I am too damn cheap to buy the papers, which is a waste of time anyhow – yesterday the Sun’s front page said CHELSY QUITS BRITAIN.
If you are a normal person you may not give a toss who Chelsy is or a flying f””k whether she’s here or on Mars. You are, however reasonably entitled to wonder why her parents couldn’t spell Chelsea, so I will enlighten you on both points.
She is a tart the buffoonish Prince Harry has been charvering (assuming someone has told him how to do it) and her parents are South African. Got that?
The Independent had a more interesting front page. It had a big close-up of a chimpanzee’s face, with a caption in case anyone confused it with a) Harry or b) Gordon Brown. (Clue: it looked a) more intelligent and b) kinder – and honest).
Anyhow, it seems scientists have been cloning some of the upper primates, and a few of them are worried about the results.
Sorry, chaps, you’re a bit too late. The buggers are already taking over. The West End pullulates with them every night. They clutter up the pubs; they vomit on the pavements; they sell each other drugs. Many are in parliament, obviously. And they’re everywhere. I went to Wigan a while back and the streets were crawling with them.
I met a marketing director in Wigan who was definitely one. So clearly whilst the really useless ones are safely corralled in the cabinet office, quite a few of the others have proper jobs. Unfortunately, though, there is a real problem facing businesses that employ these mutants. They can’t read.
I know this because my partner’s sister went to a job interview on Sunday at a firm called ROC. They do recruitment for Selfridges and Harrods. They had asked for her CV, in which she said she had no retail experience, but thought she could do the job.
They kept her hanging around for 3 hours (cloned primates can’t tell the time and have no social skills – ever seen a chimp scratching its arse?) Then when she finally got seen, the unusually stupid ill-mannered mutant ninja bitch who interviewed her said: “Sorry, you’ve got no retail experience.”
Oddly enough this firm says on their website that one of their objectives is to “Treat other people as you would want to be treated.” Obviously they all like sitting around for hours just to be buggered about.
If I were Harrods or Selfridges I’d get down to the zoo pronto and see if a few giraffes might be better at the job.
Don’t go poaching anyone at the chairman’s office in John Lewis, though: his assistant can’t read either.
But I will come to that soon.
Don’t get me started about recrutment agancies. The qualification is ‘Can dial’ and ‘can cut & past’ + ‘can search for Keywords’ – They don’t really look for people who can associates concepts or know about real work.
I love the way recruitment agencies spend 98% of their time pitching people.
Then when they get a bite, for example someone looking to recruit an IT Engineer, they spend a grand total of 30 seconds searching on that keyword through their library of CVs on an online service they subscribe to.
And then attaching the results in an email to you. That’s 1%.
Minutes later you get their short-list of people they have never spoken to.
Soon afterwards you also get an invoice for £5K.
Fantastic work if you can get it.
If you can add up like me, you’ll realise that there’s a missing 1%.
That’s spent droning on at you about how careful they are with their selection process and how they carefully vet each candidate.
Nowadays they are very sophisticated. Vetting used to mean calling people. Interviewing them. Checking their responses and suitability against your specification of the ideal candidate.
Nowadays it’s much better – they simply type in a couple of words in a subscribed search engine and hey presto the perfect candidate pops up in the results.
No need to call them or interview them any more.
After all, that would get in the way of issuing their invoice to you.
Ah but Ian, what about all the time they spend on the phone to prospective candidates letting them know how and why they’ve missed out and giving constructive feedback, that must take, ooh……..no time at all – come to think of it, you were right after all.
All of which brings me to my biggest single gripe with them – all over you like a rash when they think you might make them some money, but won’t even take your calls when you just want some honest feedback about an application that’s clearly going no further. Until of course the next job comes up.
If the government wants impervious levels of security to repel outside threats they should forget about unqualified illegal immigrants and look no further than the reception areas of one or two recruitment agencies!
The paradox is not complete.I have sat on selection interviews facing candidates who wrote glibly claiming all manners of experience and inner knowledge of the working of the concerned specialities ,only to leave us frustrated at the end of the show whether we were gullible to believe all that crap and invite them for the interview or they had
bribed or hired someone to do that resume writing for them.
These days ,as a retired person , I help candidates to put together their resumes in a sensible manner and the old experience still haunts me!
C.S.Radhakrishnan
I must admit that recruitment companies and other sales calls contributed an awful lot to a drastic business decision.
We’ve decided to outsource our phone answering (to a UK call centre). Being in IT, it’s better that our engineers spend more time talking to the customer about the IT problem and fixing it.
So, the call centre will answer every call (no numbers to dial or music to listen to etc).
They will take the clients name, details of the problem, issue them a reference number and then put them through to the engineer.
The rest of the time, the call centre’s job is to persuade selling companies to take our name off their database!
We were losing so much time dealing with persistence calls from sales companies where we had really busy engineers trying to get recruitment and other companies off the phone so we could get on with our job!