7 Top Tips to Land An Ecommerce Job | Overcoming Ecommerce Job Agency Problems
Looking for an ecommerce job, a career in ecommerce, have freelance ecommerce experience, think you’ll walk into an ecommerce employment position? THINK AGAIN!
A good friend of mine Sid recently sold his product portfolio and ecommerce business and fancied a career inside of an ecommerce business, a change, a new challenge was the plan. So i agreed to help him find his dream position and started to construct his ecommerce CV. However it wasn’t that simple and the problems detailed below came as big shock to both of us! The keywords to note here are “inept” and “recruitment agencies”.
These are his ecommerce credentials:
- 10 Years Ecommerce Experience covering A to Z of ecommerce.
- 10 Ecommerce websites briefed, built, launched and traded from and subsequently sold – with no prior experience. No mean feat!
- Multi-channel retailing: Online and Offline mix.
- Total 50,000 products handled across the sites: source, stock, sell, ship, support.
- Stock and Drop-Ship products to UK and Global customers.
- 100,000 pages SEO engineered and listed in Google’s index, with top rankings achieved.
- Handled 50 supplier accounts.
- Returns reduced from industry average of 10% to 1.5%
- Feature rich, pioneering driven bespoke ecommerce solution with many exclusive mods.
- Skill set used on sites: Web Content and Product Description Copy, Explosive SEO, Integrated Search Engine Marketing and Social Media Marketing.
- Traffic Generation techniques including top Google Rankings for any desired keyword.
- Usability and Conversion refinements decreasing bounce rates from 90% to 35%, increasing conversions from 1 in 200 to 1 in 33 from natural organic SEO traffic. PPC traffic conversions at 1 in 15.
- Pioneering checkout process refined with “Cart & Checkout Abandonment Rates” refined from 80% plus to 30%.
Now, any ecommerce business looking at this condensed skill set and CV/resume will instantly know these are stats that are pretty unique. This is someone with an innate, internalised ecommerce experience that would benefit any ecommerce business, big or small. Anyone who can turn £500 start up costs into an annual turnover of 1 million in 3 years in the animal that is ecommerce can handle any ecommerce roles, period!
What happened next may SHOCK you!
So we put a solid and refined CV together using the above ecommerce achievements as the foundation and hit the job boards and job websites: JobSite, Monster, Reed, Total Jobs, Search, etc. Ecommerce jobs in the UK are few and far between with only approximately 10-15 per month being made available, so the competition is pretty competitive. But with a CV including the above skill sets and experiences you’d think would get my mate into the interview rooms quick, right? Wrong! not even a sniff!
Ecommerce Job Agenices – The Resistance to landing your Dream job!
Love em’ or hate em’ Job Agencies NOW control 95% plus of all jobs advertised in the UK. Here in lies the problem. Not only does your CV have to work if and when it gets in the hands of the employers, it first has to get through the slippery hands of job agencies many of which have employees (recruitment consultants) that are next to useless, with absolutely no experience whatsoever in your chosen market, be it ecommerce, web design, web development, etc. Your only opportunity to get an interview and fulfil your future ecommerce destiny is literally in the hands of these ecommerce job agencies operated on the shop floor by these squeeky recruitment consultants!
Ecommerce Jobs – A Commission fuelled Lottery!
The job market in 2010 is literally a lottery, its a fierce and competitive commission driven free-for-all market controlled by ecommerce job agencies and their IT/ecommerce consultants. FACT! 2 out of every 10 applicants for an ecommerce job are actually a serious contender to be offered and get that job, such is the inept ability of ecommerce job agencies and their consultants to put forward the correct applicants.
So naturally the question is; why do companies even bother using ecommerce job agencies to ultimately hire new employees? Its anyone’s guess why! If you are deadly serious about hiring the right person, an exceptional and high quality individual then how can you possibly leave it to chance by using a money hungry, post graduate, debt heavy, pimple faced moron? The reality is, they do…
So before i detail our 7 key observations how to land your dream ecommerce job, let me give you a few of my mates’ recent experiences. Names below NOT changed to protect the identities of those involved. These recruitment consultants need to be named and shamed and uprooted from these key positions so genuine and high quality ecommerce candidates get a fighting chance to land their dream ecommerce jobs and give incredible value to their employers.
Jessica Logan from Michael Page Recruitment. The way my mate was treated by this individual was pretty much indefensible. The initial phone call from Jessica Logan was like an onslaught and interrogation loaded with resitance and animosity making my friend immediately feel uncomfortable and on the defensive. I heard the call and it was like an interview for Robert McGarby’s assistant! …and this was the initial call!
There is a saying in NLP “The meaning of my communication is equal to the response that I will receive” and this suggests that communication is like a mirror, if you are abrupt, aggressive and forceful, that is exactly what you’ll get back.
Ed Sutcliffe from Search Consultancy in Leeds is another Turkey. Sid applied for a few ecommerce roles and sent his CV to Search Consultancy and Ed Sutcliffe was the guy handling the online retail/ecommerce jobs there. Never once did Sid get a reply, response, not even a “no thanks” from Ed. So after 2/3 weeks Sid spoke with Ed Sutcliffe directly on the phone and he said “send the CV over, i have no record of it” – immediately we knew this was total BS as Sid had emailed it 3/4 times for various ecommerce roles. So Sid emailed the CV again with an email explaining why Ed should put Sid forward for ecommerce jobs, detailing the key skills and experience above. Again no reply, no response, not a whisper!
What the recruitment consultants, and anyone taking actual interviews-when it gets to this step-needs to know, is that in 2010 and beyond, to get the best out of people you need to build rapport, this is critical to get a feel for the candidate and get the best out of them. When you put someone through an intense interview like process when you are trying to find suitable candidates, this simply doesn’t work. It isn’t the ecommerce recruitments job to interview the candidate! So using these antiquated techniques they immediately build a gulf not a bridge.
An actual quote from Jessica to Sid was “your CV is simply not good enough for a 25-30K ecommerce job, there are many other candidates with far stronger CV’s, you don’t even have a degree”. BS! if she even bothered to look at the CV and the sites built, traded from and sold which includes 50K units sold, 5 million turnover, etc, anyone can see we have a high a calibre candidate here who can add massive value to any ecommerce company.
Don’t Judge a book by its Cover!
Job agencies and recruitment consultants need to be smarter than judging people on face value, a phone call! We found a few of the agencies, making rash judgements and not liking Sid and judging him on the phone call alone. This was a a result of the articulation on that given phone call, but this was because of poor and inappropriate questions and poor communication from the consultant.
If the consultant had asked better questions and tapped into Sid’s passion for ecommerce, then their response would have been so much different. Re-read the above NLP quote to understand this! We found many of the questions to be hot air, generic and totally useless questions. So they need to actually look at results and not judge by one simple phone call. The great Richard Branson springs to mind, not very articulate but what a business genius!
Job agencies and recruitment consultants need to be smarter than judging, not linking and judging people on poor articulation. The thing is many that talk-the-talk cannot walk-the-walk, they are hot air.
Experience Vs Theory!
Anyone with any common sense will know experience is priceless and although formal degree education is a nice tag to have, essentially a degree shows you have the ability to learn and assimilate theoretical knowledge and articulate this learned theory during an exam or completion of modules, etc. But when you’ve actually experienced and lived real life scenarios this gives your subconscious the ability to associate, internalise and gain through actual involvement and this ultimately allows for later reference, recall and practice. Simply not possible through mental education and learning alone.
So Michael Page have a lot to answer for and themselves should recruit stronger people as they get a large chunk of the available ecommerce jobs. And when they have an inept, totally inexperienced individual like Jessica Logan handling these key ecommerce job positions, they are denying genuine, hard working and exceptionally skilled and experienced ecommerce retailers the honest chance of getting ecommerce interviews.
7 Top Tips to Landing Your Ideal Ecommerce Job
- Build your CV so its clean, simple, no more than 2/3 pages and detail your most recent job roles, positions, achievements and experience high up on the CV as many recruiters will not read it all and many will even fail to view any external links so get as much key data on the page as you can.
- If you have problems and resistance from the ecommerce job agencies or recruitment consultants, simply move on.
- Following on from number 2 – If you can establish the company that has the available ecommerce position go direct. But once you are being represented by a recruitment agency then do not go direct, following the instructions and protocol of the consultant.
- Realise that many recruitment consultants are A) in this job for the money (commission), B) many have recently left university or have moved into recruitment from other non related markets – again for the money, so you have to educate them-where possible-to your skill set and how to best position you to future employers so you get the interview shot.
- Take as many interviews as possible as its a numbers game, the more interviews the more chance of landing a job. Its also a good idea to take interviews to get some experience and build up your momentum and confidence.
- Post your CV and covering letter (if available and required) on the website job Boards (JobSite, Monster, Reed, Total Jobs, Search, etc) to get exposure and importantly use pertinent keywords in your Title field and in your Profile as its like any other search engine/website and you will be found by matching your data to searchers keywords.
- Finally be warned that very few recruitment consultants show any loyalty to you. They will hound you before, during and immediately after the job interview process-as they want their commission, but if you don’t land the job or are not suitable for whatever reason, then don’t expect most consultants to contact you to give you feedback, many will rapidly disappear. Unfortunately you are treated like cattle!
If you find this article useful, have comments to make or if you think you have points to add, please make a comment below, tweet on Twitter or share on your desired website. Thanks Ian – Juice37
