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According to reports from recruiters, city firms have started to hire again after the trouble of recent times, although slightly cautiously.

There was an uplift in the finance job market in June that held fairly steady in July despite the slow summer trend in recruitment that usually happens every year.

Although the number of new jobs within the London financial services sector dropped overall by 7%, a two month consequent increase since June in new finance jobs in the market is positive news for finance professionals.

It is good news for the financial recruitment industry if employers are feeling more confident and starting to increase the amount of job opportunities available in the UK. As with most things during the recession it will be a slow steady increase rather than a sudden jump to how things were before.

The statistics are showing that job opportunities are appearing for most areas within the financial services industry and this is especially true at the managerial and executive level.

Today, business is conducted worldwide.  This means that employees are needed all over the world.  It is not uncommon for someone in another country to need your services.  However, it is not always easy for them to find you.  Because of the increased number of global workers, international recruitment has changed.

When you work internationally with a recruiting agency, you most likely work with a special agency known as a professional employee organization.  This type of organization works with companies in various industries throughout the world.  To save time and money, they use email to contact people.  And, they source international jobs that are needed.  A lot of the time the work is contract work, sometimes temporary.

Although a PEO works to recruit employees around the world, they spend a large amount of their time developing strategic alliances.  They make these alliances with businesses around the world.  They help these businesses become more profitable by allowing them to outsource anything possible that is costly to PEO workers.  Almost anything can be outsourced.  Companies outsource unskilled positions and even the position of CEO.  Thus, the business becomes more profitable and work is created for people around the world.

This new about to recruiting changes the game when it comes to temp work.  Many people can benefit short term from this situation or even long term.  Also, a lot of times, the positions available are better because the market is so much larger.

In the future, these recruitment agencies are hoping to have job boards online.  They want individuals to have access to job information in real time.  This way they can find candidates faster and more effectively.  Also, it helps those interested know where to look.

One of the major focuses of the PEOs is professionalism.  These PEOs work with great companies and professionalism ensures continual work.  From studies done throughout the world, there is an obvious lack of professionalism in temp agencies.  The PEOs want to avoid this.  They hope to find people around the world that need work and find the right job for them.  In their eyes, it is a win-win situation for everyone.

If you are in between jobs or are looking for more experience, look into working with a PEO.  It is a great option for developing your professional qualifications.  Many jobs, even if they are temporary, are ones you could include on a resume.  Also, it may help you determine what you really want to do in the future!

Waking up to another cold grey showery morning in a municipal town in Britain, and struggling through the rush-hour traffic to a nondescript office block for another day at your crumb strewn desk can be quite a depressing prospect. Perhaps you are already thinking it’s time for a change. Now it’s your chance to consider something you may not have thought of doing before- working abroad!

The international job market is in a healthy state at the moment and someone with the skills from a UK education and career path are greatly sought after. With readily transferable skills UK applicants are seeing high levels of success in securing International Jobs.

The benefits are obvious, a better climate, reduced living costs and gaining invaluable international experience are all great reasons to consider going international. Obviously such a move would involve a big change in your life with relocation an important process to manage. Many companies offer assistance, both logistical and financial, to help a new recruit to transition seamlessly into their organisation.

But where do you start looking for that job of a lifetime? The best approach is to find an international recruitment expert who understands the needs of prospective employers. They can help you find a role that you will feel challenged but comfortable in, and where you will not suffer cultural dislocation in the way that so many people who go it alone do .

The skills and experience an international job gives you will also put you ahead of many other candidates should you wish to return home later on. Such a role on your C.V. is amble demonstration of your pro-active nature, flexibility and willingness to embrace change. All of which are key assets in the modern workplace.

In addition the opportunity to learn a second language, is not only an exciting challenge but also another string to add to your bow for future use. With the decline of foreign language within the UK curriculum, the demand for language skills has risen sharply.

Often international recruitment is an overlooked option by UK applicants. But now is the ideal time to take that step. If you do you will be rewarded with improvements to your career prospects and your quality of life.

With more and more jobs in the private sector at risk as the economic downturn continues to hurt small and medium businesses, more people are looking at public sector jobs as a career alternative. But what are the benefits and how easy is it to stand out considering the competitive nature of the current job market?

Perhaps the primary benefit of working in the public sector is the sense that you are contributing something back to society through your work rather than generating profit for your faceless corporate masters. But it’s not all altruistic, in general public sector wages are higher than the national average. This is also coupled with an attractive benefits package and stable pension scheme. Flexi-time and other flexible work arrangements are also prevalent, allowing busy people a better chance to maintain a work life balance.

There are a wide range of careers available in the public sector, so being able to find a job that utilises your skills should not be a problem. The public sector is increasingly aware of the benefits of employing someone with private sector skills. In fact the main drawback sited of working in the public sector is that you can often feel like you have stepped into an arcane world of bureaucracy and red tape. But fear not, with increased pressure to not waste tax payers money, the ability to recognise waste and streamline working practice will lend you a distinct advantage over other candidates.

So how can you stand out in the job market? Employers are not short of applicants for available posts in the current climate. In fact a recent store opening in Nottingham attracted 1800 applicants for just 20 positions. This means it’s important to make yourself unique and present a clear case to a prospective employer to justify why you are the best person for the role.

Perhaps the smartest way to do this is to let someone else do the donkey work for you. Identify a specialist in public sector recruitment and meet with them to ensure they understand your skills and what sort of role you are after. You are looking to give them the detail that helps bring your C.V. to life and allows them to go out and present you as the well-rounded employee that you are.

Rather than wasting time applying for dozens of ill-suited roles, working with a recruitment professional will help you to land that dream public sector job.

Following on from our previous blog posts on writing job specifications and choosing the right candidates to interview, we will now look at job interview techniques. Most job interview articles whether it is for accountancy jobs or finance jobs you will read will concentrate on the interviewee and what they will encounter, but in this blog we will look at what the interviewer needs to do and look out for.

Conducting the perfect interview is all about getting the right balance of preparation, questioning and listening.

There are many interview techniques you can use, the two most common are the behavioural event interviewing technique and the criteria based interview.

The Behavioural event interview is where you look at the applicant’s past and you look at how they performed and handled previous tasks and roles. This is based on the assumption that the applicant will handle your role in a similar fashion to how they handled previous relevant roles.

Criteria based interviewing is when you measure a client’s performance in different areas, this is done by testing the applicants knowledge using structured questioning. This formal technique is a great way of testing the applicant’s performance but does involve the right questions and the ability to interpret the answers given.

The technique you use in your interview depends on various factors such as personal preference, objectives and company regulations to interviewing. But with careful planning, questioning and listening, you should be able to conduct a successful interview. Here are some of the things you need to factor into your interview.

Detailing your requirements and what you are looking for is something you have hopefully prepared already and used in your job advertising process. But it helps if you go into a bit more detail at this stage. Make sure you are clear about what skills, experiences and qualifications you are looking for.

You should always look and analyse the applications and CVs in advance, but this can sometimes be overlooked. Make sure to highlight any points you would like to raise in the interview, this includes both strengths and weaknesses. This is a great chance to highlight any questions you have about previous employment as most people don’t go into great detail in their CVs.

Remember you will not only be asking questions, the applicant will probably have some for you as well. So make sure you have relevant information to hand to make sure both you and the company appear professional, this may include history of the company, benefits or what its like to work there.

Make sure the area or room you will be conducting the interview is suitable. You want to put the applicant at ease, so don’t choose a place where you will be disturbed a lot.

Preparing an agenda for the interview will help you to stick to your time slot and also make sure you cover all areas that you wanted to go over. One of the best techniques to put an interviewee at ease is to introduce yourself and then cover your agenda so you can let them know what to expect.

Once you have finished your questions you should close the interview by asking the applicant If they have any questions. They may want to cover some of the areas you have introduced briefly. After the questions you can let them know things like, when they can expect to hear back and how the rest of the process will go. Whether there will be any other interviews for example.

As well as notes during the interview, it is always a good idea to make notes at the end to summarise what you thought of the applicant.

Once you have performed all this and seen a good range of applicants, you can hopefully come to a decision on who you want to see again or even who you want to offer the job to, completing your financial recruitment process.

If you have taken on board our advice about writing a concise job specification then you should have a good amount of appropriate candidates applying for a job but what do you do if you end up with a lot of applications and CVs. Well it can be a difficult and time consuming task to sort through them and establish who to bring in for an interview. In this blog post we will look at some of the key areas you should use to assess whether the applicant is right for your roles. If you look for the right things in these applications you should soon be able to work out who will be right to bring in.

When looking at the skills and achievements they list you will need to think how these will benefit you and the role. Do the skills they have provided actually match the ones required for the position? Is there any skills and achievements that make them stand out from the others, something that may actually help them in the role that you may have not initially thought was required.

When looking at the candidate’s qualifications and educational background you will be looking to see if it meets the requirements for this position. It will also be worth looking for applicants who have completed other courses that may bring extra skills to the position.

If they have the right skills and education, you can then move onto the work experience they have. Hopefully you will have applicants that have had good positive experiences in relevant industry sectors. There are many things to take on board when looking at this section of the CV. How many employers have they worked for? How long have they been with each one? Do they give reasons for leaving their current position?

To fully analyse this section you will need to look at what you require and how the candidate presents the information, hopefully painting them in a good light.

Sifting through a large amount of applications can be quite a task especially when finding candidate for accountancy jobs and other finance jobs. But by taking on board the points we have made, hopefully you can find a good selection to bring in a talk to.

We have written many recruitment blog posts here on the online business blog, but the majority of those were written to aid the person looking for a job. In our next few blog posts we will be looking at things from the recruiter’s perspective.

It may seem like any easy task to come up with specifications for a potential employee, but it’s a good idea to take a moment and evaluate what qualities you are looking for.

Coming up with a detailed specification will help you focus on what type of person you want and what skills you need, which will hopefully make the recruitment process much smoother.

The goal of a job specification is to come up with a detailed description of the job opportunity, and detail the responsibilities and goals of the potential employee will have.

The second part of the process is coming up with a person specification which is where you will create a profile of the ideal candidate that you think will suit the role. These specifications, not only help the employer work out what type of person they are looking for but also the candidates will be able to understand the role and position better.

Many employers and recruiters make the mistake of posting vague information about jobs hoping that many people will apply and they can choose the best. Using better specifications you can save time and resources by having the appropriate candidates apply in the first place.

By specifying exactly who you are looking for and the skills and experience they should have will also avoid problems once they have been accepted and started. This can avoid unnecessary training that may be needed if the candidate is missing any skills.

One problem that crops up with vague job descriptions is that a new employee may leave the company fairly quickly as they might find that the position was not what they were looking for. This will then take you back to square one of looking for someone to fill the position, so it is always best to get it right the first time.

This is especially true for international recruitment as you want to make sure the right candidate is chose if they are having to move abroad for an international job.

We have written an accompanying piece on our tumblr blog

When looking for finance jobs you may have seen the term risk management used, you may already know what this role is or like me might be wondering it involves. After some research I have found some great information about what risk management is in the financial sector.

Employees who work in financial risk management help to create economic value for a business they are hired by, using financial instrument to manage credit and market risk. They may also deal with inflation risks, liquidity and foreign exchange.

As expected financial risk management is very similar to risk management in other areas. It requires the identification of sources of risks, measuring how big the risk is then coming up with ways to help prevent them. When dealing with risks in the financial sense, you will be dealing with both quantitative and qualitative management. To manage financial risks, teams and individuals need to use a technique called hedging with financial instruments to prevent and maintain costly risks and exposures to them.

So when do companies need to use financial risk management? The current theory is that a business should take on risk management project when it will improve the situation for its shareholders. Firm managers cannot add value for the investors or shareholders in a project that can be carried out by the shareholders themselves for similar cost. So in terms of financial risk management, if possible shareholders should hedge risks rather than bringing in a firm to do it for them at the same cost.

But hedging risks internally by shareholders is the best situation using perfect markets, according to business theory. But financial markets are often not perfect markets and firm managers will have better luck creating value using risk management than shareholders would be able to.

For more information on risk management jobs and financial jobs, visit Martin Ward Anderson

Martin Ward Anderson offer financial recruitment services for all types of finance jobs in mainly large companies in the UK and abroad. Here is a brief look at three large companies that you can apply for finance positions through Martin Ward Anderson.

ASDA

With over 340 stores in the UK, Asda is one of the UK’s largest retailers and has even been voted in the top 10 UK companies to work for. The company is looking for proactive, talented and commercially focused employees who help in a variety of financial aspects throughout the business.

ASDA currently has a team of around 250 people that are based in Leeds. This team is split into financial control roles such as business accounting and accounts payable and crucial commercial roles.

While the pace is fast, you will have strong opportunities to move around the business.

For more information visit ASDA’s profile at Martin Ward Anderson

Royal Mail Group

The postal market in the UK is currently very competitive and this means the Royal Mail group is look for individuals to join its finance team that will help them compete and offer the best service to its customers.

The group looks for employees to have a commercial focus and has vacancies in key areas such as group investment, group finance, and risk finance. As the royal mail group includes, Royal Mail and the Post Office limited there are plenty of financial jobs throughout the businesses.

For more information visit Royal Mail’s profile at Martin Ward Anderson

Home retail group / Argos

The home retail group is the UK’s largest home and general merchandise retailers selling through Argos and Homebase.

The groups financial services business drives sales and customer loyalty to both the business, combined with insurance and credit products available to customers in a variety of forms.

There are a variety of financial positions throughout the companies, whether it is in the analytical finance team or the technical specialist finance team, you will be helping ensure that the home retail group looks after its customers and keeps them coming back.

For more information visit Home Retail Group’s profile at Martin Ward Anderson

Finding a job in any foreign country can be hard as there will be obstacles such as different customs and different languages that may hinder your efforts. Hopefully language won’t be too much of an issue as you will either be able to speak the language or will be targeting English based companies. In the case of the Netherlands around 70% of the population can speak English, so if your Dutch isn’t up to scratch when you make the move, you should find communicating easier.

Here are a few pointers on finding a job in the Netherlands.

Internet

As with most things there days, the Internet is now one of the best resources to use for finding things. This is especially true in the world of recruitment and job hunting. There will be many Dutch based recruitment sites and jobs boards, but most of these will be in Dutch. So if you are looking for an English speaking role then, companies like Martin Ward Anderson Finance Recruitment services can help you find jobs in the Netherlands. The company focuses on jobs in finance such as banking jobs and public sector jobs, but if this is the area you are looking for then they are ideal.

Personal Contacts

Networking with people in your industry is a great way of finding out about job opportunities. How you deal with these contacts is up to you, but is not deemed appropriate to flat out ask people for a job. It is much easier to let your contacts know collectively that you are looking for work. This can be done with social sites like LinkedIn of Facebook.

Media Advertisements

Dutch Newspapers is a great source of finding job opportunities. Most Dutch papers have job sections in their Saturday editions and you can also find the job sections on their websites. Some Dutch papers to check out are the NRC Handelsblad, de Volkskrant, de Telegraaf and Algemeen Dagblad.

Temporary employment agencies

Uitzendbureaus are Dutch temporary employment agencies that are very common in the Netherlands. Most occupations can be found through temporary agencies but these are obviously not the best places to look if you want a permanent position.