Advice for Job Seekers – #1 and a bit – Get on Linkedin

Employment opportunity for Accounts Assistant or Reconciliation Clerk, Watford, Herts, UK.

Folks, I am looking for an accounts assistant but more specifically, a reconciler.  I work for an SME that has been affected, although not catastrophically, by the recession.  We don’t want to pay a recruiter’s fee, something we’ve not done since the heady days of 2007, but the problem is; I want this person like…..Yesterday.

So the first place I go to is Linkedin, even though I know it is largely populated by the high earning, the well qualified and arseholes.  What I want is a person who can really handle spreadsheets, someone who can copy and paste bank statement data along with payroll data and sort, manipulate, pivot and basically, well yes, reconcile.  So I go to the search field and type: (Payroll OR Accounts) AND (spreadsheets OR spreadsheet OR excel OR Lotus) AND (assistant OR junior OR clerk).  That’s a Boolean string just in case you were wondering.

But there aren’t a great many people at this level in their career that are on Linkedin yet and I have to ask, why?  If you are on the professional network that is Linkedin it shows you have ambition, it makes you available to recruiters and hell, even if you currently have a job that you are just, well, just satisfied with, it could lead to an approach from someone with a job that could progress you to where you want to be.  You don’t have to actively search these day, you can make yourself a passive candidate.

So get yourself on Linkedin, help me out.  Anyone reading this who lives within, let’s say, 20 miles of Watford, Herts, UK, and you’re looking for a steady job or a next career move, send me a message, leave a comment or message me on linkedin, after you’ve got your profile set up that is.