Would You Hire You Based on Your CV Alone?

If you were running one of the top marketing recruitment agencies in Staffordshire and you were looking for the best talent for an important client, would you consider your own CV to be amongst those good enough to impress? It can be difficult to know what part of your CV is going to stand out to potential employers, so it is a good idea to step away from the situation and ask yourself a question. Based on your current CV alone, would you hire you? It can be very easy to fall into the trap of thinking that you will get to really sell yourself at the interview and forget that your CV has to sell you first before you get that far. So imagine that there are no interviews and no chances to give fuller explanations about your skills, experience and qualifications. Your CV has to do it all. In taking this approach, one skill you will certainly have to demonstrate is the ability to present detailed information in a concise and compelling manner. Most professionals looking for their next career move will have much more information to share about their career history than will fit on to two sides of A4. So how do you go about selecting and presenting the highlights which will grab the reader’s attention? For any job you apply for, there will be selection criteria that each candidate will need to meet. There may be lists of skills and experience which are essential or desirable, so it is your task to clearly illustrate how you meet all of the requirements. No two jobs will be the same, so be prepared to have more than one version of your CV. You may find that you can repeat some of the sections on skills, experience and qualifications from one application to the next, but make sure that your opening personal statement or summary is clearly tied to the requirements for each specific role. Another danger with CVs and trying to impress is that individuals can exaggerate the extent of their skills and experience. Another test for anything you claim on your CV is to prepare real examples and evidence of where and how you have deployed specific skills. You would be asked to do as much in your interview, so make sure you are prepared. Don’t be afraid to illustrate how your skills might be transferable and therefore relevant, even if they were gained within a different work environment or profession to the one you are applying for. The key is to focus on the competencies required to fulfil tasks and job roles and not just to mirror exact experiences. It is normal for marketing recruitment agencies in Staffordshire to request CVs, and also normal for them to interview you to assess your suitability for different roles and various clients. Again, don’t wait for the interview to show your best. The difference with your CV requirements when registering with marketing recruitment agencies in Staffordshire is that you will need a general overall CV to present the breadth of your capabilities and career history. It should be enough that they can gauge the range of roles they could put you forward for at a glance.

Branding

Building a successful brand requires you to grow a company that lives and breathes your brand values. Everyone from the front-line customer advisor through to the senior management team and CEO should all be practising behaviours which support and promote your brand values. The last in line to experience the brand is the customer, but it is by starting your brand engagement programme with them in mind that will help you map out the perfect brand journey. Once you have your internal brand engagement programme working effectively across all areas of your business, the output will be an excellent brand experience for the end customer. Building a strong brand has never been about simply getting your logo seen everywhere. It is about the entire customer experience: the interaction with sales or advisory staff; the effectiveness of administration; the performance of the product or service; the quality of after-sales service and much more. In order for every step in the journey to be successful, all behind-the-scenes operations and delivery elements need to be as fully immersed in your brand as the customer-facing elements. You can’t expect your staff to intuitively know what your brand is and how to live it, so it must be clearly communicated and training may be required. However, all aspects of the business should be delivering to the brand values. This means that how the staff are treated, how they feel valued within the business and how well they understand the contribution they make to the bigger picture are all part of the brand experience. It is easy to see that generating a truly successful brand will take more than just an effective marketing department. It requires a strong CEO and senior management team to lead from the top, an effective HR department and training team to roll out the brand across the workforce and well-equipped line managers to reinforce the brand values on a daily basis through performance management. The brand engagement strategy will be the corner stone for making it all happen, so you‘ll need a strong marketing professional to develop this for your company. Good marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire can find whatever marketing talent you need to take your business forward. If you don’t know how to start looking for a brand engagement specialist, then let marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire steer you through the process. They will have seen hundreds if not thousands of skilled and experienced candidates over the years so will know where to find your perfect fit.

Local Figures or World-Class Names?

Celebrity endorsements or public appearances to support promotions can be a sure-fire way to get the press interested in your news. But how do you select the right person for your product? The reality may be that you have to make do with whoever is willing and available at the right price. For endorsement opportunities, you should aim for influential figures whose reason for fame is relevant to your product. For example, if you produce sports training kit or energy drinks and foods, you would want sports people to help promote them. In Warwickshire you have a host of famous sports names on your doorstep with the Warwickshire cricket team. The added bonus would be that these people have a local connection too, so it might be a little easier to persuade them to support your cause. When looking to attract the attention of the media or hard-to-reach service users, then the relevance might need to be more closely linked to names that the media or the target audience will know but may have no link whatsoever to the product or service itself. For example, think of schemes such as literacy campaigns to get boys reading. Footballers and sport stars are called upon to act as role models — not because they are intrinsically linked to literacy, but because they are likely to be of interest to the target audience. If in doubt, the target market needs to be convinced that if it is all right for the stars then it is all right for them. Over the years your PR team or agency will have built up relationships with lots of contacts. This can bring you that step closer to securing a celebrity figurehead. Sometimes it will be enough to have a local legend to support your cause, but bigger stunts might require household names to grab the attention you are after. Whatever your approach, you will need to weigh up the costs of the appearance fee against the predicted sales to ensure a good ROI. Above all, you need to be able to measure the impact. PR support can be an integral part of your marketing team. It is worth weighing up the cost of agency services if you outsource your PR against the cost of hiring in-house resource. If you can attract professionals with strong career histories and even stronger contacts lists, then they can be worth their weight in gold. Specialist marketing recruitment agencies in Warwickshire can help find the perfect recruit. Calling marketing recruitment agencies in Warwickshire could be your first step to PR success.

Get to Know Your Customers

When you are getting to know new friends or work colleagues, you don’t just try to find out where they shop or what they buy. It should be the same with your customers when you are getting to know them. Of course, you will want to learn about their buying habits and what products will catch their attention, but you can develop much more effective modes of advertising if you get to know their interests, where they spend their time or what they spend their spare time doing. Whether your target customers spend a lot of time on the internet, like to travel on public transport or spend their leisure time attending live sports, it is good to know where they are spending their time. It is particularly good to know where they are spending their time when they are relaxing or where they are likely to spend time again and again. Frequency in advertising has long been linked to the success of campaigns, so finding out places where you can achieve regular repeated visibility with your customers is a great way to succeed. By finding a concentration of your target audience, you can advertise for longer or more frequently because you aren’t having to spend large amounts on lots of locations with a scatter-gun approach. Advertising hoardings at sports venues can be great regular spots for advertising placements directly to your customers. Not only will you reach them week after week, but you will get them for prolonged periods of time and hopefully in a relaxed frame of mind — as long as their team isn’t losing. Adverts on popular websites can also reach many of your target markets with regular repeat viewings at a smaller outlay than you might think. Creative thinking when it comes to advertising isn’t just about dreaming up novelty themes, designs and content for the adverts themselves. It can also be just as important to decide how, when and where to advertise. If you are a creative thinker and thrive on solving problems or working out effective campaigns, you might enjoy a career in marketing. Visit marketing recruitment agencies in Birmingham to see what current vacancies are available in your area. If you want to show marketing recruitment agencies in Birmingham what creative skills you have when it comes to planning campaigns, then maybe you could suggest great places that they could be advertising.

Look a Little Further

Successful marketing isn’t always about promoting your products and services to the end consumer. Often you need to be able to market yourself as a keen supply-chain partner and find routes to deliver your services via a third party. So when you are looking at target markets, you should be keeping an eye on large firms that may require your services within whatever projects they are delivering. When they win business, you can win business too. Make sure you are taking full advantage of your location. Many council-run projects will have targets and strategic objectives to engage with local firms on the work they need doing. For example, earlier this month Coventry City Council announced plans to promote supply-chain opportunities for local businesses to work with Costain, which has won a council building contract worth £12.6 million. Collaborating with the Chamber of Commerce, they have come together to promote the local opportunities available through a drop-in day. This is an ideal opportunity for local companies to market themselves to the council as well as the major contract delivery partner Costain. While these may be building contracts, there are all sorts of suppliers that may be needed on projects and the ‘think local’ approach will apply as much to the hiring of employees as to suppliers. If you are an individual looking for your next career move, it might be worth contacting marketing recruitment agencies in Coventry to see if there are likely to be any sales or marketing-related opportunities arising. Communications might be a key area on big projects, along with PR, so it is worth enquiring. Announcements such as this recent one by the council are timely reminders that supporting council principles and objectives can put you in a good position when it comes to applying for preferred-supplier opportunities. Marketing teams can be preparing the ground for such opportunities by aligning their market messages to those areas important to the council, which will make the bidding process that much easier for the sales teams when the time comes. Marketing roles can open up a huge range of career opportunities for the keen candidate, as there are so many disciplines incorporated in the marketing mix. Get started with a general support role and learn where you would like to specialise as you build up your knowledge. For the latest opportunities in sales and marketing, visit specialist sales and marketing recruitment agencies in Coventry.

Feedback Is Always Good

When it comes to marketing your business, gathering feedback is always a good idea. Even when feedback isn’t good, it can be an invaluable way to identify areas for improvement, which in the long run is better for your service delivery and therefore better for your quality of offer. This is ultimately better for your market image. Feedback questionnaires can be easily located at any service outlet or can be included in the packaging or delivery of products where there is no on-site option. If you need feedback that isn’t linked to a specific purchase period, then the process could warrant a direct mail campaign, depending on the spread of your customer base. When the feedback comes in and it is good, this is excellent news for your business and your further marketing potential. Hearing positive things about a product or service from users is the next best thing to getting a personal recommendation. If you are able to poll a specific amount of people and gather enough returns, you will be able to convert your findings into percentages, which can be very effective in advertising and promotion — for example, 99% of service users said they would recommend us to a friend. Just make sure you have the correct sample size to be able to qualify your results and claims. When designing you feedback questionnaire, think about the questions you really want answering and try to be specific — rather than ask if the customer was generally happy with their purchase, ask if the item did the job it claimed to do. If it is a cheaper product, ask if it performed just as well or even better than more expensive alternatives. If it's managed in an organised and efficient way, you can quickly amass hundreds of accolades which can be a much better boost to your business profile than solitary case studies. Case studies are essential for any suite of marketing literature, but they can be time-consuming to produce and you’ll need to generate a good number of them to avoid them looking like ‘one-offs’. If your feedback questionnaire is not an on-site completion, then you may need to incentivise the return of forms with a date-dependent special offer or competition. Give your customers long enough to complete and return them, but don’t let the process drag on too long or you might miss the boat in terms of the impact you can make with the results. Be careful not to incentivise the return of questionnaires in such a way that encourages the respondents to fabricate the positive nature of their comments. You want honest feedback. Gathering customer feedback is just one of the many and varied tasks you might get involved in when working in marketing. If this sounds like the sort of thing you excel at, then visit marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire to find out what opportunities might be available. When you have used the service, you may find that marketing recruitment agencies in Worcestershire are seeking feedback from the candidates they see, so make sure you complete a form. Don’t worry — they are usually anonymous.