The GAAPweb blog

Accountants - a necessary evil?

It’s not easy being an Accountant is it? Well at least that’s the impression you lot gave in a recent survey conducted by Accountancy Age and CPA Australia. I suspect the intention of this survey was to remind you all that you could be doing the same job in sunnier climes but what it revealed was a bit more unpleasant.

Only 6% of those who took the survey feel ‘completely fulfilled’ and 44% revealed they ‘sometimes’ regret accountancy as a career choice.

And how the 30% of you that believe accountancy is regarded as ‘a necessary evil’ even get out of bed in the morning is beyond me.

It makes for interesting reading so go take a look.

And then get right back here and find yourself a job that’ll remind you why you got into this in the first place.

Or alternatively cheer yourself by laughing at people with really awful jobs.

The Penny Millionaire Project - Week 3

Monday – a day off work. I decided, after having drafted and screwed up far too many “Found” posters publicising the silver locket I found last week, that it’d be easier to make like a character from a Famous Five book and take it to the police station.

I walked in feeling strangely guilty, and handed it over, whereupon the desk sergeant said “Ah! That’s almost certainly what someone came in asking after yesterday”. He noted down my name and address – argh! I had wanted to slip through the net, but now I’m on file – and asked if I’d mind the owner contacting me to say thanks. Well of course I didn’t mind! Where there’s gratitude, there’s usually reward.

To congratulate myself on my honesty and selflessness, I decided to stop off and get myself a nice Café Misto in Starbucks (I know, I know). Parked up, went to get a ticket and started putting my money in. The machine rejected my 20p, so I slid my hand into the returned coins slot and there, with my substandard 20p, was an amazing find – a bonus 50 pence coin! It can’t have been more than 10 minutes after I handed in the locket. Now I know why they call it instant karma.

Thursday – a miserable, just-rained sort of a morning. I’d not long embarked on the long, joyless trudge to the station, when I saw a penny outside a shop near my home that does something with glass, I’m not sure what. The coin felt horrible to the touch – damp and gritty and I cringed to think where it might have been, but I got it.

Friday – the train home. A woman was sleeping open-mouthed on a 6-seater across the aisle from me. On my way past her when we reached my stop, there was a 5p on the floor, near enough to her dozing leg to make me nervous, but not enough to stop me rescuing it.

Week Three

How much found: 56p

Total found so far: £3.40

How it could now be spent: A packet of 10 carp hooks.

Of course, you might rather get a job than pick up other people’s dirty cash.

Recruitment Consultant and Jobseeker: Win - Win situation?

A recent response to our subscriber survey, (wherein ex candidates give their reasons for unsubscribing) has got me thinking about the kind of service that we at our site, and more specifically the recruitment consultants that we use, provide.

He basically felt that many of the recruitment consultants he was put in contact with through our site were not very engaged with his needs, were somewhat bad mannered and often neglected to return his calls.

Without wishing to offend everyone in our client database, or indeed to alienate current or prospective subscribers, I feel that this issue requires some attention.

After a little web based research, I came across www.recruitmentrevolution.com which is a site devised by entrepreneurial graduate Jamie Mistlin.

He decided to set up a new online recruitment service after having been persistently disappointed in agencies who failed to recognise his potential.

His business does not use agencies and therefore omits the rec con middle-men.

However, he does also charge his candidates for placements and it is a little hazy to me how it will work without some mass marketing and a good deal of money behind it. But still – we find the work of a chap who in his frustration with recruitment agencies decided to take the matter into his own hands. This alone, I think, merits some applause.

In response to this, a recruitment consultant (I’m assuming she’s a recruitment consultant) satirically named “Student Grant” had this to say: First off they need to find advertisers and lots of them. As they have cut out recruiters from advertising they are going to need one hell of a marketing budget to make the impact from direct clients. Funding will be a major issue and they will struggle to get a large offering of graduate jobs.

You can find the whole debate at here.

I think it can be hit or miss if someone is successful with an agency or not, and it is not always necessarily the fault of the client if a candidate persistently fails to get a placement. As time goes on, graduates will be increasingly dissatisfied with recruiters but that has a lot to do with the fact that there are more qualified and capable people out there than there are jobs available. This I feel is the main issue at stake here.

The Penny Millionaire Project - Week 2

Early success this week. On Monday’s walk home from the station, I spotted a 1977 vintage 2p outside my local Co-op. It looked a bit like someone had taken a hacksaw to it, but it's ok, I don’t think it’s too damaged. Should still be legal.

Nothing on Tuesday. Was actually starting to get nervous about the future of the project, but Wednesday saw that off.

I usually walk to the train station by cutting through a park, and today was no different. But something (and I don’t want to get superstitious about this) made me cut into the park a bit before I normally would. As I cast my eyes hopefully down, immediately there in front of me, in a neat little fallen-out-of-a-trouser-pocket pile on the grass, was my biggest success to date – £1.72! I can’t really describe the thrill of seeing first a pound coin, then a 50 pence, a 20, and, in a respectful nod to the star coin of the project, two pennies, so I won’t try, but I was very happy indeed.

Thursday – another day, another soupcon of newly acquired wealth. I hope you don’t think this is cheating, but I was so excited when this project was conceived that I couldn’t help but tell my nearest and dearest – my mother and my 11 year old brother and sister (kids are potentially quite an asset – having eyes nearer to the floor should make for better coin spotting ability). Today, it was mum who brought home the bacon. Struggling through the pain of having pulled something in her back, she heroically managed to sink low enough to scoop up a penny outside a pub, and gamely handed it over.

Woke up at a disgustingly early 6am on Saturday morning, and decided to go and do the post-Friday night cab-kebab trail, figuring there was bound to be cash wherever drunkards had been fumbling their money out in the dark. Absolutely no coins anywhere. A flutter of excitement when I saw a discarded pencil case outside a bar with BANKING writ large across it, but it was empty.

I could have brought home at least 28 pints of milk sat doing nothing outside Ben and Jerry's and various other cafes, but I wasn’t sure anyone would have bought milk from me with no questions asked. Besides, it’d be a shame if a project which started out so noble and true ended with my arrest for petty theft.

Headed home, but an inspired detour led to me finding a sterling silver locket lying in a park. Opened it up half expecting a tiny scroll or map to be inside, but it turned out to be 6 cut-out faces of various ages gurning at me. So now I’ve got a project within a project – tracing the owner. This is definitely good news. Even though it isn’t hard cash, if I can return this locket to the mourning schoolgirl who owns it, I’ll have such an avalanche of good karma that I’ll be finding money everywhere.

Week Two

How much found: £1.75

Total found so far: £2.84

How it could now be spent: A pack of 10 rewritable CDs.

If the project keeps going this well, I might need to find myself an Accountant.

Dealing with Stress

Struggling to cope with the day to day pressures life throws at you? Use the following excerpt from 'deal with stress', one in a series of online stress guides, to take the first step in stress management: spot the symptoms.

For many individuals, joining the finance culture has entailed a substantial personal cost: stress. The word ‘stress’ has found as firm a place in our modern lexicon as ‘fast food’, ‘mobiles’ and ‘IT’. ‘It’s a high stress job’, people often say, awarding an odd sort of prestige to an occupation.

But for people whose ability to cope with day-to-day matters is at crisis point, the concept of stress is not a matter of bravado. For them, stress can be translated as pain!

It’s important to be able to distinguish between pressure and stress.

Take a good look at your well-being. If you experience any number of the following behavioural and physical symptoms on a frequent or near constant basis, it might be time to start looking for causes and to reassess your priorities. These symptoms may be your body’s way of telling you that you have crossed over the dividing line between healthy pressure and harmful stress.

Behavioural symptoms:

• Constant irritability with people
• Difficulty in making decisions
• Loss of sense of humour
• Suppressed anger
• Difficulty concentrating
• Inability to finish one task before rushing into another
• Feeling the target of other people’s animosity
• Wanting to cry at the smallest problem
• Lack of interest in doing things after returning home from work
• Waking up in the morning and feeling tired after an early night
• Constant tiredness
• Lack of appetite
• Tendency to sweat for no good reason
• Headaches

So right now, in the midst of your job search, take a step back, regain control of yourself and remember nothing is more important than your health.

Job boards are dead. Long live the Job board!

There was a time when the only ways to find a job were through someone you knew, newspaper job ads, or by mastering the art of social networking. Today the internet, and more specifically the job board, is slowly strangling the life out of the humble printed word.

And whilst nepotism has always and will always be a major boon for those in the fortunate position of being able to capitalise upon it, the ways in which we can now find ourselves in such a position are increasing in number.

People can now network in their own time, in their own space, and without suffering from aching cheeks as a result of smiling all night in an attempt to look approachable.

The online recruitment process is evolving

Both Microsoft and Reuters are soon to launch a sort of ‘Myspace for Accountants’, a networking site geared toward finance professionals. This could all lead to an entirely different method of recruitment, where everyone can potentially be headhunted, and everyone can be the headhunter.

It could lead to a referral system becoming a prominent method of recruitment, or it could slip away quietly, meekly bowing to the mighty power of recruitment heavyweights such as Monster or Jobsite.

Then again, perhaps when Google get a real handle on the industry (and rumour has it they’re interested in buying Monster) they’ll crush all of their competitors to dust with their ready-made candidate base, or maybe US site Jobster will cross the Atlantic to remind the UK that anything we can do, they can do better.

The only sure thing about the world of recruitment advertising is that newspaper classifieds will eventually be utterly usurped by their online cousins. In terms of functionality, the two just don’t compare.

Newspaper ads versus online ads

Online, a job ad can contain far more information than the limited amount of text a newspaper ad space can afford. Ads can stay posted every day for a fraction (and I mean a small fraction) of the cost of running the same ad day after day in, say, The Times.

You can click through to the company website more often that not to find out more about who you’re considering applying for a job with, application is paperless and much quicker, they offer quicker response times, you can search by keyword…Really, the only advantage newspaper job advertising has over online is its portability.

On the train for example, you see far more people with newspapers than you do with laptops, and more to the point, laptops in range of an accessible wi-fi signal. Still, wi-fi is becoming more widespread on trains and with mobile phone technology threatening to offer PC-standard internet usability, we could soon see an end to people circling their interest in red marker and the advent of people tagging their interest with an internet bookmark.

But this evolution has been on the cards for a while. Newspaper advertising prices are dropping drastically in an attempt to hold on to the market, to wrestle it back from the job boards. But what are the job boards doing with this success?

Where do job boards go from here?

Today’s successful job boards have been established for years, many were started on a shoestring budget (GAAPweb included), and took years to get optimised sufficiently to start showing in the search engine results pages. To start a successful job board today would require a vast outlay of cash, if for no other reason than to raise awareness of the fact that your job board exists in a market that is growing all the time.

Job boards as we know them are under threat from change, but this change is not necessarily a bad thing. For many, the ‘death’ of the job board as we know it makes way for better services and happier candidates.

Clearly, not all job boards are going to survive the long haul, and those that do are going to have to change with the recruitment landscape to be a viable prospect. The aforementioned giants such as Monster and Jobsite are likely to keep going on strong, but smaller sites may find themselves overlooked by candidates drawn to new and interesting features that bigger sites may offer.

For example, US site Jobster now offers a standard job listing for free. Free. They make their money from advertisements and the premium job advertising options they offer.

Smaller sites could not compete with this kind of strategy. They would lose custom and simply dry up and disappear.

Then there’s theladders.com, a ‘job search resource’ employing a strategy that would have me laughed out of any meeting at GAAPweb - the candidate has to pay to view the job adverts.

Again, a US site, its tagline is ‘The Most $100k+ Jobs’. It’s catering exclusively to the higher end of the recruitment market, and all signs point to it being a great success.

It’s difficult to predict what’s going to be the next big move in terms of online recruitment, but the common consensus is that niche boards, such as theladders.com and indeed GAAPweb, can survive the war for job board monopoly currently being fought by mouse clicks and keystrokes across the world.

How can job boards survive?

To offer a tailored, unique service to a particular segment of jobseeker, with relevant, useful, interesting and even entertaining content all on one site, all generated to be of interest to a certain demographic – that’s the way forward.

Why would a solicitor go to Monster.com when all their relevant job search functions are laid out far better on totallylegal.com? An engineer’s more likely to find more of what they’re looking for on jimfinder.com than Jobsite, and (forgive me) a Finance professional would be foolish to look anywhere other than GAAPweb.com for their next career move.

Job boards won’t die, although many providers of job posting services will most certainly fall by the wayside.

Those that prevail will offer innovations in the job-hunt process (networking capabilities/referencing) and will most likely tailor their services to a niche audience.

Still, when the war is over, the one clear winner will be the candidate.

The GAAPweb blog - a quick 'hello'

Welcome one and all - that includes you at the back - to the GAAPweb blog. As most of you (we hope) are aware, we at GAAPweb are the leading financial and accounting online recruiter. "Yes, I know!" I hear you cry, "But what's with the blog?". Well, my friends, let me tell you…

Basically, we want to communicate with YOU. And that, in a nutshell, is that. Our dedicated editorial team will be producing stories and threads regarding pretty much anything to do with Recruitment, the web, Accounting and Finance and a whole lot more in between, looking for your thoughts and comments.

What’s that you say? "Who is this mysterious web team?" Again, I have the answer…

Employed as Online Content Editors, we are a menagerie of English and Journalism graduates who share tales of our latest culinary experiences and weekend plans whilst making sure the jobs on our website match our own high standards.

Along with ensuring the search terms in our jobs are keenly refined to suit both you willing candidates and hard-working Recruitment Consultants, we tend to supplement our day with thought-provoking debates, such as "If you could be any nationality, what would you be?". If you're interested, I’d like to be Dutch. There's something oddly alluring about having a 'Van' as part of my name. Don't ask me why…

In the interests of keeping you guys involved, how about some suggestions for a few debates?

So, this is me (Chris - last night's dinner: curry, weekend: house party/birthday) signing out and welcoming you with open arms.

The Penny Millionaire Project Week 1 - The Project Begins

Thursday saw my first penny rescue. Walking home from the train station, I noticed a brilliantly shiny example that seemed to cry out “pick me up, please, pick me up, I’ve polished myself. I just want a home.” I couldn’t believe no sucker had spotted it. It was sat on the corner of the pavement, right by some traffic lights. Unfortunately the lights were on red, which meant a captive audience of bored goons sitting in cars watching.

As I stooped, feeling curious eyes on me, I forced a wry grin and tried to look playful – as if it didn’t matter to me whether I got hold of the penny or not, I was just humiliating myself to amuse us all. But I’m going to have to get used to that uncomfortable feeling of being observed pretty quickly. I need to be bold for this to work – a prospective millionaire penny saviour has no time for shame.

A trip to the gym, and yet more success. I had to park pretty far away as the gym car park was full (the chubby clientele not considering that walking somewhere might help them), so a lengthy trek from car to gym was required.

With the manifesto ringing in my ears, I kept my eyes on the ground, determined to bring something home for the jar. I’d only walked a few metres when I saw a dull penny on the tarmac. Fifty or so metres further on, and another penny lay by a parking ticket machine.

I reached the gym, 2p richer and flushed with success, and once inside at the reception desk I showed the woman my card and went to walk in the gym when I was stopped dead in my tracks. Another penny laying there on the fern green carpet of the reception area. I know the receptionist looked at me as I ducked out of sight and popped up again a second later with a triumphant air, but by now I didn’t care. It’s all about the loot.

After my workout, I went into the changing rooms, and since there was nobody around, I thought I’d have a peek in some of the empty lockers for forgotten pound coins. Sure enough, in the second one I looked in, there was! I know this might be slightly outside of the original remit of the project, in that the money wasn’t so much “lost” as forgotten minutes earlier, but I’m getting greedy. A walk to the local newspaper shop for a celebratory chocolate bar in the afternoon made me even richer thanks to a 5p in some grass around a tree.

This is easier than I thought. I have a pang of regret for all the wasted cash retrieval opportunities that must have passed me by over the years. It’s possible I could have been dictating this from my yacht in the Med by now.

Week One

How much found: £1.09

Total found so far: £1.09

How it could now be spent: A can of Lilt and a bag of Revels.

If you prefer a more pragmatic approach to making your way to your first million, you could do a lot worse than looking at our jobs.

The Reluctant Blogger

I have to say, I approach the notion of blogging tentatively. Even as I write the word my spell check squiggles beneath it with its admonishing red zigzag. The subconscious impulse is to pay attention, to amend, but there is nothing to revise it to...Perhaps I have an antiquated version of Word. In fact, yes, I more than probably do…I can’t imagine that in today’s increasingly technologically assisted culture that a word like “blog”, being as it is in relatively common parlance, has escaped entry into the up-to-the-minute OED...(Or indeed Websters – the online OED charge a subscription fee!). ASBO after all has made its way in there. Perhaps I’m just not moving quickly enough with the times.

Whilst thoughts like this make me feel dreadfully ancient I still think that had I been born in the eighties rather than the seventies I would have less trouble with this as I would have developed as the internet developed and indeed would have known no other kind of planet.

By way of comparison, although I recognise it may not be the best one, in all the time that I’ve been alive there have been televisions and whilst I’ve heard from a number of my older relatives that televisions are the scourge of mankind I’ve always accepted them as part of our culture, proffering good things as well as bad. I can, however, remember a world before the internet existed.  I’m not by any means a technophobe but the idea of participating in a blogosphere of fellow netizens (incidentally my spell check is going wild now) makes me wary purely because I prefer my interactions (as far as possible anyway) to be real rather than virtual.

First day jitters

Heya everyone, I’m Mhairi and I’m another of the lovely webbies at GAAPweb. I’ve been here for a year now so the terror of my first day is now a far distant memory. Hopefully though, all going well on the job hunting front, many of you will soon be facing the nightmare that is - The First Day. This is the day where you find out one or all of the following:

• The office dress code is totally different to your last place of work and everyone keeps looking at your jeans and asking if it’s laundry day.
• The person who was ‘ill’ when you were shown round the office is actually the office psycho – and you’ll be sat by them.
• The person who did the job before you was adored by the entire office and you’ll spend your first few months plagued by the phrase ‘that’s not the way X used to do it’.
• The work/life balance talked about in your interview, in practice means you’ll get a laptop so you can at least see your family or flatmates while you fire off emails until one in the morning.

Even if you’re off to your first day at a dream job the ‘first day jitters’ can strike at any time. With this in mind, here are a few tips worth taking note of, as the more prepared you are the less nervous you’ll be:

• Plan your route and leave in plenty of time. It won’t impress anyone if you’re late and it’ll just make you more flustered.
• Plan your outfit. From your interview you should be able to judge what is suitable for your new workplace so it’s best to try and blend in. If you like to stand out with what you wear it’s probably best to give it a week or so to assess how lenient the dress code is before introducing that fluorescent Lycra number.
• Ask for help. You’re new, people will expect you to need help and most people enjoy giving advice as it makes them feel like they’re good at their job.
• Smile. First impressions count and you want people to think you’re going to be good to work with. Keep it natural though – overdo it and we’re back in office psycho territory.
• Be ready for the paperwork. Bring in any paperwork such as your p45 or National Insurance number which you may need to get set up on the payroll.
• Talk to people. This is no time to be shy (and yes, everyone in the GAAPweb office, I know I’m the last person in the world to be handing out this advice) it’s hard but it’ll make day two so much easier.
• Talk to the useful people. As well as those you’ll be working with directly it’s sensible to introduce yourself to a few others such as the Office Manager who’ll be responsible for a million things like: office supplies; holidays; pay issues etc. It’s also a good idea in most offices to be nice to IT so they don’t laugh too much at you when you get them over to fix the computer that you actually just forgot to plug in.
• Keep it in perspective. If it doesn’t all go to plan it’s probably not the end of the world, so just get through it and try again on day two. For the ultimate guide in overreacting have a look at this story about a Lawyer who’s suing his dry-cleaners for losing the suit he wanted to wear on his first day.

If your first day does go horribly wrong just console yourself with the fact that there’s a load of people out there, and probably in your new office, who messed up just as much on their first day. In fact if anyone fancies sharing their own first day nightmares…