Recruiter Brad Remillard on Functional resumes:

I don’t read them. It is obvious when one has a functional resume they are trying to hide something and I’m rarely going to take the time to attempt to figure it out. 1 second.

Remillard was writing in  How Recruiters Read Resumes In 10 Seconds or Less.

His suspicion of functional resumes is well-placed. Like good writing, a good resume or CV is crisp and unambiguous. Functional resumes appear deliberately ambiguous.

Recruiters are brutal when sifting through resumes and CVs. As Brad Remillard explains in  How Recruiters Read Resumes In 10 Seconds or Less it seems disrespectful, but from their point of view it makes sense.

He says his first pass over a pile of resumes is box-checking. He can quickly rules out many candidates in a matter of seconds. Here's an example of how he works:

Industry. If my client is in banking and your background is primarily manufacturing – goodbye.  These two often are so different that the client isn’t open to considering such different industries. This works both ways, if you have a manufacturing background I’m not going to consider someone with banking. 2-3  seconds to determine this.

I've hired many journalists in my time and I usually take a similar approach – at least with the first cut. If I advertise a job and it asks for X,Y and Z, then I toss out all the applications which don't have them.

And because I'm an editor, when I hire journalists I immediately cut applications or CVs with spelling or grammar mistakes. I'm unlikely to keep poorly written ones either.

If you've been head-hunted or approached through the recruitment mill and find yourself in sight of a new job, do what you can to stall salary discussions until the employer decides it needs you.

That way, once you know you are the person they want, you have negotiating leverage.

There's a good chance recruiters and interviewers will pressure you to name a your price before it gets to that stage. Politely decline and say you'll be happy to discuss pay when you know more about the job.

When negotiation start, it's best if you can get the employer to name their figure first. If it's what you expected or better – you are home and dry.

If it's not enough, just say "it's not enough" and let them come up with a better figure – though it's more likely you'll be asked "what is enough?"

Make sure you have an answer.

You got the secretive phone call. You met the head-hunter in a discreet pub or café. You jumped through the hoops, passed the tests and sailed through the interviews.

Now there’s only one step before you make the jump: negotiating the right deal.

Because you’ve been head-hunted, the negotiation is slightly different from when you answer an advertisement or otherwise find your way to a new job.

People asked you to come and work for them. They paid an expensive head-hunter to find you, woo you and tempt you into taking their approach seriously.

Face it, they aren’t going to go to all that trouble and then lose your skills because of a few dollars here and there.

Negotiate a deal

If negotiating a deal is like a game of poker – and there are similarities – then you’ve been dealt a good hand. But as any card player will tell you, the cards you are holding are only part of the game. You still need to keep your wits about you.

Most people understandably reduce an employer’s entire offer to its cash equivalent when evaluating salary offers. This makes a lot of sense and I’m not going to disagree with the general principle.

However, it is worth paying close attention to working conditions while in negotiation.

For example, if you don’t like overseas travel – maybe you have a young family – make sure there’s written agreement on the amount of required overseas travel.

Likewise this is a good moment to make sure you have adequate support staff, the right working environment, a budget that covers your expected expenses and so on.

Hours and leave

This is the best time to talk about working hours and annual leave entitlement. Once you sign it's too late.

It’s usual for today’s employers to talk vaguely about you technically being paid for a working week of so many hours, but being ready to work as many hours as it takes to complete the various tasks that are assigned to you. This is fine up to a point, but if your employer is effectively asking you to commit to unlimited hours, it is not unreasonable to put some qualifications. For example you might ask that you never have to work on Sunday because you’re an active member of your local church.

Annual leave is a sticky issue. You’re entitled to a certain amount of leave by law. In practice the amount of leave your employer will let you to take will probably be considerably less than your legal entitlement and will almost certainly be less than the amount nominated in your contract. These days most people get a handsome payout for unclaimed holiday pay when they leave a job. The money is nice, but time to unwind is better.

A long time ago I worked with someone who quickly climbed through the ranks of a sizable organisation. Each time he was promoted he negotiated a deal that increased his annual leave – in many cases he traded leave entitlement for pay.

The result was he reached a level where he had 10 weeks leave a year. This might not be possible today, but the principal is good. For most of us cash-rich, time-poor knowledge workers annual leave is a luxury.

In my opinion it is a good idea to specify some leave dates when negotiating initial terms and conditions before joining a new company. Try and get them written into an agreement. If you’ve been head-hunted the employer will almost certainly agree to this as it seems a cheap way to complete a deal. Even if you haven’t been head-hunted, the salary negotiation is your best opportunity to fix this.

Get professional tax advice

It pays to get some professional advice about the salary part of any deal. The big trap people fall into when head-hunted, is to overlook the tax considerations of any extra salary. Unless you’ve been hired by a US company to work in the states, you will almost certainly already be on the highest rate of income tax.

This means that looks like a 20 percent pay rise on paper might be as little as a 10 percent increase in take home pay. In many cases it is possible to negotiate terms that minimise the tax impact.

Finally, there’s twist to negotiating salary when you are head-hunted. In many cases the head-hunting recruitment process is one long whirl and very flattering. It’s possible to have your head turned by the process – you may laugh, but many head-hunted executives end up with poor deals by being charmed into accepting far less than their new employer would pay.

It doesn’t help that these processes tend to go ahead at a breakneck pace. The usual rule of salary negotiation is to do plenty of homework and benchmark your salary against industry norms – if the employer is in a hurry you may not have time to do this properly.

If possible try to slow the process down. Don’t make it look as if you are dragging your feet, but buy yourself some time to do the research. A few days shouldn’t make any difference to your new employer, but they can make a big difference to you.

You aren't likely to get head-hunted unless you are already near the top of the career tree. In Australia, real head-hunters don't tend to look for people to fill positions paying much less than $150k because there's scant reward for the effort involved.

Some earn a commission, taking a percentage of the recruit’s first year’s salary. Others get a fixed fee.

Either way head-hunters are expensive and can only be justified for senior appointments. Of course, the salary threshold will differ in other countries.

There are exceptions to the salary rule. Head-hunters are occasionally asked to deal with hard to-fill-vacancies in specialised niches. Occasionally an organisation hires a professional head-hunter to woo a specific person – possibly from a rival.

How head-hunters work

A head-hunter's operating style makes a huge difference to the way you should deal with them. Fixed fee head-hunters receive a payment whether the candidates they find are hired or not. Typically these head-hunters are only interested in recruiting for the very top jobs.

Once they have a curriculum vitae they are unlikely to punt it around the industry if they fail to fill the original vacancy. While they may keep it on file and use it later if a similar position comes up later, they probably won’t do this without first getting permission.

It isn't always true, but the head-hunters operating on a commission basis tend to work for a number of clients at the same time. Typically they’ll operate at a slightly lower level. They build databases of potential candidates: be warned once you are 'in play' they might hound you until they find you a new job.

Don't assume that because head-hunters earn commission they have an interest in negotiating a high salary. In practice they can maximise their income by turning over more business than by squeezing an employer for a few thousand dollars here or there.

So, while they are happy to see you get more dollars, don’t push your luck in negotiations. If anything they are keener to close the deal than win more money.

Interview coaching

Some commission head-hunters will coach you before an interview. They’ll do whatever they can to help you secure the job. At times you may feel they are pushing you– that's because they are pushing you.

It isn't unusual for rival commission head-hunters – even from within the same recruitment organisation – to have candidates in line for a single job. While you’ll get a lot of push, you probably won’t get much of attention, that’s because they have so many irons in the fire.

Although it might look like you have a job in the bag, you might be only one of many candidates.

Fixed fee head-hunters will spend a lot of time with you. They probably won’t coach you, but they will help with negotiations and finding information.

You can expect to get lots of feedback about how the process is progressing. By the time you are in front of a company, you’ll be one of only two or three short-listed candidates – the job isn’t yours yet, but you will almost certainly be a good fit for the job, much of the remaining work is determining if you are the best fit for that employer.

Negotiating position

Another dangerous assumption is that a call from a head-hunter puts you in a strong negotiating position. After all, in theory it's easier to extract better salary, terms and conditions when someone else is doing the asking.

To some extent this is true, but don’t get carried away, head hunters spend their working lives recruiting people, you only change jobs once in a blue moon. You certainly have some negotiating leverage, but remember you’re up against professionals and they will have seen all this before. What’s more, their clients are the employers, not the candidates.

If they have done their homework properly the prospective employer will already have a very definite idea of your worth to their business. They are prepared to negotiate and may even go past their expected limits, however, you should remind yourself that they probably have other candidates in the pipeline too.

Despite this, a call from a head-hunter is an excellent way to boost your salary or job. After all, if they want to tempt you away from your current position, they are going to need to offer something attractive.

Computerworld Australia reports IT job advertisements continued their slide in May, which is bad news for tech-oriented knowledge workers. Overall job ads fell by 4 percent in May and 52 percent for the 12 month period ending in May. The number of IT job ads fell 58 percent over the 12 months. The numbers are taken from Olivier job index

The good news is the decline is is slowing down and part-time and contract positions were up during the month.

via IT jobs slump 5% in May: Olivier – Computerworld.

On Wednesday Paul Smith wrote Job seekers are frozen out of market for the Information page in The Australian Financial Review.

Smith says almost half of Australian organisations have imposed a freeze on hiring information technology workers. He also said more than a quarter of IT employers have laid off staff this year.

The story is based on research by Hudson, a specialist recruitment agency which says financial and professional services have been hardest hit and the situation is most difficult in Western Australia.

In Economy at risk as IT graduate numbers fall? I said it's weird speculating about the shortage of computer science graduates triggering the collapse of New Zealand's entire economic infrastructure at a time when US employers are sacking large numbers of IT workers.

It appears there could be a fresh supply of willing recruits closer to hand. In today's Australia IT, Jennifer Foreshew writes:

The economic downturn has prompted jittery employers to force IT staff to take leave over the holiday season following a widespread slowdown in activity.

What's more, she continues: "The moves come as IT employment experiences a big slump, with job vacancies down as much as 30 percent compared with 12 months ago."

Contrast that with this paragraph from the New Zealand Herald story attributed to John Hosking who is a professor of computer science at the University of Auckland:

Parents often had a strong influence over their children's career selection, and following the dot-com crash there was a perception that IT was not a solid career choice.

Which just goes to show. Mummy and daddy know best.