Author Archives: amachwe

Dealing with Job Consultants in UK (Part 2 – The Inital Call)

Part 1: Here
Part 2: Here
Part 3: Here

IMPORTANT ADVICE IS IN ITALICS

There are several stages (as mentioned before):

1) The Initial Call

2) Pre-interview Phase

3) Post-interview Phase

4) Finalization Phase

5) Bye-bye!

Lets start at the beginning (always the best place to start!)

The Initial Call

This is the most critical phase of your interaction with any consultant or recruiter. The first question they ask you is the MOST important one (as I have learnt from experience). After introducing themselves they will ask you if it is a good time to talk or not. I would suggest you be truthful and if you are in the middle of something do not get into the call with a distracted mind. If you want things to work out it is best you listen to whatever the consultant has to say carefully. Most consultants will call you back if you request them to call later. Remember they called you because they are interested in your skills!

Usually consultants call to figure out your skill set and to generally get your profile (which includes things like salary requirement, willingness to relocate etc.) for:

– an opening that they have for which they wish to send your CV

– future openings they might be expecting or just to store your details on their systems (I call it a Fishing Call)

They will ask you questions about salary expectations, current employment status, work experience, career path desired, willingness to relocate, whether you can drive or not and if you have just completed a degree about the degree itself. You should answer all these questions truthfully to allow the consultant to judge whether you are suitable for the offered job.

Remember not all jobs are suitable for you and you are not suitable for all jobs. So try and be as clear as possible with the consultant as to what you are looking for and try and not get desperate for a job. Desperation is the worst thing to guide you in your job hunt.

Also remember consultants usually know what they are talking about in UK. While they are not experts they are aware of the general profile required for a job. If you feel that you would suit a particular opening you can try and convince the consultant but as I said before DO NOT GET DESPERATE.

The consultants also ask two – three other questions especially if it is a Fishing Call.

The first and most damaging question they can ask is if you have any other interviews lined up (with other consultants or direct through company HR). The reason they give for asking this is so that they can avoid duplicate submissions of your CV (i.e. your CV going for same job through different consultants). There is a sinister side to this question as well. If you give them the info the next call the consultant is going to make is to the company where you have your interview lined up and offer some more CVs to them which would increase the competition for you! That is why many consultants, if they have a specific opening in mind for you, will ask you not to discuss the details with anyone else and keep the client name a secret.

The second question which can harm you is when they are talking about your current employment they ask you in a very casual tone the name of your manager and what part of the organisation they work for.  They will usually say that they have done a lot of work with your current company and might give you two three names to gain your confidence. Do not answer this question under any circumstance! It can harm you in many ways:

– If you are on a contract and your contract is about to expire the consultant can send some other candidate’s CV to your manager and your contract may not be extended if the candidates are better suited or work for a lower rate.

– they will call your manager to find out if they are recruiting and may let slip the fact that you are talking to consultants.

Remember these are desperate times for the consultants as well! There are not many job openings out there so consultants have to work twice as hard for leads!

 

 

Dealing with Job Consultants in UK (Part 1)

Part 1: Here
Part 2: Here
Part 3: Here

Looking for a job in the UK? Then read on!

If you are really lucky you will never have to come in contact with job consultants, instead you will get to interact with company HR (which is a whole different ball game).

To make things clearer let me clarify what the difference is between a job consultant and company HR. Job consultant is usually the ‘middleman’ between you and the prospective employer. They get a percentage of the salary that they place you at (if you get the job), this is called ‘placement fees’.

Therefore a consultant needs to maximise the salary you get placed at, while ensuring you get the job. It is a tough job, to manage the expectations of both the job seeker and the employer. This means your average consultant needs to be smart, aggressive and pushy. This can be a good thing or a bad thing depending on which side of the gun you are facing. For proper opportunities you need someone aggressive fighting for you with the company.

A company HR person works for the company. Their loyalties are usually not divided. They usually come in during the beginning and end of the interview process.

Your interaction with the consultant is likely to be divided into the following phases:

1) The Initial Call

2) Pre-interview Phase

3) Post-interview Phase

4) Finalization Phase

5) Bye-bye!

Out of the above five phases the first (The Initial Call) and the third (Post-interview) are most important. These determine (to a great extent) which side of the gun you face.

More on these in Part 2!

Choices Within Choices

Life is full of choices.

I believe all our actions have a choice behind them.

There is nothing called circumstances. We can choose to be a slave to circumstance or not.

All choices have consequences.

All choices have choices within them.

An example:

You are at work, it is a 9-5 job and you have to stay in the office till 5pm. But you don’t feel like working and want to leave early. Most people would say that it is because of circumstances that you cannot leave the job early. If you did you could loose your job.

In my view that is a choice we  make. We choose to hold on to the job and obey the 9-5 rule. The choice is ours. The consequence of this choice is that we get stability in life.

There is a choice within this choice as well.

Holding on to the job could mean just holding on to it or it could mean doing it well. Choosing to leave early is a choice. We could choose to remain at work and do something (like write a blog!).

So remember… never curse your luck or your circumstances.

It is all down to the choices you make!

SQL Server Express 2008: Timeout and Pre-login Errors

If you are getting Timeout or Pre-login Errors when trying to access MS SQL Server Express 2008 from a Windows Vista based client then read on!

Some of the reasons behind these errors (and the solutions) are given here:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms190181.aspx

If the above does NOT resolve the error (as in my case) then before you start cursing Microsoft try this:

Go to the Network and Internet –> Network Connections

Right click on the connection being used (WiFi or LAN or any other).

I found IPv6 and and Link-Layer Topology protocols enabled which I disabled.

This partially resolved the issues. Database access was quite stable and I was able to do some of the work. But still things were not 100% normal. I was loosing the wireless connection and it was showing me connected to an ‘unidentified network’. Even the internet stopped working if the computer went into standby.

This it seems is a very common problem and more info can be found on the Microsoft site.

This problem results from

A) Issues with DHCP implementation difference between Vista and XP.

Read for solution: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928233

B) Issues with power management profiles and WiFi networks

Read for solution: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/928152

The Importance of Experience…

We all want our lives to be smooth and happy. No one really wants anything bad happening in their lives. We do various things to keep bad days away. We pray to God, we try and eat right, we read self-help books and do various other things to keep life in the green.
Perhaps the most important thing we can do to keep life in the green is to enjoy both bad and good experiences.

It is difficult to enjoy bad experiences I know that. But at the same time it is not impossible. What we must remember is that, just like day follows night, good times will be followed by bad and just as night follows day, bad times will be followed by good.

Often the good will come with the bad (as bad comes with good).

Life will never be perfect (or it won’t stay that way for long!).

I think it is up to experience to teach us to enjoy both the good and the bad times. To seek postivity even in bad things.

It is similar to when we hear a piece of music again and again it becomes embedded in our mind. We are able to pick that piece of music up even against background noise. We have trained our braint of identify that piece of music.
The same can be done with positivity. Pick any situation in your life and examine it in detail to seek what all positives there are in it. Keep doing this with new situations that come up and one day you would have trained your brain to pick the positives out of the background noise of life!

🙂

[SQLServer JDBC Driver]Character set 437 not found in …

If you face the following error message when you try and connect with Microsoft SQL Server:

[SQLServer JDBC Driver]Character set 437 not found in <PATH OF SQL SERVER LIBRARY e.g. com.microsoft.util >

1) Locate the jar file: msutil.jar – search for it or look in the MS SQL Server Drivers directory.

2) Unjar the file using WinRar or 7zip and extract all the files.

3) Go to the util folder (if msutil is the main directory then the path to the util folder is:msutil\com\microsoft\util)

4) Within the util folder locate a file called: transliteration.properties

5) Open the file in notepade or similar text editor program and add the following:

translit.type.437=VM
translit.name.437=Cp437

6) Save the file and either redirect the class path to the unjared folder with the edited transliteration.properties file or jar the msutil and replace the old msutil.jar with the new msutil.jar containing the edited file.

The Door That Wouldn’t Open….

At work we have code-lock doors (doors with numeric keypad). So whenever you want to move from one area of the office to the other you have to pass through one or two code-locked doors.

The weird thing was that sometimes the door would open after entering the code once but most times I would get stuck and need the code to be re-entered.
One day, I was feeling bit frustrated and the doors were getting stuck again and again.
As I was re-entering the code, for the nth time that day, I thought ‘man what a day I am having, even the doors here are blocking my way today’.
Few days later as I entered the code and the door got stuck. This time instead of re-entering the code I just pushed the door firmly. To my amazement the door opened without requiring the code to be re-entered.
It made me realise that similar things happen in life with all of us. The same problems keep bugging us. We keep getting stuck. But we should never loose hope. Why? Because just like that door, if we just make ourselves strong and push through these little blocks on the road to life then all doors will open!
🙂

Decisions of Consequence

We often think about decisions, in real life, before we take them. We also come across statements like ‘that was the wrong decision’ and ‘in the long run it turned out to be the right decision’.
But the other day when such a statement came up in the conversation I asked myself is any decision wrong or right? Or is the perception of a decision being right or wrong simply a matter of time and frame of mind?
Let us examine the problem with decisions first. The problem with real life decisions is that you can’t play what-if with them. Time is always flowing and you cannot come back to that same instance in time and take a different decision. There is no save-load in life.
Therefore once a decision has been taken there is no way to go back and re-take THAT particular decision. Once the route ahead has been chosen all other routes are closed automatically. In fact the very act of thinking about what to do next signifies a choice about how to proceed.
This means there is no real way of comparing two choices.
Therefore no decision can be right or wrong.
While it may appear right or wrong at a particular instance in time or when we are In a particular frame of mind, there is no guarantee that the evaluation is correct (or incorrect).
Then my question is why worry about decisions taken in the past?
Why decide to worry about a problem with no answer?
Why choose this road ahead?

Following on how can we decide what is the best road ahead at that point of time?
Well we can try and think of the consequences of taking the various different roads ahead. That is where the skill of the decision maker comes into the picture.

Quotes from Journey to the West – Part II

First part of this post can be found here.

Journey to the West is a Chinese classic. It is an epic (fictional) story about how Buddhist teachings were brought to China.

The English Language version (Chinese Foreign Languages Press edition translated by W.J. F. Jenner) is full of amazing quotes. I will be posting my favourite ones here.

Quote 5: Chapter 59

“The traveller feels lonely on the road;

Monastic robes do not keep out the cold”

 Quote 6: Chapter 60

“Don’t push around your best friend’s wife;

Don’t try to destroy the joy of his life”

Quote 7: Chapter 67

“There is an old saying that persimmon trees have seven perfections:

1. They prolong life.

2. They are very shady.

3. No birds nest in them.

4. They are free of insects.

5. Their leaves are beautiful after frost.

6. The fruit is excellent.

7. The branches and leaves are big and fat.”

Quote 8: Chapter 70

“By being too clever one becomes a fool;

What was once a joke can turn out to be real”

Quote 9: Chapter 73

“You are never poor if you are at home;

but poverty on a journey is killing”

Quote 10: Chapter 73

“Weeping eyes meeting weeping eyes;

One broken heart coming across another”

Quote 11: Chapter 73

“While good deeds stay at home;

Bad deeds are known far and wide”

Quote 12: Chapter 77

“No thread can be spun from a single strand;

Nobody can clap with a single hand”

Quote 13: Chapter 80

“A mountain can’t stop the road; it can find its own way across”

Quote 14: Chapter 80

“Do not fail to do a good deed because it is small;

do not commit a bad deed because it is small”