Help me find a new job in the UK
June 13, 2013 8:44 AM   Subscribe

[UK Job Hunting] I'm looking for a new job and my usual roster of recruitment agencies and contacts are failing to come up with anything either interesting, in London or at my level of seniority. If you were hunting for a senior position role in London right now, what places/companies/services would you be using or doing?

I've subscribed to and posted my CV on:

- LinkedIn, who seem to have a reasonable job selection but tend to want to push me towards one specific industry.
- Monster, who appear to have nothing at all.
- JobServe, who send me stuff that bears no relation to what I want and often very junior.
- Glassdoor, who seem to have multiple agencies advertising the same roles.

After 5 months of this, I'm going nowhere. I feel like I'm missing out on plenty of good roles out there - probably advertised by companies who don't want to use agencies. I've had my CV checked independently and am confident that it's strong and does the job, the problem is finding companies to put it in front of.

My questions are:

1. Short of trawling the websites of those companies on a regular basis (or subscribing to their mailing lists), how can I find out about those roles?
2. Are there any other decent job sites and/or services which I should look at?

FWIW, I'm looking for "VP/Head of" level roles within "Product Management" or "Product Development" (10+ years experience) developing mobile or internet based products and services. I've got a background of telecoms and finance, but it can be any industry as long as I'm managing the development of a product or service.
posted by anonymous to Work & Money (4 answers total) 1 user marked this as a favorite
 
I wasn't looking for things at the same level/sector as you, but I found the job sites where you upload CVs to be pretty useless - I'd get a message from an agency asking to call me, they'd ask me about my background and then tell me I wasn't useful to them, so clearly nobody was reading my actual CV. There's only one agency I've ever dealt with that was useful and that was Judy Fisher (and my company recuits temps from there) but they probably wouldn't be too useful for your specialist. My main experience with agencies is that they tend to dick you around, or don't take you seriously, but then I haven't dealt with them since I was at the start of what turned into my career.

I would recommend GuardianJobs and whichever trade magazine is relevant to your industry (ie. Campaign, New Scientist). I'd also look at the jobs sites for large companies that work in mobile/internet services such as the BBC, Sky or digital arms of ad agencies - when I was last job-hunting, I used to see a lot of development roles advertised. You can sign up to job alerts on GuardianJobs and on the BBC Jobs site at least.
posted by mippy at 9:24 AM on June 13, 2013


My technique most recently was to reply to a couple of approaches on LinkedIn and get my CV in front of a couple of agents and that tends to do the trick pretty quickly for me, and that's mid-high level tech jobs in London, but you say that's not working for you right now. How about following some interesting companies on Twitter? A lot of small-medium companies will tweet job opportunities from their corporate account.
posted by corvine at 10:47 AM on June 13, 2013


Seconding trade magazines - even recruiter ads on specialised trade sites are more useful than the general run of recruiter ads. LinkedIn can be made more useful if you search for relevant groups on the site and join them: the groups themselves are useless, but having them on your CV seems to help people find you and break the industry box you are stuck in. Also search for and link to recruiters in the industry you are looking at. Even if you are ideally not looking for roles through a recruiter role, linking to these people will make people in the target field your friends-of-friends and expand the list of direct postings you see.

Do a quick search for companies you're interested in on Twitter, and follow anyone who is posting from those companies, as well as any bloggers/ journalists / trade groups / publications in your field you read regularly. Job ads often circulate on Twitter in just the situation you are describing: companies are looking for someone senior and specific and want to ask their networks "has anyone seen this person?" Make sure you monitor industry-relevant hash tags, too (but #jobs on its own is useless.) If you use Twitter for personal reasons, and don't want to make your friends read work chatter, it might be worth starting a separate business account. Regardless, plan on making a few tweets a day about your field, to get the people who you follow to follow you back.

Finally, I know at least one person who had great luck looking for a senior London role on The Ladders, but I can't speak from experience there, and it was a marketing position, so YMMV since that's not your field.
posted by Wylla at 10:48 AM on June 13, 2013


Seconding GuardianJobs.

I've also seen ads that might suit you on totallyexec.com.
posted by sueinnyc at 5:57 PM on June 13, 2013


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