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How to choose the right Recruitment Agency

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Discover in this article how to choose the right Recruitment Agency most suitable to your Business needs.

Whether you are a candidate seeking a new role or a client looking to hire, identifying a good recruitment agency is the first vital step in making this often tedious process a pleasant and fruitful experience.

Applying for a job is hard work, time consuming and extremely competitive. Despite having an outstanding CV, hiring managers may never get to see it even if you have the right qualifications and experience. In order to maximize their chances, candidates are turning to a recruitment agency to help them in their search for their dream job.

So, how should you go about identifying a recruiter who is right for you? A quick Google search will bring up a myriad of results, and a scan of positions available may be one way of choosing who to entrust your CV to, however, this isn’t necessarily the best approach. When you research agencies, many of them will have things in common – but you need to find the one that will best serve you in your search for a new job.

The first thing to consider whether you are a client or candidate is the agency’s approach. Do they really care about you? A good agency will be keen to speak to you, find out about you and your motivations behind looking for a new job as well as quizzing you about your career goals. The same principle goes for clients who are looking to place a role with a recruitment consultant. Recruiters should be inquisitive about your organisation, the sort of culture you have there and the type of person that would fit in, as well as the usual job description.

An ability to sell is essential in a recruiter. They are your representatives in front of your potential new employer and as such, when they find you a great role, you want them to pitch you as the perfect candidate, with the right skills and personality for the role on offer.

Furthermore, you need to conduct your job search with an enthusiastic recruitment agency. Job-hunting is not an easy process, so working with someone who is positive and who motivates you when the going gets tough will make life better all round.

A recruitment agency that has genuine experience in the sector you are interested in is vital. They must understand the jobs they are recruiting for and the needs of the client entrusting them with finding the perfect candidate. There is nothing worse than being put up for a job by a recruiter who doesn’t understand the industry they are recruiting into.

A good agency should be able to help you tailor your CV so that it stands out and meets the employer’s needs, as well as offering you tips for interviews. They should be able to get you in front of great companies, respect the confidentiality of your CV and only send your details to companies with your permission.

So in short, you are looking for a recruitment agency that is enthusiastic and highly motivated to help you develop your career.

They should take the time to understand your experience and requirements, and offer you advice and support throughout the process – helping you secure your next brilliant role.

If you’re a Business Owner or Hiring Manager, ensure you select a recruitment agency that displays genuine interest in your Business and how it operates. A detailed understanding of your Business will enable a recruitment agency to fine tune their image of your desired candidate.

Finding the right talent is extremely important for growing and established Businesses. Recruitment Agencies are a highly effective way for Businesses to obtain high quality talent that is matched to Business needs, values and culture.

Graffiti Recruitment offer IT Recruitment Solutions for Businesses seeking talented candidates in the areas of operations, support and development.

Get in touch with us on 0330 22 33 047 or E-mail us at hello@graffitirecruitment.co.uk to discover how we can help you!

 

– Sarah Bloomfield

Shropshire Careers & Enterprise Advisor Network complete success!

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More than 40 business leaders celebrated the launch of an initiative in Shropshire

Representatives from companies across Shropshire attended the launch of the Careers & Enterprise Company’s “Enterprise Adviser Network”. The initiative is aimed at building stronger guidance-based relationships between businesses, schools and colleges so that young people are equipped with the knowledge to effectively develop their workplace skills.

Held at Enginuity in Coalbrookdale, the event focused on the important role that businesses have in ensuring that young people have access to the right careers advice at the right time, and the impact that access to business leaders who take on Enterprise Adviser roles can have on young people.

Speaking at the event, Dr Floyd Millen, Head of Operation Delivery at the Careers & Enterprise Company, commented on the importance of integrating business and skills in Shropshire.

“It’s great that this is happening here and now. As someone who grew up a few miles away and now lives in the south east, I’m pleased that the Marches LEP and Telford & Wrekin Council have demonstrated their commitment to bringing businesses and schools together in a way that will provide young people with transformative, life changing experiences. It is, therefore, a pleasure to be here at the official launch of the Enterprise Adviser Network.”

Drawn from across the public, private and third sectors, senior business people who become Enterprise Advisers will provide advice to school and college heads on how to effectively engage local businesses in the development of careers and enterprise plans.

Paul Hinkins, Deputy Chair of the Marches LEP, was also at the launch and highlighted why closer ties between business and education are so important – especially in an area like the Marches:

“The Marches covers a diverse geography of rural, semi-rural and urban but shares many of the same barriers as the other 38 LEP regions: namely those of a skills void and an ageing workforce.

“Here in the Marches, there are too many people in the 16-54 age bracket that leave to pursue careers elsewhere – we need to prevent that from continuing by encouraging young people to realise their potential with businesses already based here and those which will invest in the region in the coming years.

“We know that 44% of employers in the Marches see a lack of skills as a barrier to growth and that 45% of employers found it a challenge to recruit in the last year. With those facts in mind, the introduction of the CEC Enterprise Advisers should be warmly welcomed.

“This initiative encourages businesses to go into schools and tell young people the options open to them – an approach which helps us retain our home grown talent. It also helps us to identify how to help schools and colleges navigate a fast-changing careers landscape and to give students the best chance of reaching their full potential by providing friendly, strategic advice and guidance. I’d strongly encourage all businesses in the region to consider how they could contribute to this this.”

The launch event also included input from John Gallagher, Vice President at Cap Gemini and Katherine Kynaston, Assistant Director of Business, Development & Employment at Telford & Wrekin Council.

 

– MarchesLEP

15 Steps on how to get into Software Development

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Considering a career in Software Development? Read these 15 Steps which could help send you on your way to an exciting new career!

More people than ever before are entering Software Development from non-traditional backgrounds. The number of coding bootcamps is increasing, and there’s a broad push from the industry to attract more diverse developers. Many companies are no longer solely focused on hiring senior developers, and have realised that it may be smarter to train and upskill the next generation of senior developers instead.

Software Development pays well, the industry is booming, and compared to many other careers, software developers get treated very well. But the thing that draws most career-changers to software development, is the search for more rewarding work.

The career transition stage can be a big, scary, but exciting place to be. It can be one of the most challenging life-changes a person could make however, the finishing result could be a more fulfilling career.

If you’re considering a career change, there’s one question that you should ask yourself, above all others: if you make the switch to software development, will you like it? Getting to a level of skill where you are hireable is a lot of work, and you may be leaving behind a promising career in the process. The stakes are high.

If you don’t know whether you’re going to like it, build things with code. Create a Tic Tac Toe game. Start a small online business and do the development yourself. Contribute to open source. Make games. Complete programming challenges. Build a personal website and do all the design and development yourself. If you enjoy any of these things, there’s a good chance you’ll enjoy working as a software developer.

Switching careers can be an epic, challenging journey – but it could just be one of the best things you’ve ever done.

There are a thousand ways to learn to program; the route you take will depend on how you learn best. You can take online courses, find a teacher or mentor, watch YouTube videos, read books, get a Computer Science degree, watch screencasts, or simply jump onto the command line and start experimenting, hitting up Stack Overflow as you go.

 

Here are 15 tips which could help you start your journey to becoming a Software Developer!

1. Have something you (passionately) want to make: Whether it’s a blog, a game, a website, a SaaS startup, an online dating website, or an app to manage your family’s finances, having a project that you’re motivated to build, will push you through the tough times when learning to program. A real-world use-case for your skills will accelerate your learning.

 

2. Attend a coding Bootcamp to get a taster and see if you feel it will work for you: A good coding bootcamp will give you a focused environment, help when you need it, and support when the journey gets tough. When you’re first learning to code, it can be really hard to know what you should focus on.

A good coding bootcamp will also assume no prior programming knowledge, and teach you the skills you need from the ground up, unlike many programming articles and videos, which will be written with professional programmers in mind.

 

3. Connect with other people learning to program: Learning to code can be difficult at times. Having a network of other people going through the same challenges can be hugely important. If you don’t know anyone making the transition, attend local meetups and talk to people there, especially if you’re focused on languages popular among junior developers (Ruby and JavaScript in particular). If you’re lucky, your local programming meetup may even host a ‘Newbies’ night now and again. Make sure to go!

 

4. Find a mentor who works in the industry: A friendship or mentorship with a working software developer can also be immensely helpful in your journey. They will know what the interview culture is in your local industry, will be able to give you advice when you get stuck, help you focus on the most important skills to learn, and give feedback on your code. If you’re lucky enough to find a software developer generous with their time in this way, make sure to give back somehow, even if it’s just buying lunch when you meet. Once again, meetups are a great way to meet potential mentors.

 

5. Focus your learning:If you’re hoping to do backend programming primarily (the engine of most apps, not the visual presentation), focus on learning one language and one web framework as well as you can. Also aim to be somewhat familiar with JavaScript, HTML and CSS, as many roles will have you working with both the frontend and backend of an application. If you’re aiming for a front-end role, focus on JavaScript, HTML and CSS. You might also focus on a popular JavaScript MVC framework like React or AngularJS.

 

6. Be prepared to invest in your career change:You can spend a lot on the transition; books, courses, classes, and screencast subscriptions can add up to hundreds of pounds a month, and many boot camps are over £6,000. Despite the hype around programmer salaries, you can expect to make between £20k and £30k as a junior developer. At first, it might seem like you’ve invested a lot in this career change without much financial reward. Over the long term though, this investment should pay off as you rise to a senior developer level with the potential to earn between £50K and £70K.

 

7. Don’t worry if your journey isn’t linear:Learning to program is tough; it takes time. If you’re juggling a pre-existing career and other commitments, it may be difficult to focus on it for more than a few hours a week. You may have doubts, you may get distracted, and you may stop progressing for days, weeks, or months. Trust that if software development is truly what you want to do you’ll find your way eventually, even if you end up taking the scenic route.

 

8. Create an account on GitHub, build your profile, be selective about what you show: GitHub is an online hosting service for git repositories, best described as version-controlled programming projects. When a repository is public on GitHub, anyone can read through your code. Many hiring managers will check the GitHub profile of applicants, to get an idea of how they write code when nobody is watching. When evaluating junior applicants, the hiring managers may not be looking for amazing code, but instead looking for enthusiasm, work done on multiple projects, willingness to try out new things, and a sense of play. Your GitHub profile is a great way to show this, but keep in mind that hiring managers may only have a few spare minutes to review your profile. For this reason, it’s a good idea to make only substantial or interesting projects public. For projects which you were just using to learn, it might be worth making them private to give your best stuff the limelight.

 

9. It’s hard sometimes:Self-doubt is a common trap for junior developers, especially those from groups who are underrepresented in the software industry. If something feels hard, it’s not necessarily because you’re not cut out for this. It might be because you have more to learn, or perhaps, because the thing you’re working on is actually hard. You may also be concerned when something you find challenging seems easy to someone else, especially when that someone else has a similar level of experience. But stick with that person long enough and you’ll likely encounter something they struggle with, that you find really easy. We’re all different, we bring different pre-existing skills to the table, and we all practice differently. Programming is like any skill: you can become good at it if you persist long enough and care about getting better. Avi Flombaum, co-founder of the Flatiron School, says “I absolutely believe that anybody can learn how to program in the same way that we know anyone can learn how to read and write.”

 

10. Be aware of your blind spots:By all accounts, career-changers have been making waves in the development community. They’re self-starters who’ve sacrificed an existing career, and sometimes a higher salary, in order to become software developers. However, we do have blind spots. The inner-workings of computers and the internet are mind-bendingly complex, especially to anyone from a non-technical background. Mastering one programming language, one web framework, JavaScript, HTML and CSS might take up all your available time. However, when you’re starting out as a junior developer, you probably won’t realize that these things are just a small slice of the technologies you work with every day.

Think about the answers to some of the following questions:
How does your code get run?
How does your language’s interpreter or compiler know when it encounters a syntax error?
How does typing a URL into your browser toolbar result in a web page being rendered on your screen?
How does a web server work?
How do you stay logged into websites even after you close and reopen your browser?
How does your app run on a web server?
Your project is hosted on Heroku or AWS, but what do they use under the hood?
When people say an object is ‘in memory’, what does that mean?
How do you SSH onto a server?
How do you set up and use a build pipeline?
How does your operating system run on your computer?

Of course, this list could be much longer. There’s so much to learn that it can feel overwhelming. The good news is that you don’t need to know the answers to all these questions in order to be hired as a junior software developer, but you should try to learn them as you go further in your career. You can’t get really good at software development unless you have a working understanding of the tools that you work with every day. Increasing your understanding will empower you to make better choices, become better at debugging, and make better design decisions.

 

11. When you’re struggling, take time to appreciate the unique skills you have that computer science graduates may not have yet:If you’ve attended or scheduled a work meeting, been given tricky feedback at work, been through a performance review, or led a team, you already have valuable skills that recent computer science graduates may not have. You may be more at ease talking with stakeholders, better at meetings, planning and organization, simply through having more experience. Most importantly, you may have better perspective. After all, if you’ve previously worked as a nurse in an operating theatre, a bug in production might not seem so overwhelming. After all, nobody is going to get (physically) hurt!

 

12. Get experience with pairing:Pairing is the practice of having two developers share one computer and work on the code together. One developer will write code, while the other watches and does some of the following things: makes suggestions, asks questions, catches errors, and thinks more broadly about how the code being written, fits into the larger program. Since both roles are fatiguing, they will usually swap anywhere from 15 minutes to every few hours.

Pairing is a common practice in the industry and even more common in the coding interview process. You don’t need to be an expert, but pairing for the first time can be a little intimidating, especially when pairing with a senior developer. Despite this, pairing can actually be really fun, and is a fantastic way to learn. If you can, get some practice with pairing before you begin doing coding interviews. If you have a mentor, pair with them. Otherwise, you can find opportunities to pair at hackathons and hack nights in your local area.

 

13. Set up a mock programming interview:Programming interviews are likely to be quite different to the interviews you took to get a job in your current career. They often involve coding challenges, writing pseudocode on a whiteboard, pair programming, and feedback on your code. Learn as much as possible about coding interviews by researching them online. Then practice them with a friend. Find a whiteboard and solve simple problems by writing your code on it. Get your friend to ask you common programming interview questions. It doesn’t matter if your friend is non-technical. The experience will really help when it is time for your real coding interview, as they can be a little intimidating at first!

 

14. Before test-driven development, practice error-driven development:Errors will be your constant companion when learning to code. You’ll be breaking stuff all the time, and will be face a lot of error messages. As once non-technical people, error messages can be scary. Before learning to code, they may have meant that you wrecked your computer while installing a game, or bricked a phone while trying to unlock it. An important mindset when programming, however, is to see error messages as helpful.

When many developers encounter an error message, they react a little like they’ve been slapped on the hand, quickly navigating away from the browser or shell window and peering at the code they  just wrote, trying to figure out what might have made the computer so angry. In most cases, the computer is already telling us, via the error message it just printed, but we need to slow down and read it before we can reap the benefits.

Jeff Cohen, an instructor at my coding bootcamp, encouraged us to practise error-driven development. This method goes beyond slowing down to read error messages, and instead, lets a succession of errors guide you forward in your development. Call a method that doesn’t exist, see a ‘no method’ error, and then write the code to bring that method into existence. Reference a view that doesn’t exist, see a ‘no view’ error, and then create the view. Errors are not to be feared, in fact, they can guide you and help you build your skill as a software developer. Just try to avoid errors in the final product!

 

15. Learn about and practice test-driven development (at least a little bit): Once you’re comfortable with error-driven development, test-driven development is the next step in your learning. Test-driven development is a sought after skill in the industry, and familiarity with it is a requirement to get hired at some software companies. It’s the practice of writing code to ‘test’ how your program behaves, and to drive out a better design for your program. If you’ve ever added some functionality to a program, only to have it break something else that was previously working, this is one of the things that test-driven development (often abbreviated as TDD) can help with!

Few programming resources for beginners focus on TDD, mainly because it can be a difficult concept to teach. When you aren’t sure how to write good tests, it can feel more difficult than writing code. You may encounter a situation where you know exactly how to write the code that will solve a problem, but designing a test around it takes an hour because you’re not sure of the appropriate way to exercise the code with a test. Learning TDD will slow you down at first, but you’ll be repaid with confidence – confidence that your programs work, and confidence that if you break something, you’ll know immediately. Tests are an incredibly useful safety net for junior developers.

You don’t need to be an expert at testing, but some familiarity with TDD will put you ahead of many other junior applicants, especially those coming from traditional Computer Science backgrounds where test-driven development is still not always taught. Bonus points if you can eventually articulate the difference between a mock and a stub.

We hope you have found these tips useful and will have hopefully broadened your knowledge on ways of becoming a software developer. Apply yourself! You don’t need to be a genius to get into software development. Just make sure you remain consistent with your practice and studies. Remember that you will hit barriers and most importantly remember to push through them and never give up. As previously mentioned, becoming a software developer is a challenging career path, but the resulting future prospects can be outstanding. You could find choosing to become a software developer might end up being one of the best decisions of your life. Good Luck!

If you considering a career in Software Development and would like to know more, be sure to get in contact with us here!

If you already have experience in Software Development and you are seeking new opportunities, make sure you check out our latest job role by clicking here!

-Natasha Postolovski

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