Article 1 – Samantha Tipton is the King…
Be honest, are you one of the 46m people a month playing King.com’s Candy Crush Saga? If you thought that number was high, here are some more facts and figures about the game we all get invited to ten times a day on Facebook –

• 61m ‘likes’ on Facebook

• One in seven people in Hong Kong are regular players

• In the US Apple iStore, daily revenues are around $630,000

• It’s the third most popular free app as well as the highest grossing app on Google Play

• It has been installed half a billion times across Facebook, iOS and Android devices

It’s massive. It’s Angry Birds all over again and those who play it appear to love it.

This is a recruitment newsletter though, so why are we talking about games that have been specifically designed to detract you from working hard and furthering your career?

It’s because our colleague, Sam, has just signed up King.com as a client of Asset Resourcing. Not only are we immensely proud to have such an influential business on board, it is a testament to building, nurturing and maintaining solid business relationships that last.

She always takes the ‘friend approach’ to recruitment and always finds that by not badgering people on the phone and letting them contact her in their own time, the resulting relationship is one of mutual respect and subsequently more successful.

The hiring manager at King.com was aware of Samantha’s recruitment techniques and the standard of candidate she represents because she operates a European recruitment community on LinkedIn of which a number of King.com executives are members. As well as posts about specific roles, Samantha posts interesting and relevant articles and incites debate about the European job market, HR, business development as well as links to key speakers throughout Europe. It’s a method of client engagement that adds value to the Asset Resourcing service offering.

At the moment, she is looking after King.com’s senior recruitment and recruiter roles for London, Germany and Stockholm. There is also a Learning and Development business partner position in London and a HR Business Partner in Barcelona with other positions within the HR space in the future.

Article 2 – News in Brief

We thought we’d give you a selection of some of the jobs and recruitment stories making the rounds in the last week or so. Have you read anything interesting, funny or newsworthy? Drop us an email at enquiries@assetresourcing.com or follow us on Twitter @AssetResourcing and tell us. If it’s befitting our esteemed newsletter, we might include it next month!

How Much Overtime Do You Do?
Alan Jones writing in last week’s London Evening Standard has suggested that according to the TUC, 5.4m people worked more than their contracted hours for no additional pay in 2013, amounting to £640m of unpaid or ‘free’ work. The article goes on to say that one in five workers do almost eight unpaid hours a week with the highest proportion of workers, an estimated 900,000 coming from London. Breaking it down further, it seems that workers in their early 40s are most likely to do unpaid overtime, and the most common jobs where employees go over and above are, unsurprisingly, in education, professional, scientific and technical jobs.

Do you work overtime without being paid? What are your thoughts? Do you mind putting the hours in or do you resent not being paid for the work you do? Tell us at the details above.

Student Pessimism
In the same paper, Alison Kershaw reported that in an NUS poll where the student body questioned almost 4,000 students and recent graduates about their views on the jobs market. It turns out that pessimism is still rife amongst arguably our most vital demographic. Some say it’s the responsibility of big business to improve the job market and some say that it’s unfair to make students and recent graduates work for free for weeks or months in order to get experience. It’s that vicious circle again. Just over 40% said they were pessimistic about their chances of finding a good job in the next 12 months but 28% were optimistic…

What do you think? Are you a recent graduate with good or bad experiences of the job market? Tell us using the contact information above.

Mobile Friendly? No? Why Not?
On www.recruiter.co.uk, Sue Weekes writes that despite one in three jobseekers searching on a mobile device, it appears that employers still don’t get it and are driving away potential talent as a result of poor and non-responsive websites that aren’t optimised for tablet and smartphone.  Mobile browsing is a case of ‘search, find, act’ and if the estimated 88% of people searching for jobs on mobile can’t find what they’re looking for on poorly formatted corporate websites, they will very quickly go elsewhere. As a corporate employer, if your website isn’t optimised for mobile and tablet, you may be missing out on the best talent in the market.

What are the best and worst sites for mobile browsing? Let us know!

Article 3 – March Jobs Report

Asset Resourcing MD Ben Sweeting is a regular contributor to the monthly UK Jobs Report compiled and published by KPMG and the Recruitment & Employment Confederation (REC) and he has pinpointed two very interesting elements that have emerged, including a paradigm shift in the balance of power from employer to employee –

• Employer confidence is growing strongly as we move deeper into 2014 and their thirst for new staff is at a 15½ year high. The UK construction industry is showing improving growth figures (as is manufacturing across the Eurozone) and as is common, when construction grows, other sectors will follow.

• Bernard Brown, Head of Business Services at KPMG (and one of the key compilers of the monthly report) essentially said that even though jobs are being created, there has been a decline in the number of people entering the jobs market. What appears to be happening more and more is that the preference for talented employees seems to be a ‘try before you buy’ mentality before committing to long-term or permanent roles. This shifts the balance of power back into the hands of the employee who can pick and choose where they want to work and for how long. This is most common in the TMT (telecoms, media and technology) industry but it seems other industries will follow.

With the escalating crisis in Russia and the Ukraine, global markets are ‘cautious’ so we’ll always suggest treading carefully and remain vigilant to business threats.

Carrying on the vacancy theme, ONS data states that vacancies were up over 15% on an annual basis in the three months to December 2013 and importantly, internet-based recruitment spending rose by 9.0% in the third quarter of 2013, the sharpest increase for almost two years.

As part of February’s report, all contributors (including Ben) were asked to specify areas in which they have encountered a skill shortage in the preceding month and the usual suspects are all represented – accountancy & financial, IT & tech, secretarial & clerical and blue collar & engineering.

Perhaps the most notable inclusion in this list is ‘social media’. Businesses are now understanding the importance of social media and engaging with their clients and customers (as is evident by this newsletter, Asset Resourcing are embracing the world of social media) and we are confident in saying ‘watch this space’. Social media and content marketing is a vital component of any business’s marketing strategy and we think that niche industry sector is about to explode with more and more dedicated social media roles coming to the fore.

We certainly are, but are you seeing more in-house social media or content marketing roles coming up? Let us know on Twitter @AssetResourcing.

Article 4 – Say what?

People really do say the funniest things, especially when it comes to jobs and work, but some of these quotes really are quite profound –

‘Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life’. Confucius

‘I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.’ Michael Jordan

‘The difference between a job and a career is the difference between forty and sixty hours a week.’ Robert Frost

‘My mother said to me, ‘If you become a soldier, you’ll be a general, if you become a monk you’ll end up as the pope.’ Instead, I became a painter and wound up as Picasso.’
Pablo Picasso

‘A lot of fellows nowadays have a B.A., M.D., or Ph.D. Unfortunately they don’t have a J.O.B.’
Fats Domino