Snakes and Ladders - Times Online - WBLG

Get paid to volunteer at a charity

Fancy working for a charity without giving up your income? If you can persuade your boss to give you a 12-month sabbatical - or if you don't mind quitting your job - you might be interested in the Vodafone Group Foundation's latest initiative.

It's promising to pay four people up to £25,000 each (plus as much as £20,000 in expenses) to spend a year working at their favourite UK-registered voluntary organisation either here or overseas.

You'll need to get your application in to the World of Difference programme by the end of the month; see www.vodafonefoundation.org for details and all the fine print.

Want to work in Australia? Learn to use a deep-fat fryer

Australia's pernickety points-based visa system can make it hard for foreign professionals to get work in the country. On the other hand, Oz is suffering from such a severe skills shortage that McDonald's and KFC have been forced to recruit overseas using the skilled migrant visa programme, reports news.com.au. So, drop out of university and start flipping burgers if you fancy moving Down Under.

There's no such thing as a clean slate once you've started work

I am not a fan of Lucinda (one of the unsuccessful Apprentice candidates). While I thought she had some good ideas, she was also enormously irritating and had an uncanny ability to make others want to gang up on her.

But I was intrigued at the way in which her motivation for coming on the show was analysed, both by people commenting on this blog and those within the show. There seemed to be a suggestion that, because she earned plenty of money in her previous job, she somehow wasn't serious about wanting to change course and work for Sir Alan.

Does this mean that no one is taken seriously if they try to chuck in their first, well-paying career and try a different path?

The etiquette of failure

Lee celebrated his Apprentice win by giving Claire, the loser (runner up is a meaningless term here, as in most places in the business world), a big hug. While this is perfectly acceptable in televisual terms, it's not likely to go down as well in a normal workplace.

Imagine that Claire and Lee weren't on-screen competitors but colleagues who were going for the same promotion in some everyday business. Lee gets it, Claire doesn't, meaning that he is now her boss. If you're the person in Claire's shoes you're left with a number of options:

Bizarre jobs

Every now and again, there's a job advert that catches the eye. It's not becasue of the unbelieveably high salary. Nor is it because it's the dream job that will take you out of the cruddy hell that is your current place of employment. No, it's because the job is so improbable - that you know that it is the only one of its kind. I came across such a job this week - and here it is.

Head of Movement at the Royal Shakespeare Company in Stratford. Duties include; increasing the physical eloquence of the performing company and support their wellbeing. I love this job.

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.