You may have noticed the shitstorm of controversy sparked yesterday by an online article in the Daily Mail, entitled “Why women hate me for being beautiful”. Samantha Brick, for it is she, contended that ordinary and ugly looking women discriminate against her because of her looks. A separate article in The Economist last week, takes...
Give us a kiss! I wasn’t always a tactile person, you know. We didn’t really do hugs in my house, when I was young, and even now a greeting with my family usually consists of a raised eyebrow, accompanied with a gruff “Aye”. An embarrassing thing happened to me and a friend last week. Let’s...
OK, so it seems like the English FA are embarking upon an extensive and far-reaching search for a successor to Fabio Capello (hat in Italian), before offering the job to Harry Rednapp. Almost everyone agrees that the outcome is a foregone conclusion, so why bother going to extraordinary lengths, and expense, to arrive at the...
This phrase is famously quoted in the seminal (in my opinion) movie, Wayne’s World, and attributed to either “Kierkegaard or Dick Van Patten”. It’s not always easy to control how we are defined by others, but we all make attempts to do so. Often random events or idiosyncrasies become how other people relate to you,...
I’ve changed my mind about something this week. The germ of an idea had been growing in my mind about religion and recruitment. In many countries there are constitutional laws enacted to keep religion and state separate, for many reasons, but largely to ensure that the governance of a country is neither swayed, nor (more...
As a recruiter, and professional nosey-parker, I always loved finding out intimate details of individuals’ working lives, which they would never reveal to other people. One of those, of course, is the biggest taboo subject in the workplace –salary. A spokesman for the Government Equalities Office says: “From October 2010 the Equality Act will make...
This is a response to the blog post by Mervyn Dinnen here. There is inevitable duplicity built into the entire recruitment process. Would you advise a candidate to be scrupulously honest, and offer “full disclosure” in a discoverable way online? Lies being told. 1. Candidates appear at interview, pretending that they already want the job,...
I don’t know if I’ve mentioned it, but I’ve been a recruiter since 1987. “I didn’t know that!” I hear you say. Yes it’s true. Up until a couple of years ago, admitting it in public was equated with being league with the devil, and greeted with a look of bemused disgust. And then of...
So Geoff Hoon, Stephen Byers and Patricia Hewitt have been caught going for interviews, whilst currently in the employ of the British Parliament. None are presently Ministers of State, but all are serving MP’s with, presumably, a full workload until 6th May. With time running out on their current contract, these three have taken a...
Only very occasionally in a lifetime do we find ourselves at the very start of something special. Usually, we don’t even realise it at the time. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, but we rarely realise this at the time we are taking it. I’ve been fortunate enough to be...
