Migrants must adapt resumes for Australian employers

One of the biggest mistakes new migrants make when attempting to enter into the Australian job market is sticking with the resume from their country of origin.

It is absolutely crucial that newly arrived jobseekers tailor their resumes towards Australian employers. Lisa LaRue of CareerWorx Careers & Transitions specialises in adapting overseas resumes for the Australian job market.

Ms LaRue says: “A lot of migrant jobseekers contact me for help when they have been unable to find work for months after arriving in Australia. The first thing I ask them to do is email me their resume”.

She said some of the most common errors she sees are spelling and grammatical mistakes. Another mistake is including obsolete information or detail which has no relevance to an Australian employer.

“Many contain too much personal information which is a major faux pas in an Australian environment,” added Ms LaRue. She pointed out that Australian labour market law prohibits employers from discriminating against certain job seekers.

“There is no need to divulge your marital status, age or religion in your resume,” Ms LaRue said, “unless you are applying for a teaching position at a religious school, it is not necessary to inform your potential employer of your religious beliefs”.

Although employers are prohibited from discriminating against job seekers, it would be naïve to assume that all employers adhere to the law all of the time. With this in mind, it is best not to mention your age in your resume or cover letter. There is always the possibility that you could be discriminated against should the employer feel you are too young or too old for the position.

Migrant job seekers should also ensure that their qualifications will be accepted by Australian employers. Overseas qualifications need to be recognised by the appropriate body for them to carry weight within the Australian job market. Information about having your qualifications recognised can be found at www.immi.gov.au/asri/

It is a good idea to have your resume appraised by someone in Australia to ensure that it is easily understood and appeals to Australian employers. CareerWorx offers a migrant employment assistance service including resume tailoring and assistance with job search skills.

 Visit  :   www.careerworx.com.au for further information. 

 Source  :  www.careerone.com.au

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Rudd plays a straight bat on Rove

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd may have been worried about his prime-time appearance alongside Bruno on Rove last night, but it appears he came through smelling of roses.

Yesterday he said on his Twitter account he was wary of appearing next to Sacha Baron Cohen’s Austrian fashion reporter, asking his followers: “Any ideas guys about how I can get out of this one?”

But after a week in which Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull spectacularly failed to secure the Prime Minister’s scalp over the fake OzCar email, Mr Rudd was always going to like his chances of a sympathetic audience on national TV.

He used an interview with Rove McManus to explain his stance on the OzCar affair, and answered the traditional “Five Questions” from the popular television personality.

Gone were the stilted colloquialisms that have been typical of Mr Rudd’s staged media performances, but McManus didn’t let the PM get away without confronting his now infamous “fair shake of the sauce bottle” remark.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                 

“How many times a day do you actually shake the sauce bottle?” asked the host.

Mr Rudd parried back with “not often enough,” earning the approval of many Twitterers who were watching the show.

“Sauce bottle joke – awesome! ‘Not often enough’,” said one blogger, while another said they had a “lot more respect” for Mr Rudd after his appearance.

Twitter was alive with chatter about the Prime Minister’s cameo, with topics like “Rove”, “Rudd” and “KevinRuddPM” among the most talked about on the microblogging service.

Channel 10 and the Prime Minister’s office would have both been happy with that result – Mr Rudd’s appearance on Australian television was getting as much debate as “Iranelection” and “Michaeljackson”.

While some bloggers dismissed his appearance as awkward and cringeworthy, most reactions were positive, with one lamenting the fact that Bruno did not share the stage with the PM.

Mr Rudd said he was nervous when he found out the comedian was going to be on the show, telling McManus: “Basically I’m in a state of induced panic.”

Perhaps it is lucky for Mr Rudd that they did not share the stage because Bruno’s appraisal was straight to the point: “Your Prime Minister? That guy I saw backstage? He’s so hot.”

Parliament has risen for six weeks, Mr Turnbull’s approval ratings have taken a huge dive in the wake of the OzCar affair and Rove’s audience likes the Prime Minister.

Source  :  www.abc.net.au

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Warning: tax refund email scam

The Tax Office is warning people to be wary of a fraudulent email being circulated that claims to offer a refund from the Tax Office.

The email uses the Tax Office logo and the words ‘Tax refund online!’ in the subject heading and the following text:

Tax refund online!After the last annual calculation of your fiscal activity we have determined that you are eligible to receive a tax refund of AUD 452. Please submit the tax refund and allow us 2-5 business days in order to process it.

There may be more variations to this subject heading and text.

The email asks people to click on a link which directs them to a bogus Tax Office website and asks for credit card and personal details.

Tax Commissioner Michael D’Ascenzo said anyone who receives the email should delete it immediately.

“The Tax Office never sends emails asking people to provide personal information including credit card details.

“People should always be wary of unsolicited emails claiming to be from the Tax Office.

“As an extra precaution we recommend you type internet addresses directly into your internet browser rather than clicking on links embedded in emails,” Mr D’Ascenzo said.

These websites are often set up in multiple jurisdictions making them difficult to trace and to effectively shut them down.

If people have entered their credit card information on the website, they should immediately report it to their credit card provider.

More information www.ato.gov.au

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Ramsay cancels Perth tour

 

Chef Gordon Ramsay has cancelled his planned visit to Perth at the end of this month.           

A spokeswoman for the Perth Convention Exhibition Centre which is hosting the $1000-a-head dinner and a $125-a-head motivational breakfast with the star,

said it had received an email from event management company Diablo Events saying Ramsay would not appear at the two events at the convention centre.

Source  :  www.thewest.com.au

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CommBank cops sustained online fraud attack

Commonwealth Bank customers are being inundated with phishing attacks, some at a rate of several scam emails a day, sent by cyber criminals seeking to steal passwords and credit card details.

The scammers, who are specifically targeting the bank in a sustained assault, are bombarding customers with several clever variations of the email ruse – such as using bogus call centres – in an attempt to hook even tech-savvy web users.

The emails have largely managed to evade spam filters using methods such as images instead of text.

Commonwealth Bank spokesman Steve Batten admitted the bank was losing the war with the fraudsters, despite working closely with the Australian Federal Police’s Australian High Tech Crime Centre.

“As soon as we close them down they are opening up elsewhere,” Batten said.

This is backed up by figures from the Australian Payments Clearing Association, which reported a 33 per cent increase in both the volume and value of fraudulent online payments in Australia for the year ended December 31, 2008.

The scam emails, which look authentic and include the Commonwealth Bank’s logo, try to trick the victim into handing over sensitive information by telling them they need to unlock an account, activate a card, claim a fee refund, update internet banking details, view an important security message or complete a survey in exchange for payment.

When the victim clicks on the link in the email, they are either infected with a password-stealing virus or presented with an official-looking page that asks them to enter their details, which are then harvested by the fraudsters.

Batten said some of the emails purport to come from actual Commonwealth Bank staff members. He stressed that the bank would never ask customers to submit sensitive information over email.

But in a new variation on the traditional “phishing” attack, which usually asks victims to click on a malicious link, one Commonwealth Bank scam email asks customers to call a Queensland phone number in order to redeem a $500 “cashback bonus”.

IT contractor Tom Howard, from the Central Coast, received the email and attempted to call the number just as an experiment.

“It’s an automated system with an American accent that welcomes you to the Commonwealth Bank of Australia and then requests an account number or says something’s expired and asks for your credit card number,” he said.

The voice recording then requested Howard’s expiry date and pin number, but he just entered in random digits.

“It actually told me the information was incorrect, which suggests that it’s hooked up to a payment gateway and it’s actually trying to do an authorisation on the credit card right then and there,” he said.

Howard said he was alarmed at the sophistication of the scam and believed the bogus call centre idea would trick a lot of people.

“People have been conditioned in terms of these phishing emails to ‘don’t click on the links’, but not so much to ‘don’t call the number’,” he said.

Source: smh.com.au 

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Look out Outlook, Google’s Wave is coming to swamp you

A team of Google engineers from Australia has unveiled a prototype replacement for standard email that abandons the reliance on the chronological sorting and stacking of messages which has been the hallmark of one of the internet’s first and still most popular applications.

Christened Google Wave, the new feature was given its first public viewing in San Francisco earlier this morning Australian time at Google’s annual developers’ conference.

“I think you will see a form of interaction that you would not have previously imagined,” Google co-found Sergey Brin told a post-launch press conference.

Wave – which began life as a project codenamed Walkabout – is a combination of email and instant messaging and document-, maps- image- and video-sharing all housed under one roof.

Much like a conference call, it also allows for conversations between more than two people to happen simultaneous.

And because it all happens inside a web browser, there is no special software to download or plug-in – which means it can be used from any computer or internet-enabled mobile phone.

“Our communication space is very fragmented today. We have a million different tools for different things with lots of different kinds of overlaps,” said Lars Rassmussen, a senior software engineer with Google Australia

“The most natural way to try and solve that problem is to take all those different tools and try to make them smaller and fit into a single package and maybe integrate them across the boundaries.”

Wave is being released so that the developers – independent software creators – can help iron out the remaining bugs and cook-up a swag of new uses for the service and the platform upon which it is based ahead of a public release later this year.

But Wave is more than just another of Google’s ubiquitous free web services. It’s also a protocol – meaning that it is going after email’s mantle as the predominant internet communications tool.

And despite the recent growth of web-based email services like Hotmail and Gmail, most of the world’s email runs through Microsoft’s Outlook client.

And to encourage organisations to catch the Wave, Google is offering it up as an open source protocol, meaning that anyone – even a competitor – can box it up and host it on their servers.

Wave is the creation of Danish brothers Lars and Jens Rasmussen, who together with Australian Noel Gordon and Stephen Ma – founded and later sold what became known as Google Maps to Google for an undisclosed sum in 2005.

Lars has worked for Google and lived in Australia since the sale and enticed Jens to leave Google’s headquarters near join him in 2007.

The pair and the Wave team – who have been given the full backing of Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page – have been working on the project out of Google’s offices in Sydney.

Stephen Hutcheon is attending the San Francisco conference as a guest of Google.

Source: www.watoday.com.au

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