So many job candidates have asked me what happens after they send in their CV to Firehead that I thought I’d let you in on the behind-the-scenes process of how we work as digital communications recruiters. I’m not promising riveting reading, but potential candidates may find this useful.
1. First contact
When you submit your CV to Firehead through our Candidate services page, it goes directly to a human being’s email and it gets read. We analyse your talent offering – skills, experience, education, years of work, personal interests, and so on – from what you present to us in your CV.
If we feel that your skill set does not match our recruitment offering, we will email and let you know. No sense wasting anyone’s time.
If we see that your skill set does match a specific job opening we have, or the kind of profile we work with at Firehead, we will email you to get in touch with you to have a chat about start the candidate process. Once the candidate process starts, you will be in our database and we can put you forward for jobs that come up matching your interests and our clients’ requirements.
2. In the talent bank – potential candidate
There may not be an immediate match (alas!) as the registration process takes a while (see details below) and priority is given to candidates already on our database. But this does not mean that the process stops here for you.
Let’s say that your CV contains skills and experience that match our digital communications recruitment profile. If you do not hear from us about a specific position within five days, this only means that we don’t currently have an open position to consider for you. Instead, we enter your name and CV into our database with the tag ‘Potential Candidate’. What does this mean? Basically, that you’ve sent us your CV, your profile looks interesting enough to pursue, and that we still need to go through the full registration process, which involves getting to know a bit more about you.
At this point, the main thing to know is that you are ‘in the system’.
3. Getting to know you – fully registered candidate
When a suitable job opening arises or we are looking for specific profiles, we usually start by calling you to have a chat about you and what you’re looking for, where, why, contract or perm; and also to tell you more about Firehead, so you can have opportunity to assess if working with us is right for you. We make a huge effort to be as personal as possible to ensure both candidates and clients are happy.
First, we need to verify your identity, your credentials and work history. Mainly, this chat is about establishing your credibility so that we can put you forward to our clients. We don’t work with people we don’t believe we can represent. Please note that all the information you send us is completely confidential. We adhere to the Data Privacy Act (and further) and don’t share your details with anyone without your express permission – unless, in the unlikely event, we are required to by law enforcement, but let’s not go there.
Second, we also explain to you how we work, so you can decide if you want to go forward with us representing you.
4. The admin bit
To establish you as a ‘Registered Candidate’, in due course we will require a copy of your passport photo page or other document proving your legal right to work in the country you will be working in. Please note: Firehead cannot procure this paperwork for you – if you don’t have it, please don’t apply.
We will ask for references, and possibly samples of your previous work. We will ask for permission to contact your former employers listed on your CV and/or managers. And we will check your social media presence. We will review all of this information and put it in our database. If everything checks out the way we want it to – ie, you are as good as you say! – we’ll change your tag status from ‘Potential Candidate’ to ‘Registered Candidate’, which means we have the information required by our own and recruitment industry, professional ethics standards to represent you (always with your express permission, of course).
If we find any bad surprises and choose not to represent you, we will inform you of this, too. We’re only into confidential information when it comes to our database, we will not keep any secrets from you – we only work as a team or not at all.
5. Job opportunities
Now, you’re ready to be put forward for appropriate job openings. When one comes up that matches your profile, we will get in touch to talk about it with you to see if you want to be considered and get your permission to put you forward to our client if you do. We will never put you forward to a client (or anyone) without your informed and express approval.
To be very clear, these are the talent areas we are actively seeking for our clients:
- TechComm
- Content strategy
- Metadata
- Terminology
- Taxonomy
- Ontology
- Content marketing
- Web content development (including copywriters)
- Augmented reality content development
- Brand journalism
- Web development
- Information architecture
- Usability
Please don’t send us a CV for a sales representative or football coach, no matter how good you are. We can’t help you outside of our specialisms. We are invested, experienced professionals in digital communications and our niche is what we know.
Any questions?
If you have any further questions about our recruitment process, please post a comment below and we’ll do our best to answer it. And if you are a digital comms ace in any of the areas above, then please submit your CV here and let’s get the process started!
Image: (CC) Garfield Anderssen/Flickr
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