Firehead

It’s been quite a year here at Firehead with milestones a-plenty for our audience of talented job-seekers and also for us as a specialist recruiter of web content and communications professionals in Europe. Here’s our review of 2010: its main recruitment trend and some highlights, both serious and fluffy!

The content strategy explosion

The big trend for 2010 was that content strategy as a field, and as a career option, positively bloomed from the seeds laid down in 2009 when Kristina Halvorson’s Content Strategy for the Web came out.

Content strategy saw the same exponential increase of interest as social media did three-four years ago, with Google search results for “content strategy” going through the roof.

Meanwhile in Europe, we hosted the first-ever dedicated content strategy conference, Content Strategy Forum 2010. The two-day event drew content strategy’s A-listers to Paris in April (see Kristina Halvorson presenting the keynote, left).

Firehead is proud to have sponsored and co-organised CSForum10 – not least because we met so many talented people and content experts who have since kindly posted their advice and thoughts on content strategy here on the Firehead blog. Check out posts from Rahel Bailie, Kathy Hanbury and Richard Sheffield on our content strategy sidebar (left) and more from Colleen Jones, Ken Yau, Tom Johnson and others under our special Guest Bloggers category.

We’ll be posting more from expert guests in 2011, as well as hunting out resources to help content strategists and technical writers making the transition keep ahead of the field. Indeed, our most popular post this year was 1001 Content Strategy links – a good place to start if you are thinking of making a career change.

Firehead goes Bitesize!

Firehead’s core business is recruitment. Indeed, we are proud to say that we are the market leaders in Europe for web content and technical communication recruitment.

But this year we also rolled up our sleeves and got involved in the work itself, launching a service called Firehead Bitesize.

With client interest in content strategy on the rise, we’ve come up with a way to offer clients some test-drive content strategy before opting for a full service or hiring a full-time content strategist. Our big production is Firehead Bitesize – a unique content strategy service offering fast and cost-effective ‘bitesize’ audits for clients. If you’re a company with an eye on budget and resources in 2011, we think you’ll love it.

New office, new kittens, new blog

In the summer of 2010 we decided to engage more directly with our clients and job candidates via the Firehead blog, opening it to guest bloggers and experts in technical communications and content strategy. We have been very lucky to have some of the world’s leading tech comms experts and content strategists writing for us, as well as some fascinating one-off posts, such as ‘The Résumé Guy’ whose online infographic CV went viral.

Into that mix, we’re also covering market trends, conferences, and, of course, recruitment advice on CVs, interviews and job applications. We welcome your thoughts and feedback on how we can work together, so let us know if there is something you would like to know from a recruiter’s eye view. Alternatively we are always on the lookout for interesting guest bloggers with something relevant to say.

As for our new office, well, more about that early in the new year. An exciting announcement is overdue!

Until then, we’ll leave you with the Firehead kittens, Lorem and Ipsum, who arrived just last month to complicate our lives in the nicest possible way.

Together we wish you a very Happy Christmas and a Prosperous 2011 – from all of us at Firehead.