The One Page Covering Letter

I can’t stress enough to you the importance of a good covering letter. Let’s begin by taking a moment to consider the start of the hiring process.

The person reading your letter (and that could be either a recruiter, hiring manager or an HR Professional), may be reviewing hundreds of CV’s and you are going to get about 30 seconds (at most), to ensure that the hirer remembers you and short lists your CV.

Your covering letter is therefore setting the tone of your application, so make sure you make the very best impression you can.

Here are some suggestions on structure and content for letter:-

1st paragraph
Your 1st paragraph should explain the purpose of your letter. It should be clear and concise and may read:

'I would like to be considered for the position of ‘XYZ advertised on/in (here you could name the source of the advertisement)’.

2nd paragraph
Clearly state why you feel you are suitable for the role. Briefly outline your work experience and academic qualifications and your relevant skills. Do not be tempted to add lots of information here that is not relevant to the role. Only mention skills which are relevant to this particular role.

Yes, you do need a specific covering letter for each application. Specific applications are written by people who REALLY want that job!

3rd paragraph
Outline your career goal, ideally making it relevant to the position you’re applying for, and expand on the pertinent points in your CV. Let the hirer know what you could bring to their company. Don’t turn it into “War and Peace”, it simply won't get read.

Final paragraph

This is your opportunity to reiterate your interest in and suitability to the role and your availability for interview.

To summarise; keep it brief, keep it concise and make it relevant to each recipient you send your CV to.

To sign up for more tips on getting the job you really want click here.

 

About CJE Resourcing:

CJE Resourcing is a professional recruitment consultancy. Started in 1987 by Carmel Eastwood, we are proud to have been providing large enterprise and SME recruitment solutions for over 25 years. Our key clients are in Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire as well as the East Anglia counties of Suffolk and Norfolk. We offer an array of recruitment solutions designed to reach and attract the best temporary staff, longer term contractors as well as permanent staff. Our services include managing a temporary payroll and non-exclusive staffing recruitment. We also offer a search& selection service, usually managed on an exclusive basis. CJE has recently launched “eRecruit”, an extremely innovative, fixed fee recruitment solution specifically aimed at risk averse SME businesses.

 

 

Free Essential Annual Company Strategic Talent Management Audit

 

So, we all know that each year we have to undertake certain annual check- ups and audits which are frankly less than enjoyable; the tax return or company accounts for example.  

Yet, we rarely review the well being of one of our most important assets, the fit for purpose and contemporary suitability of our businesses strategic Talent Management plans and goals. Our people focused training, development, recruitment and retention policies. 

We develop our strategies, and somehow we become enveloped in working “in” our business, and not working “on” our business, and then just as we come up for air, another year has passed and we realise that we have failed to achieve our goals.

And so it continues.  

Perhaps it is time to take stock and review the direction that your people policies are taking? 

Your salary and benefits packages versus your competitors; your staff learning and development courses and programmes; staff attrition rates; succession planning; HR policies and legal documentation; recruitment and retention plans, practices and policies; recruitment budgetary control and analysis– the list is endless.

You may well conclude that you could do with a professional “tune-up”, and that may also lead you to conclude that you need the expert assistance and support of East Anglia's most unique and prominent Talent Management and Recruitment consultancy containing some of the region's most outstanding business mentors, coaches, and HR and Legal talent.  

CJE Talent Management has the answer!  

We believe that prevention is better than cure and the cost to any business of the loss of a valuable trained member of staff is immeasurable in terms of finance, time, productivity and morale. 

Forward thinking business of all sizes and ages, are now very tuned in to taking the utmost care of their people as they recognise that a company is only as strong as it's talent. 

Now is absolutely the right time to be planning your people policies for the future, and it all begins with a  FREE STRATEGIC TALENT MANAGEMENT AUDIT to candidly evaluate the current health and ability of your human resources,recruitment and retention plans under the expert guidance and analysis of CJE Resourcing & Talent Management.

With detailed feedback from our Talent Management diagnostics you will know what action to take to move your recruitment and retention strategies forward – real fast!  

Please call Carmel Eastwood on for an exploratory discussion.

About CJE Resourcing:

CJE Resourcing is a professional recruitment consultancy. Started in 1987 by Carmel Eastwood, we are proud to have been providing large enterprise and SME recruitment solutions for over 25 years. Our key clients are in Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire as well as the East Anglia counties of Suffolk and Norfolk. We offer an array of recruitment solutions designed to reach and attract the best temporary staff, longer term contractors as well as permanent staff. Our services include managing a temporary payroll and non-exclusive staffing recruitment. We also offer a search& selection service, usually managed on an exclusive basis. CJE has recently launched “eRecruit”, an extremely innovative, fixed fee recruitment solution specifically aimed at risk averse SME businesses.

The New Way to Solve Your Recruitment Needs - Fast!

As a small to medium sized business, you are unlikely to have the benefit of utilising your own recruitment team, and resourcing for new employees can be an awfully time consuming and expensive activity. 

Recruitment consultancies provide services from a distance from their own offices, and are pre-occupied with a wide range of vacancy projects at any one time. 

Out of sight, out of mind. 

They are certainly not working exclusively on your urgent role. 

CJE Resourcing have launched another radically different recruitment service designed to provide SME's with their own dedicated in house recruiter, called In-House Recruit! 

Our new product works seamlessly with our SME service eRecruit, and we are very excited about it! 

This is how it works, and we believe you will be excited about our In-House Recruit consultative services too! 

One of our highly experienced senior consultants will work closely with you as your totally exclusive and dedicated recruiter, an extension to your own resources, one of your team. 

Sourcing suitable passive and active job seekers through a variety of proven search and selection methods, including our own extensive database of jobseekers, your In-House Recruit specialist will provide you with a definitive and expertly selected short list. 

We will arrange all of the interviews, provide briefing notes, and even coach you in advance of the interviews in all of the latest interviewing techniques to enable you to make the perfect choice. 

Not only that, but we will also participate in your interview panel and guide you through the process as only a professional and highly experienced consultant can. 

Through second interviews and subsequent discussions and negotiations we will represent your business and manage the process until the chosen applicant commences with you. 

We are not distracted with other projects, our focus is entirely upon providing your business with a recruitment solution in an expedient fashion. 

This support and expert guidance attracts no additional fees to you, as we regard it as essential when we are appointed as the exclusive provider of recruitment services.

Don't you think that it is about time that a recruitment consultancy provided exclusive and unique services for small but perfectly formed East Anglian businesses?! 

CJE Resourcing understand, as we are an SME business too, and our focus is fully trained upon assisting companies that look just a little bit like us; "birds of a feather" and all of that! 

You are in control when we come to you, and we believe that is exactly how it should be.

About CJE Resourcing:

CJE Resourcing is a professional recruitment consultancy. Started in 1987 by Carmel Eastwood, we are proud to have been providing large enterprise and SME recruitment solutions for over 25 years. Our key clients are in Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire as well as the East Anglia counties of Suffolk and Norfolk. We offer an array of recruitment solutions designed to reach and attract the best temporary staff, longer term contractors as well as permanent staff. Our services include managing a temporary payroll and non-exclusive staffing recruitment. We also offer a search& selection service, usually managed on an exclusive basis. CJE has recently launched “eRecruit”, an extremely innovative, fixed fee recruitment solution specifically aimed at risk averse SME businesses.

Making it easy for SME’s to recruit!

At CJE Resourcing we engage in a revolving conversation that centres upon a key theme that goes something like this, “What can we do to provide valuable and cost effective solutions for our SME clients?”

You see, this question is close to our hearts and we empathise with the challenges of a small business, as the accurate definition of an SME (less than 50 staff) precisely describes our very own structure.

For us it is a very simple case of looking into the mirror and staring at our own reflection, and surprise, surprise, we get it! 

So, with the cash flow challenges of a typical SME business in mind we have devised two new pricing options for our clients that we feel provide outstanding cost benefits over the direct use of job boards, advertising, or the use of traditional recruitment consultancy services.

We are able to offer you free Job Posting on some of the best known job boards available, in exchange for providing us with a limited period of exclusivity to source suitable candidates for your available vacancy.

Not unsuprisingly, we've found most SME businesses are particularly risk averse in the current economic climate. So, we've designed our new SME recruitment solution,  eRecruit, so that a fee is only applicable when a result is gained, rather than having to pay for job boards or advertising space well in advance of any tangible return, irrespective of whether one is forthcoming.

Here’s how it works!

Provide eRecruit with your job and we will expertly devise a job description and place the role on a range of jobboards free of charge and professionally screen and vet candidates on your behalf.

Only when you interview a jobseeker that you personally select from our shortlist will a fee become applicable, and even then, it will be at a significantly lower rate than placing the vacancy directly across a range of job boards yourself. Furthermore, our fees are considerably cheaper than advertising in local, regional or indeed national newspapers.

Why not request a fee shedule?

You can opt for a single candidate interviewed  fee  or  if you prefer, you can select to pay for unlimited interviews also at a flat Fee no matter how many candidates you wish to meet.

Once you have made a job offer and your new colleague commences with your business, we will then apply an additional Introduction Fee of between £550 & £750, depending on the final salary of the candidate. Of course VAT applies to all Fees.

Compare the total combined introduction fee with other forms of attracting new talent to your company, and we think that you will be delighted!

Plus, we take away from you all of the pain of vetting and screening candidates, allowing you to work on and in your business, AND we will send you CV’s and profiles to assist you in achieving effective interviews and a favourable outcome.

If you wish us to search our own candidate database, we can do that too, for a small additional fee per vacancy. 

In the event that you ultimately wish to utilise our outstanding and proven Search and Selection services, our standard Introduction Fees will apply AND when we have found you a suitable new employee we will then deduct all of the eRecruit fees that you have been previously charged from our final invoice.

With eRecruit, we minimise your costs and risk, and increase your opportunity to succeed effectively with expert outsourced recruitment assistance and support.

Please contact Carmel Eastwood for further information and let eRecruit make it eAsy for you to recruit!

About CJE Resourcing:

CJE Resourcing is a professional recruitment consultancy. Started in 1987 by Carmel Eastwood, we are proud to have been providing large enterprise and SME recruitment solutions for over 25 years. Our key clients are in Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire as well as the East Anglia counties of Suffolk and Norfolk. We offer an array of recruitment solutions designed to reach and attract the best temporary staff, longer term contractors as well as permanent staff. Our services include managing a temporary payroll and non-exclusive staffing recruitment. We also offer a search& selection service, usually managed on an exclusive basis. CJE has recently launched “eRecruit”, an extremely innovative, fixed fee recruitment solution specifically aimed at risk averse SME businesses.

The SME business challenge... recruiting new staff

The SME business challenge... recruiting new staff

For any SME increasing staff numbers is a massive decision, but in your heart, you know that it’s the only way forward if you want to grow your business. So, here are my tips to help you successfully recruit.

Be clear on the job and person specification…

Take time to write a full job and person specification, list the key tasks you would like your new employee to deal with and think about the skills required to complete those tasks successfully.  There are numerous benefits to having a clear and concise job description, not least of which is it will help you measure your new employees performance in their role.

Decide on the hours needed, salary and benefits.

Cultural fit for your business…………
You will ascertain during your skills based interview, candidate testing and references, if your candidate can do the specific tasks required for the role.

As an SME business owner you’ll be acutely aware of the importance of “culture- fit” when bringing in a new team member and you will need to ascertain this during the interview process by asking questions about values, principles and team ethic.

Don’t forget to sell the merits of working for your business......
Your business is your universe, but in the eyes of a candidate, you may be an unknown quantity. You need to pitch your potential growth and promote any non-financial benefits of working for your business e.g. flexible work arrangements. When you are reviewing candidates, look closely at candidates who have worked for other SMEs or who have established their own businesses and are looking to come back into the workplace. You want people who are happy to get their hands dirty, have a hint of entrepreneurial spirit, or have no interest in working for large organisations. 

Temporary, contract or permanent to start with?.............
Hiring someone as a contractor or temporary employee to start with can be a smart move to ensure that, firstly, the new recruit can do the job, but also fits with the culture of your workplace. It also allows employers to test a flexible work arrangement before creating a more permanent position.  However, if a candidate is already in a permanent role they are unlikely to accept an offer of contract or temporary work from you and in this instance you would need to make an permanent job offer to attract that candidate into your business.

Most of the time, candidates will work with a contract/temporary role as long as there is a view to the role becoming permanent. Do, keep in mind that candidates may continue to consider other permanent options whilst they are working with you as most people’s priority is a permanent job.

Many employers are also happy to hire someone upfront in a permanent position. Most candidates are naturally attracted to permanent roles because it provides a sense of job security. If your business is established, there is sufficient work, and you require someone with skills that your business doesn’t have, permanent roles provide the opportunity for someone to come into the business with a medium to long term outlook.

If you would like the support of CJE Resourcing - the SME recruitment specialist- let’s talk.

You can always call me, Carmel Eastwood on 01284 277288 or 01252 517778 if you wish to discuss your recruitment plans and objectives.

About CJE Resourcing:

CJE Resourcing is a professional recruitment consultancy. Started in 1987 by Carmel Eastwood, we are proud to have been providing large enterprise and SME recruitment solutions for over 25 years. Our key clients are in Surrey, Hampshire and Berkshire as well as the East Anglia counties of Suffolk and Norfolk. We offer an array of recruitment solutions designed to reach and attract the best temporary staff, longer term contractors as well as permanent staff. Our services include managing a temporary payroll and non-exclusive staffing recruitment. We also offer a search & selection service, usually managed on an exclusive basis. CJE has recently launched “eRecruit”, an extremely innovative, fixed fee recruitment solution specifically aimed at risk averse SME businesses.