Who are our clients?
As a team at Executive Agents, we’ve been helping clients achieve true greatness since 2017, so who exactly are we helping?
Read on for a richer, more distinct impression of the people and positions we serve.
What’s going on with Key Selection Criteria? What do current employers want to see?
There is little doubt that the AICD Company Directors Course (CDC) is highly regarded by Boards, employers and participants alike but given the significant cost and time commitment, is it actually worth it? The answer is: it depends. Frustratingly equivocal as this answer is, it’s also the only decent one since the qualifications and experience of those of us considering enrolment can vary wildly. To provide a more satisfying response, we have taken that variety into account and sketched out three common career scenarios.
Why is LinkedIn so important? Do I really need LinkedIn?
These are two of the most common questions we get when consulting with clients, particularly those who are hitting the job market for the first time in a long time.
Highly regarded courses such as the AICD Company Directors Course are not necessarily the be-all and end-all for Board membership, particularly when candidates have strong experience and an accompanying track record of on-the-job effectiveness.
Have you ever scrolled through one of your friends’ social media profiles and thought that it looks so curated and immaculate that it barely resembles the person at all?
Resumes, like a person’s Instagram profile, offers a first impression of a person. It’s no surprise that research has indicated 25% of all resumes contain significant lies (1).
Humans love to lie. One study found that people told lies anywhere from 30% to 50% of the time on topics including their feelings, their actions and their plans and whereabouts (2).
The extent of lying in resumes appears to be positively correlated with a person’s seniority, a stratum where there the stakes are significantly higher. A study of Fortune 1000 executives found that 33% of resumes contained fraudulent material or lacked vital information (3). Split by gender is has been found that 67% of males lie, and 33% of females (4). The more rarefied and more senior the level, the more benefit to lying, because it gets more competitive at the senior level (5).
Technology is one sector that has more resume fraud than others, particularly concerning qualifications (3). Those industries that are more close-knit typically have less prevalence of fraud, along with those that have highly rigorous certification and registration systems. The more your personal reputation matters in your industry, the less chance of fraud.
“Within corporate Australia we find the criticality of reputation varies by geography”, says Nick Hurley, Managing Partner at Executive Agents, a Melbourne-based executive branding agency. “The cities where reputation matters more is where there is a really strong sense of community. Perth, WA, being one of the world’s most isolated cities, is a perfect example of this phenomenon.”
Ironically, one of the most common things people lie about is actually the easiest to check – educational qualifications (6). One study has found that one-third of all executives “lie about past degrees, jobs, and responsibilities” (4). Additionally, educational qualifications have been found to be the least checked component of a candidate’s resume or application (7).
But before you fall for the potentially normative social influence of the trend and start considering jumping on the truth-stretching CV bandwagon, there are a number of tools available for employers. Technology is playing an ever-increasing role in sifting through candidates, from Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS) through to reference checking software.
In fact a whole industry has popped up proving verification services. Companies such as Xref (www.xref.com) and HireRight (www.hireright.com/apac/) offer a suite of reference checking and employment verification services.
Xref states that “Knowing that the candidate has the qualifications and skills they claim enables you to make informed decisions about their performance in the role. In addition, managers can prepare for managing this individual by knowing important factors about their past work experience.”
If even after taking these new developments into consideration, you feel you still need to incorporate some ‘mistruths’ into your CV in order to build a successful application, make sure you speak to one of the consultants at Executive Agents. We have the creative nous and expressive capabilities to make sure your application shines without having to resort to dishonesty.
Talk with Executive Agents today so we can help you sell yourself with authenticity and integrity.
Be someone who creates their future.
Get the Executive Kickstarter.
Perfect for people who want an impeccable CV, LinkedIn profile, and covering letters for powerful job applications.
Training and skill development should form part of the ongoing commitment of a NED once appointed to a board role to ensure they keep up to date with developments in the company and the relevant business sector.
How to Convince Your Boss to Continue Letting you Work from Home: The 2021 Reboot
For those whose employment does not centre on face-to-face interactions, working from home has become ‘COVID normal’ in 2020. As with the pre-COVID era, however, employers tend to favour the centralised office over remote modes of working, meaning that requests to work from home still need to be accompanied by high-level diplomatic skills. Even with the slew of research concluding that employees are equally, if not more, productive working from home, and 72 per cent of recently surveyed knowledge workers indicating they would prefer to work from home some of the time, there is an intractable perception that working from home amounts to slacking off. It seems timely, then, to revisit the sound advice provided in Rebecca Knight’s 2017 article ‘How to Convince Your Boss to Let You Work From Home’ in light of what working under pandemic conditions has taught us.
Knight presents honesty and diplomacy as the features most important to successfully negotiating working from home and these features will be crucial to post-2020 negotiations too. The case for remote working needs to make sense for both you and your organisation: pointing to numerous organisational benefits without putting yourself in the picture will only lead to questions about your motivations. If working from home means you can spend more time with family then be upfront about it but also make an effort to be reassuring. You might wish to point out, for example, that increased family time doesn’t come at the expense of work but, rather, peripherals such as commuting.
Knight recommends devising ways of alleviating the negatives as managers see them. Edith Cowan University’s Stephen Teo observes that trust is the biggest issue, with managers tending to think that seeing their teams equates to more effective supervision and that remote working team members are less responsive or available for consultation. Ensuring you are responsive across several communication platforms including videoconferencing, email and telephone will help address this anxiety, as will being available via chat services such as Slack or Cliq, and readily agreeing to being on-site when the occasion demands.
Along with many other experts in the field, Indranil Roy, an Executive Director at Deloitte Consulting believes ‘face-to-face interactions are required to facilitate collaboration, build relationships, solve complex problems and generate ideas.’ A growing body of evidence has also indicated that adverse mental health effects result from the erosion of boundaries between work and home life. It might be useful to present employers with a suite of ideas aimed at mitigating these drawbacks, ranging from fostering more opportunities for working collaboratively through videoconferencing; to establishing informal, workplace related, but non-essential, messaging groups that allow for ‘water cooler’ conversations.
Knight suggests we give employers time to process requests for more flexible working arrangements. Despite ‘COVID normality’, we should also avoid implying that remote working is an entitlement. Instead, suggest a trial period, starting with working from home one day per week or fortnight; and schedule a review after three months. You might be able to draw on your organisation’s positive experience of remote working under COVID to support your case. If your organisation found having a remote workforce unsatisfactory, you may still be able to advance your claim by demonstrating that the problems could be attributed more to pandemic conditions than to working from home.
From a monitoring, evaluating and troubleshooting perspective, the requirement that remote workers interact digitally may have distinct advantages. The more digital tools we use, the more traces of our interactions we leave and that record may prove invaluable for identifying strengths and weaknesses within teams and across the organisation. While this raises issues around which traces remain and how they are used, it may also help persuade managers that working from home provides them with opportunities to perform their duties more effectively. That said…
Whichever way you present your arguments, steer clear of presumption and making extravagant claims about the rewards working from home reaps for your manager or organisation. Emphasising the savings made on office space rental and utilities might backfire, for example, if your organisation is contractually obliged to foot those bills regardless of whether or not employees use the spaces. Claiming that remote work is healthier because it reduces the risk of contracting seasonal colds and the flu is similarly problematic. Not only are you telling your manager how to do the job, you are also leaving little room for further negotiation if you fall ill while working off-site.
Publications consulted for this Insight
Philippa Fogarty, Simon Frantz, Javier Hirschfeld, Sarah Keating, Emmanuel Lafont, Bryan Lufkin, Rachel Mishael, Visvak Ponnavolu, Maddy Savage and Meredith Turits, (eds.) Coronavirus: How the World of Work May Change Forever, BBC Worklife, 23/10/2020.
Rebecca Knight, ‘How to Convince your Boss to Let you Work from Home’, Harvard Business Review, 05/05/2017.
Emma Wynne, ‘Is Continuing to Work from Home Post-Pandemic Right for You?’ ABC Everyday, 9/11/2020.
If you’re looking to update your resume to land your dream job in 2021, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us for a free 15-minute consultation today.
Be someone who creates their future.
Get the Executive Kickstarter.
Perfect for people who want an impeccable CV, LinkedIn profile, and covering letters for powerful job applications.
7 resume trends for 2021.
This time last year, we shared our top 6 Resume Trends to Watch Out for in 2020, thinking it would be a regular year.
Oops.
Instead, in a year that could have been lifted straight out of dystopian science fiction, a global pandemic chased us all into our houses; 909 Australians died from coronavirus; and (what feels like a decade ago) bushfires burned through 47 million acres of land.
Plus, even as businesses fast-tracked their digital transformations and instilled work-from-home practices in every department, they also cut loyal employees. Qantas slashed 8,500 jobs, Deloitte cut 700 positions, and Myer temporarily closed all its stores to stand down 10,000 people. In total, 600,000 people lost their jobs in April alone.
With everything transforming around us, it comes as no surprise that the way you write your resume is vastly different heading into 2021 compared to 12 months ago. And the first thing you should address are these 7 resume trends for 2021 that have emerged in the wake of 2020.
It’s understandable if the first thing you want to do is banish all signs of 2020 from your resume, but unfortunately it’s essential information and number 1 in our 7 resume trends for 2021.
Any special COVID-19 achievements should be detailed at length in your resume. For example, suppose you helped your business adjust to work-from-home practices by assisting in remote management processes. That’s a highly relevant and impressive achievement that should go near the top of your resume:
Of course, even if you didn’t accomplish anything spectacular, the truth is your efforts were probably more important than you think.
One of the biggest problems businesses faced this year concerned their culture. Stress about catching coronavirus was only the beginning. Financial pressure, poor sleep patterns, favourite co-workers getting laid off, only seeing family members over FaceTime — it all adds up.
In situations like these, maintaining strong teamwork was worth more than anything. If you’ve been someone that other team members leaned on during the pandemic, it’s a great accomplishment to mention. Of course, you can make it sound a little more formal for your resume:
versus
If you rack your brains and still can’t think of an achievement you pulled off during COVID-19, don’t worry. The easiest thing to talk about was how you boosted your career development with an online course or something similar. Flag it in your Professional Summary or covering letter for bonus points.
But don’t think you need to fork out tens of thousands of dollars to enrol in a Go8 university just for the course. With the rise of online learning, some of the most reputable organisations in the world are offering free or cost-effective courses that take less than 10 hours — including Google, HubSpot, TAFE NSW, TAFE Vic, Khan Academy, Open Culture, and many others.
Adding a few of these qualifications can be an appealing way to show companies how employable you are.
On the other hand, if all you did was sink into your couch and watch Netflix all day … well, at least you still have some time to remedy that. Most businesses are still working from home, so you can still bolster your resume with a short online course in the new year.
Even in a regular year, you should never explain a redundancy in the resume. Even if your reason is convincing, it’s still irrelevant:
However, if there’s one positive for jobseekers heading into 2021, it’s that you don’t need to do much explaining at all about losing your job. If you were working for Virgin Australia, the whole nation knows your company went into voluntary administration in April. Even the most heartless Hiring Manager isn’t going to hold it against you that you were unlucky enough to be in the industry hit hardest by the pandemic.
A ton of intelligent, accomplished, meaningful employees lost their jobs this year. So even if you were terminated from your position this year, you can produce your resume with full confidence that you’re still a strong asset to a company.
We sound like a dead horse, but LinkedIn only becomes more and more popular each year. In fact, with everyone locked at home, LinkedIn reported a 50 per cent increase in shared content on its website this year. We wrote at length about the most relevant changes here.
The short story?
It’s safe to say, if you don’t have LinkedIn in 2021, you’re well behind the eight-ball in your job search. Your competitors are positioning themselves as thought leaders with hundreds or even thousands of LinkedIn followers, daily Story updates, dynamic Events and Interests feeds, and the new ‘My Company’ page. If you don’t know what these are yet — head over to our comprehensive LinkedIn Insights article to see what the fuss is about.
Plus, the basics of LinkedIn are still essential. Your About section, headline, and role descriptions are essential information that make or break your LinkedIn page.
In particular, with greater competition, your headline is the first thing recruiters see, so make sure it’s both specific for your role while being eye-catching enough to seize attention. Here’s an example of a poor, generic LinkedIn headline:
Marketing Coordinator passionate about the construction industry
And here’s an example of a much more effective headline:
Marketing Coordinator (Construction) | Grew Facebook Ads ROI by 3.5x
In the equivalent section last year, we talked about how important it is to quantify your achievements. That’s the traditional wisdom that’s been repeated over and over in every resume writing guide published since the dawn of time.
So are numbers less important in 2021?
No — in fact, it’s still best if you know how to quantify your accomplishments. However, in a year where everything nosedived, even treading water was a great achievement. So if you didn’t grow your revenue by 30 per cent like a madman because you were somehow even more productive during COVID-19 than usual, that’s okay.
An achievement like this is very impressive:
But actually quantifying and making this achievement specific can make it look less impressive:
As soon as you quantify those ‘four clients,’ you’re bringing attention to your failures. However, if you keep it more vague, you keep the attention on your actual achievement — ‘protect[ing] revenue streams.’
Video resumes, as we wrote about earlier this year, are one of the most innovative ways you can boost your application.
The way to use them is definitely as a complement rather than a replacement for your traditional text-based resume. You send them along to the Hiring Manager at the first opportunity, such as before you have your first interview.
In short, video resumes offer some amazing advantages. They show your personality, display your video editing and tech skills, and offer a competitive advantage over most job seekers who don’t use one.
But don’t be too enamoured with them — the biggest problem with video resumes is how they offer the chance for companies to discriminate against you. If you believe you’re someone who gets less opportunities because of age, sex, race, ethnicity, or anything else, don’t feel obligated to submit your video resume.
Otherwise, a video resume can only boost your job search when complementing your traditional text resume. Companies love to hire for culture fit, and your text resumes have always been more about achievements, successes, and responsibilities than your personality. Preparing an additional video resume to send along can seriously elevate your application.
Job searches have become more competitive, more brutal, and more likely to end in failure in 2020, and that’s likely to continue next year. With more people out of a job — and extremely talented people at that — applicants per job are well above pre-coronavirus levels. That means job seekers need to beat out more competitors to successfully land a suitable position.
Unfortunately, a lot of talented people without professional resume writers behind them aren’t even getting interviews.
Executive Agents, for example, uses a professional design team to optimise your resume template for ATS — applicant tracking systems. If you don’t have your resume optimised, chances are you won’t even get past the machine that automatically rejects almost 90 per cent of applicants.
Executive Agents is a 100 per cent Australian company with all employees in Australia. We’re also constantly innovating in the face of cutting-edge changes in the recruitment sector, such as LinkedIn, ATS, and COVID-19 trends.
If you’re looking to update your resume to land your dream job in 2021, don’t hesitate to get in touch with us for a free 15-minute consultation today.
Be someone who creates their future.
Get the Executive Kickstarter.
Perfect for people who want an impeccable CV, LinkedIn profile, and covering letters for powerful job applications.
What are recruiters looking for in a CV?
The quick answer – it varies considerably from recruiter to recruiter.
Some recruiters like detail, some like brevity, some like a functional layout, most like a reverse chronology and some even like fancy graphic design.
The most important facet of working with a recruiter is to be open and willing to adjust the CV as that recruiter sees fit.
Before attempting to engage with a recruiter it’s important to gain an appreciation of the type of talent they are looking for and to appreciate how they make money. Don’t forget, recruiters aren’t there to serve you as the candidate, they are there to fill a role for their client – the hiring company.
That being said, because they benefit if you get hired, they will work for you to an extent.
Recruiters ideally want to work with the hottest commodities – candidates who are currently employed; have salary expectations in the range of the role being filled; have precisely the right matching skillset; ideally niche or hotly sought-after skills; have a clear and distinct career trajectory; and who have been gradually but steadily rising up through the ranks in their profession/skillset. The icing on the cake is a candidate who is being actively sought by multiple companies – let’s start a bidding war!
What they typically aren’t as keen on: people switching careers; people with big gaps in their employment; those who have been demoted; those without permanent residency in Australia; people who do not live in Australia or who haven’t for a very long time; people with broad nebulous skills and experience that is difficult to classify; and people with grandiose sounding job titles and degrees that place them well above the role needing to be filled.
If you’re in this group, then maybe a recruiter isn’t for you.
How do I get a recruiter to even notice my CV for consideration?
Our empirical research has shown that recruiters spend on average just nine seconds initially reading your CV. You therefore must get your initial message across clearly, succinctly and consistently.
The questions they will be asking themselves:
Can I see the keywords I am looking for (eg SQL DBA)? Is there a career progression? Does the person have increasing levels of responsibility? Do the titles make sense? Do the responsibilities and accomplishments listed match what I’m looking for? Does the talent have an online presence? Can I find their LinkedIn profile?
The CV you send a recruiter needs to stand out, be punchy and to an impeccable standard. It can have lots of pertinent detail however that can be left to the following pages. They need to decide if they like you from the first page, only then will they want to subsequently read through the details of your accomplishments in more detail in the latter pages.
Here at Executive Agents we actively work with you to identify your unique selling proposition, your value-add and piece together a consistent and clear career story. We condense it down into a CV that will proudly become your principal piece of personal marketing collateral.
Be someone who creates their future.
Get the Executive Kickstarter.
Perfect for people who want an impeccable CV, LinkedIn profile, and covering letters for powerful job applications.
