May Newsletter

Welcome to the fifth monthly newsletter of the year. We hope that you will

enjoy the following mix of industry trends, tech bites and comedy that have caught

our attention recently.

Contents Click below to be taken to each section:

When Your Dream Job Turns

into a Nightmare What did you want to do when you

were a kid?

Tech Bite Games Industry Tax Relief – What a

relief!

News in Brief Monthly insight into the recruitment

Industry

The cream always rises to the

top, doesn’t it? Clever recruitment methods

When your Dream Job Turns into a Nightmare

We did a dream job straw poll around the office and, in no particular order, footballer,

astronaut, MD of Cadbury, documentary filmmaker, wine taster and rock God were the

type of positions sought.

However, all of us currently work in recruitment and we love it. Was it the job we dreamt

about as kids? No. In the same way that no kid grows up wanting to be an accountant,

HR Manager or middle management drone in a carpet company.

Here at Asset Resourcing, we’re not alone amongst recruiters when we talk to

candidates about looking for their dream job. More and more, young people through

careers advisers, college and university are planning for the career they want and

learning and training to do it. The idea is that they find the job they want but with that

comes a comfortable standard of living, mental stimulation, emotional equity and a

sense of drive.

In the Wall Street Journal this month, we read about an American woman who had long

targeted a career in the seemingly glamorous world of advertising. She did all the right

things, from heading the advertising club at her university to getting an internship at a

big Manhattan ad agency. It was to be a foot in the door. It was.

After university was over, her first job was as an Assistant Media Planner for an agency

in Durham, North Carolina. She liked the people and she was thrilled to be at an agency

with big brand clients and a hip, creative vibe. This was her dream job. Or was it?

Working with big brands on their creative briefs was what she loved, but she didn’t

anticipate how hard it would be managing complex budgets for big accounts and fielding

10-20 calls a day from eager sales reps looking to sell ad space.

She was naïve. She saw through the actual role and focused on where she was

working. The hard part came when she had to face up to the fact that she’d made a

mistake. She then had to embark on the process of overcoming disappointment, looking

for the moment where she went wrong and then taking the positive steps of learning

from what had happened and making the most of the skill set she developed.

The happy ending to this particular story was that she took a

proper look at what she liked doing and built the skills and

contacts she needed to land a new job in social media, one she

enjoys from top to bottom.

This failure (and many others like it) was wholly unexpected but it

can – and often does – have a positive effect.

It gives you the opportunity to ask yourself ‘where can I go from

here and what can I do’. It gives you the opportunity to re-evaluate

your priorities and it gives you the opportunity to think in a new

way.

In a 2011 study in the Journal of Social Psychology, it says that people who take stock

and think deeply and clearly about what they might have done differently tend to be both

more creative and realistic about reaching specific goals in the future.

Asset Resourcing is a recruitment company but we are also a resource of information

and advice. Our role doesn’t stop when you get placed and we get paid. We are here to

answer your questions, help you through your issues and give you the advice you need

to grow and be successful.

Search through our Candidate Clinic for support and advice, call us on 01582 469 922 or

email enquiries@assetresourcing.com. It’s what we’re here for.

Tech Bite

Games Industry Tax Relief – What a relief!

It’s taken seven long years, but the UK’s video games industry has won a significant

battle to claim Government tax breaks. At the end of March 2014 (and as we reported in

a blog post here from November 2012), the European Union Commission has reached a

decision to grant ‘cultural’ tax breaks to the UK’s video game industry.

Film and theatre production companies already benefit from being able to claim back

25% of their qualifying production costs and now the games industry can do the same. It

appears that around a quarter of computer games made in Britain would qualify against

a set of criteria including British locations, characters and speech as well as the use of

British talent, including developers, programmers, composers, designers, animators and

studio facilities.

Rachel Austin, an accountant at Deloitte said ‘the relief will provide a huge boost to an

industry that has faced fierce competition in recent years from developers in countries

such as Canada and France, where tax incentives are already offered.’

The UK video game industry’s stats remain in line with how they stood in 2012. It

employs 9,000 people and contributes around £1bn to the economy each year (The

Independent Game Developers Association, or TIGA). TIGA’s boss Richard Wilson is

understandably delighted with the news which he has campaigned for and championed

for years. ‘[this tax relief] will create jobs, boost investment and enable the production of

more British video games’. He predicted that tax relief for the video games sector would

cost £96m, but should safeguard almost 5,000 direct and indirect jobs, offer £188m in

investment expenditure by studios and generate an additional £172m for the Treasury.

Thanks in part to these new tax breaks, the industry will benefit from more jobs for UK

talent and perhaps most importantly, the exodus of talent (otherwise known as the ‘brain

drain’) that we have experienced in recent years will slow. Global Recruiter has

suggested that over 50% of the advertised jobs aimed at UK-based programmers are for

jobs in North America with companies with very deep pockets while only 20% are for

UK-based jobs and the hope is that this trend will, over time, reverse itself.

Here at Asset Resourcing, we believe wholeheartedly in the future of the UK gaming

industry and the dearth of talent we produce and we have some fantastic opportunities.

Have a look through listed roles and if there’s something that fits the bill, let us know and

we’ll do all we can to help you get to where you want to be.

News in Brief Monthly Insight into the Recruitment Industry

Here’s a selection of some of the recruitment stories making the rounds in the last week

or so. Have you read anything interesting, funny or newsworthy? Email us 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!

The better qualified you are, the more likely you’ll work for free… ...so says recruitment

firm Adecco. Simply put, they’re saying that young jobseekers (16-24) are more likely to

accept unpaid work to get themselves on the career ladder the higher the level of

qualification they have, contradicting the oft-levelled accusation that they are part of an

‘entitled generation’. 38% with GCSEs as their highest qualification would work for free,

rising to 50% (AS Level); 54% (A Level); 60% (undergraduate degree) and up to 68% of

post-grad degree holders saying they’d work for nothing. What are your experiences?

Have you worked for no pay to get experience and a foot in the door? Let us know.

Here come the girls…

New research from the UK’s largest independent graduate jobs board suggests that

more and more female graduates are looking at traditionally male-dominated industry

sectors such as Banking, Engineering, Energy and telecoms, Manufacturing and

Production. Gerry Wyatt, Operations Director at graduate-jobs.com, said, ‘Increasingly

female graduates are looking to work in traditionally male-dominated areas, showing that

efforts to combat the gender career divide are working. For example, despite male

graduates constituting 80 per cent of the graduates looking to begin a career in

Engineering, the percentage of female graduates looking for jobs in that section has

risen steadily since 2003.’ Are you a female graduate looking for a role in a traditionally

male-dominated industry or conversely, are you a male looking for a role in traditionally

female-dominated industries such as Secretarial & Business Admin, Charities,

Languages, Health and Travel & Tourism? Tell us about your experiences.

We’re not engaged

The latest Kelly Global Workforce Index reckons that UK employees (24%) are less

committed to their jobs than their peers in Russia (37%), Norway (42%) and Denmark

(45%). Only a third of UK employees feel valued by their employers and as such 67%

plan to look for a new job in the coming 12 months. Almost half are currently looking for

something new while of these, over 70% admit to looking for a job at least once a week!

The HR Director for Kelly Services UK & Ireland Katie Ivie said ‘Engagement levels are

comparatively low in the UK compared with other European markets and it’s clear that

more needs to be done by employers to provide an environment that will help to retain

staff in the long term. This will become even more critical as the war for talent

intensifies.’ A new job you say? Browse through our selection of roles IT & New Media,

Accountancy & Finance, HR & Admin and Sales & Marketing and then contact us for

everything you need to know.

The cream always rises to the top, doesn’t it?

In a competitive job market, candidates need to stand out. Conversely, with such a

depth of talent out there, companies have to also make themselves attractive to

candidates.

Microsoft found a brilliantly innovative way to filter the cream of the crop in one of their

adverts for a software developer. They laid down a challenge by simply asking worthy

candidates to call them –

Problem solvers wanted. Call us on this number now: x=24 y=30 =01.(y²-x).(y²-10²)x10

Presumably they got their guy although knowing Microsoft it’s possible he’s still stuck in

a whirling vortex of call centre hell…

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