes, Twitter! It’s quite similar to the LinkedIn strategy above; create a good looking profile with relevant keywords in the bio section (limited to 160 characters), follow as many Recruitment / career accounts as you can (industry relevant as well), tweet smart and be someone worth following!

3. CV-Library – The big kid on the ‘job board block’! You’re very much missing out if you’re not signed up for CV-Library. Make sure you use their ‘jobs via email’ alerts to make sure you don’t miss anything that’s posted!

4. Jobsite – Another good’un that you should be signed up with! I don’t have much to say about it, apart from that it should definitely be in your job search arsenal!

5. Indeed – Indeed may actually the best of the job boards! Think of it as a ‘job search engine’, it essentially crawls hundreds of thousands of careers websites every day (including ours) for new vacancies, and then automatically posts them. It is literally overflowing with fresh jobs!

They also have a very powerful jobs by email service; if you’re only interested in receiving jobs such as (for example) a Mechanical Design Engineer, then make sure you wrap that text in speech marks, this will tell Indeed to only search and send jobs which have exactly “Mechanical Design Engineer” in them.

6. Facebook – I wasn’t actually going to put Facebook on to this list until I remembered something invaluable about it! Local groups! Recruiters and Hiring Managers love using these to advertise vacancies, but they aren’t the only ones, you will often find if you join a group with a large member base, that there will always be a few people in there who will proactively share jobs that they spot online!

Try searching for “jobs in …..”, replace the dots with whatever town or county you’re looking for a career in, and you’ll usually find something almost straight away!

BONUS WEBSITE – https://www.mansell.co.uk – The best of the lot. Period!

That’s it for today’s post, I hope you’ve got something to take away from it, and if not..well then sorry for wasting 5 minutes of your time! Remember, these are just a small collection of websites which in my (almost) two years of experience working here I have seen; there’s plenty of others out there which you could and should be searching on!

Remember, these are just a small collection of some of the websites which in my (almost) two years of working here I have seen; there’s plenty of others out there which you could and should using in your job search.

10 Very Useful Career Infographics

Infographic for your thoughts?

I love a good infographic (career infographics to be precise) and frequently post them to our social channels; they provide quick and extremely useful pieces of information in a clear, precise and (usually) pleasing-to-the-eye way!

So, here are 10 career infographics which I felt were worthy of featuring; let’s begin: (please note that these aren’t in any particular order)

1. The Hottest Skills of 2015 on LinkedIn

If you’re wondering what to do with your life, be you a school leaver or even an experienced professional looking for a new career path, then this list will definitely point you in the right direction!

2. Modern Ways to Job Search

It’s a few years old, but this post still provides very relevant and detailed information on how to go about searching for a job at present!

3. What’s Your Career Type?

Take this one with a pinch of salt (maybe even a big spoonful, haha) as it may not be entirely accurate, BUT, it’s still fun to read and go through the different branches to see where you end up.

4. 10 Tips to Master The Phone Interview

Hopefully, most of these should be a given to you already, but some of you may not have become a phone interviewing Jedi yet. Don’t despair though! Give this infographic a good read!

5. Interview Preparation – The Decisive Factor

Did you know that 93% of employability is determined by preparation and that only 1 in 10 candidates spends 2 hours of more preparing! I know that because I stole it from the article, haha. But seriously, interview preparation is EVERYTHING; it’s worth it, I promise you.

6. 17 LinkedIn Profile Must-Haves

I’m a big advocate of LinkedIn (as you can tell by this one and some of my other blog posts) and why on earth wouldn’t you be?! It’s the largest business to business network in the world at your fingertips..for free! If you want to get noticed on LinkedIn though, you need to put in the hard work – again, this is worth it in the long run!

7. The Do’s and Don’ts of The Modern CV / Resume

Here’s another modern-themed career infographic covering all of your cv need to knows and do’s! Despite being a published a while ago, it’s all still very relevant information that you should heed!

8. 15 Ways to Beat Procrastination

Go on, admit it, you might have come across this article whilst procrastinating! It’s fine! It happens to the best of us! However, you wouldn’t be procrastinating if you were either in a job / in a job that you enjoyed. I personally found numbers 2, 4, 6 and 9 very useful.

9. Keep Calm and Beat Job Interview Nerves

As Siofra mentions in this post, “it doesn’t matter how many job interviews you undertake” or what the level of position is, every single job interview you attend will be a nerve juddering experience. So that’s why EssayTigers came up with this great infographic to help you out!

10. The Habits of Successful People Vs Unsuccessful People

Want to succeed in life? Of course you do! Well, then it’s worth implementing these everyday habits into your routine! Transform yourself and see where it takes you!

That’s that! Finito! Remember that these are just a small selection of my favourite career infographics, I’ll have some more for you very soon! In the meantime, you can visit our LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook pages for more!

Your LinkedIn Profile, Your Second CV

Don’t underestimate the power of the LinkedIn profile!

I can’t begin to tell you the importance of having a LinkedIn profile these days, everyone has one and (almost) everyone needs one! Being our Social Media & Resourcing Manager, I view A LOT of profiles every week, and one of my ‘pet peeves’ (is when I do come across someone that is actually looking for a new career) is how poorly put together some of their profiles are!

I’ve seen some amazing LinkedIn profiles in the past, filled to the absolute brim with recommendations, endorsements, awards, projects, etc, and most of those people are securely locked into jobs that they may never leave!

If you are a job seeker reading this and know that your LinkedIn profile is lacking then you need to make use of these tips that I’m about to give you! Let’s begin:

1. Keywords, keywords, keywords! – This is absolutely imperative if you want to be viewed by potential Employers and Recruiters! First, create an ‘elevator pitch’ in the summary box at the top and target it at the people that you would like to see it (e.g. “I’m a versatile and highly skilled Mechanical Design Engineer seeking work…etc, I can bring value to…”), you want this to be about 4/5 lines long. The second paragraph is where you can add in your skills / specialties / keywords. For example, “whilst working at **** I used the Revit CAD package, which assisted me while designing ****”….etc. Placing your main skill in the headline box helps a lot as well! Get the picture?

2. You did what and where?! – Make sure you include (almost) everywhere that you have worked and give it a decent description (tasks, projects, etc). You really don’t need to include that tea making job you had when you were 15…

3. School anyone? – Another one that I (don’t) see on candidate profiles, missing education and certifications! This is especially important if (for example) you have a Degree! This could be the make or break when it comes to a Recruiter contacting you or not. Let’s go back to our Mechanical Design Engineer from above, he went to University and received a 2:1; the client are looking for someone with at least a 2:2, so he’d be perfect! But wait, he hasn’t listed this on his LinkedIn profile, which is going to instantly turn whoever is on his profile away! Certifications wise, if (for example) you’re a Project Engineer / Manager and have a Prince2, get it on your profile! Shout your qualifications loudly and proudly!

So, that’s that! More to come soon about LinkedIn and social media in general; we haven’t even scratched the surface with the above!