pumpkinstrokemarrow

But I do remember being rather peeved when the same sort of thing happened to me, albeit on longer runs, when my company was paying for my first class ticket. One of the few perks that was left by the time that I had left. First class private office long gone. Tea lady (who remembered the days of carting up coal for the nobs) even longer gone. And she was called Gladys; a very proper sort of tea lady.

I was then prompted to apply for a job as a car park attendant in the Haringey service, a game that anybody can play at http://www.haringey.gov.uk/index/jobs_and_training.htm. First of all you have to register. This bit is not much more complicated than telling them your name and email address. So far so good. Then you find the job you are interested in and study the long list of mandatory and desirable requirements which you need to address in the course of your application if you want to get anywhere near the shortlist. Then click to apply, whereupon you are invited to fill in a six page form. This is delivered one page at a time so you can't take stock of the thing before you start or complete it in the wrong order if that takes your fancy. Nor did the six page form appear to bear any very close relation to the long list of requirements, so it was not terribly clear how or where one explained how well one met them all. One might of thought that a form based around the long list would not have been a bad idea. But perhaps I do them an injustice. I abandoned my attempt to be a car park attendant at the second page. It may have been that the pages following did indeed link up with the long list. I was also told, although I did not get far enough to verify that Harringey, holding Diverse Employer Certification (DEC for short), asks question like "what is your sex?" and "what was it at birth (if different)?".

Now I can see that for a large employer like Haringey, having a sophisticated recruitment package of this sort is a good wheeze. The HR people can run on factory lines and get through lots of recruitment in short order. They can tick all the boxes in the DEC (see above), HASIRC (Health And Safety In Recruitment Certification) and IOPC (Investors On People Certification) forms. They can whack out lots of statistics. Their interviewers can get through their interviewing days without ending up brain dead or dying for some recreational substances. But for the applicant not so clever. In these days when one might need to apply to dozens of outfits before one is suited, it means that you have to go through all this rigmarole dozens of times. You can't just write a CV then knock that out, gently tweaked and under a short email dozens of times. When you might even have the stomach for hundreds of times with the CV option. And at the end of all this, when well knackered, you actually make it to a recruitment centre (not sure if that is the right term. One of those group things in a hotel where ten of you are, in effect, interviewed jointly and competitively by a bunch of very well paid HR contractors), you have to turn up gushing with enthusiasm and just dying to work as a car park attendant in Lordship Lane. Once again, glad that I have left the world of work!