Career Opportunities: the Ones That Never Knock

Abstract

With job hunters seemingly now outnumbering vacancies in the legal information field by some margin, recruiters currently have plenty of choice in front of them when seeking to fill a post with the right candidate. In the current market, the applicants themselves need to do everything they can to maximise their chances of selection. The general aspects of good and bad practice in job hunting and recruiting should be obvious to everybody of a professional status. But are they? We're all supposed to know the textbook dos and don'ts of recruitment and selection; but how much attention are employers and candidates in the information sector really paying to the detail? Through his role as Library Manager in the London branch of a national network of law schools, Mark Haines has sat on the recruitment and interview panels for over thirty posts over the past six years. He has also been job hunting himself during this time; applying for more than fifty posts over the past two years, and attending more than a dozen interviews. As a result of these experiences, he has witnessed countless examples of good and bad practice. Employers and applicants may all be aware of what they should be doing, but in this paper he will be discussing his experiences of what they're really doing; and most importantly, what can be done to improve performance in the light of this.