How to make hundreds of banking recruiters hunt you down

Don’t want to sit around waiting for recruiters to respond to your applications when they get around to it? Don’t want to live in hope that your CV will inveigle its way through automated screening procedures? Do want a job soon? Now’s the time to get proactive. Take your job search into your own hands. Make recruiters come to you.

Except it’s not that easy. Even extreme measures don’t work. We spoke to someone who walked around the City of London wearing a sandwich board advertising his skills and availability. “I got a lot of leads from the sandwich board, but sadly they didn’t take me anywhere,” he said. “If you can find a way of making banking jobs come to you in this market, I’d love to know it.”

With that in mind, here are some alternative methods for attracting recruiters. We’re told they work. (OK, ‘hundreds of recruiters’ may have been an exaggeration.)

1. Optimize your own personal SEO

Forget physical networking. Making jobs come to you in the digital age is all about managing your visibility online. Just as companies practice search engine optimization (SEO), you can do this on a personal basis too.

Broadly, SEO means ensuring you have maximum visibility on Google. Ralph Du Plessis, an SEO consultant with Red Mud Media, says you need to start by filling in your social media profiles (eg. Twitter, Facebook, Google +, LinkedIn) with as much information as you’re willing to make public.

Secondly, interlink all your social media profiles so that your Google+ account has links to your Twitter and Facebook accounts as well as to any other sites where you’ve blogged or made a contribution. Whenever you register on a website to leave comments, link back to your main profile so that people can find you.

Thirdly, Du Plessis says you need to use words in your profile which reflect the jobs you’re looking for. If you’re an M&A associate with three years’ experience in natural resources, make sure you add this to your descriptors.

Fourthly Du Plessis advises that you use the same photograph on all your profiles for the sake of consistency. Gravatar is good for this.

Lastly, if you want to maximize your personal SEO Du Plessis advises that you use use brandyouself to control how you appear when people search for you on Google.

2. Optimize your CV as it appears on CV databases

If you’re reading this article, you may have already uploaded your CV to the eFinancialCareers CV database, if you haven’t then do so very soon.

If you want to get your CV found on a CV database, you’ll need to make sure it includes keywords matching the jobs you’re applying for. Look at job descriptions. Look at the words that are used. Weave these subtly and prolifically into your CV.

3. Start a personal website or blog

This takes us back to point 1: you need to be visible on Google. If you start a blog or simply set up a website titled ‘Experienced M&A associate, natural resources’, people will find you.

Karin Peeters, a careers coach who deals with bankers says she had a client who became known as an expert in a particular product area as a result of his blog site. “When people in the industry looked for solutions to problems, he appeared as an expert on his blogs – he started getting a lot of hits and job offers as a result.”

Success requires patience and effort. Robert Karofsky, the former global co-head of equities at Deutsche Bank-turned head of equities trading at Alliance Bernstein started a blog titled ‘Global Banking Executive.’ However, Karofsky wrote fewer than 10 posts and appears to have given up on it....