Snakes and Ladders - Times Online - WBLG

Gloomy Monday

My train was on time, I got a seat and I arrived at work feeling quite chipper. Sat down, opened my e-mail and there it was: a press release from a consultancy called Hay Group letting me know that the year ahead will be colder, poorer and quite possibly short staffed.

The summary: 30 per cent of organisations it surveyed globally will or are considering freezing base salaries while 20 per cent plan to freeze or reduce headcount in the near future.

The next e-mail in the queue was from a company offering advice on how to see redundancy as a good thing. (Why worry about updating your CV or calculating how many months' rent your savings will cover when you could be looking for a new path to self-fulfillment?)

And, as a colleague just pointed out, the price of a coffee from our local cafe has gone up 12p.

So, how secure do you feel in your job? And what are you going to do about it?

Interview howlers

Carly wrote about smelly interview candidates earlier on this blog and now another colleague, Sarah Campbell, has written an article in The Times with some more howling mistakes including candidates chatting up interviewees and others being completely clueless about who and where they are.

I've carried out a few job interviews in the past and can contribute the following eight unforgettable interview experiences to the list:

1. The candidate who directed all his conversation to my chest (despite the fact I was wearing a high neck jumper). No I didn't offer him the job. 

2. The guy who spotted me on the train going home after the interview and pleaded with me to give him the job for my whole commute home. Again no job offer.

3. The woman who for some inexplicable reason thought I was going to be a man and turned up in plunging top, miniskirt and far too much make-up. She spent the whole interview trying to pull the mini skirt down and hold her top together.

Professionalism and social networking profiles

Recruitment companies - or at least their press offices - are very worried about Facebook and other online social networking sites. People might put up pictures of themselves drinking, they worry; sometimes they might even say inappropriate things that indicate work or study is not their only source of pleasure.

This month's Fast Company magazine, however, takes a much more sensible approach. "What looks like exhibitionism isn't quite what it seems," writes Rob Walker. "By and large, the versions of self-identity that the young - and not-so-young - users offer up on these sites are not so much confessional as calculated."

Just as dating sites carry profiles of people who are younger, slimmer and just a little more interesting than the real-life person that they represent, so people's web selves on other sites are also carefully-edited versions of reality. "We sign on to promote our own agendas," Walker concludes.

Please shower before going to your interview

People, what's wrong with you? A survey by the Recruitment and Employment Confederation - the body which represents headhunters, recruitment consultants and the like - suggests that a worrying number of job seekers are turning up at interviews smelling like week-old shrimp. Almost 50 per cent of recruiters questioned for the poll say that employers have told them that some candidates showed poor levels of personal hygiene.

Other anecdotes culled from the survey include:

*A candidate answering a question about computing skills with the claim that he was proficient on a Sony Playstation;

*Another job-seeker, asked to identify his or her greatest weakness, answered "my dishonesty"; and

*The applicant who decided that dressing to impress meant taking a black-tie approach; she arrived at her interview wearing a ballgown.

My favourite, however, is the candidate who was too vain to wear her glasses and thus walked into a cupboard instead of out of the door when her interview finished. We've all been there, love.

City of London pay rises all round. Yippeee.

It seems that my recent post about pay rises going out of fashion told only part of the story. Phew. And as for a meltdown in the markets...

Big thanks to The Joslin Rowe Financial Services Employment Index. It tells of the "most up-to-date trends in the jobs market," according to, er, Joslin Rowe, the recruitment agency. I know it is the job of headhunters like JR to try to cheer us all up, and to tell us all that the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. But hey, it is still nice to hear good news.

It's latest research tells us three things about job prospects in the good old City of London. First, it is took an average of 72 days to fill a City job in January compared to 87 days in the same month in 2007. Second, there were 20 per cent fewer people looking for City jobs in January this year (at 30,000) than in October last year. But best of all, City salaries are up, yes UP, by 10 per cent over the 12 months. And while the big swinging Richards of investment banking have found some way of keeping their bonus pools brimming despite the global credit crunch, it appears that the people that actually do the hard work are benefiting too.

Average salaries in London have risen 11 per cent to £38,759. Hourly rates for temporary workers in the City have increased from £15.22 to £16.49 in the last year, a 8.4 per cent increase. Or so Joslin Rowe would have us believe.

What to wear to a job interview

I used to think that the question of what to wear to a job interview could be answered relatively easily: a suit, polished shoes, tidy hair and discreet makeup (very discreet if your chromosomes are of the XY persuasion). Then business casual came in, I - and many others - started working in a non-suity profession and the prevailing advice shifted towards staking out one's would-be employer, assessing the outfits worn by its staff and dressing to match. Not quite as straightforward, but still manageable.

Now it has become much more complicated. A couple of pieces on CareerJournal.com tell us that new rules for interviewees now include:

The new year is a time for diets, not hasty job decisions

I imagine that you're reading this on your first day back at work after a week and a half of eating, drinking and sitting around with a bit too much time on your hands. The results of the first two can be dealt with by a month or so of good diet and vigorous exercise; the effects of having time to think are much trickier to handle.

Christmas is a (psychometric) testing time

We know that entrepreneurs and businesspeople plan to work right through Christmas (thanks, Carol) but what's perhaps less well-known is that plenty of everyday employees spend at least part of the 25th logged on to online job boards in search of new professional homes. (A recruitment consultant told me this a while ago, though for the life of me I can't remember his name so I can't give him credit - sorry).

Career advice: is it ever a good idea?

I'm not much of a fan of advice. Mostly this is because, when people offer it to me, it's likely to involve me doing something I don't enjoy or stopping something that I do (swapping to decaf coffee falls neatly into both categories; I had a headache for a week and I forgot how to spell). However, in the great tradition of aged relatives across the world, I'm not going to let my dislike of receiving advice stop me from giving it. Or, to be more accurate, passing on advice from other people. That's journalism for you.

How much feedback should you get after a job interview?

A major graduate recruiter recently told me that every applicant who makes it to interview stage at his firm is offered feedback about why they didn't get the job if they don't win a place. From a candidate's point of view this is supposed to be good news because she can learn from that feedback, remedy any weaknesses in her CV or presentation and generally do much better next time.

You know what they say: big car, small...

When it comes to assessing our suitability for jobs, companies have countless tools at their disposal. They can interview us. They can interpret our body language and/or analyse our facial features as they interview us. They can measure our IQ or EQ or SQ, examine our handwriting, ask us to undergo psychometric tests, contact former employers for references.

4 recruitment videos to make graduates cringe

How can university students know which company they want to work for without giving it a go? By watching a hard-sell recruitment video, complete with beepy electronic music and uncomfortable-looking employees asserting their passion for what they do.

The hiring manager can be a horse's a***

Animal-based management training has proven a popular gimmick in recent years - see this article by Sathnam for an explanation of why it's probably best not to take advice from gorillas too literally - but a bunch of horse psychologists have just taken the idea to the next level.