Hiring and firing

Well, I'm back again to complete my work. Hope you have had good weekends. I've been enjoying some time off from work and been taking advantage of the good weather, which have been plus points. On the downside, the weekend's football hasn't been so good. Manchester United seem to be shooting themselves in the foot after losing at Fulham yesterday, ending the match with 9 men and just to compound matters, Liverpool have gone and beaten Aston Villa 5-0 today.

And to put the top hat on it, I went to watch Eastbourne Borough's match against Burton Albion yesterday and saw Eastbourne play stoically against the league leaders only to undeservedly lose 2-1 in the fourth minute of injury time. Football can be a cruel game sometimes.

Anyway, there a couple of bits and pieces I didn't get round to writing the other night. Let's change that now.

4. Job Centre investments are welcome
There have been a couple of pieces I have read in the newspapers recently that have said that the Government is planning on pumping some spending into improving Job Centres in this country and to try and help long term unemployed into finding suitable work and giving them more access to relevant training. There has some criticism from some quarters of this move, particularly as it comes at a time when Government funds are tied, not least by its increased support for failing banks. Nonetheless, in principle I think this is a good idea.

If I'm honest, I'm not the greatest fan of the Job Centre or the people that work in them. Now, fortunately I have not had any real experience of using the Job Centre myself as in my career to date I have been able to go straight from one job to another and have not had any enforced departures from my jobs hitherto. You might think therefore that I am a little unqualified to give an opinion on Job Centres given my lack of interaction with them. However, I know other people who have needed to use the Job Centre to find work and I have been less than impressed by some of the stories I have heard.

Like a number of agencies that are directly accountable to national Government, I think the Job Centres are so obsessed with meeting targets that they forget that they are dealing with human beings and not just numbers on a Government spreadsheet. In my line of work, I work for an organisation that receives a large amount of its funding from central Government and as a result I am familiar with how evidence of outcomes being achieved is what the rings the bells of the charcoal suit, sensible shoes wearing civil servants sipping mint tea around Whitehall way. The same principle applies where Job Centres are concerned. Everything is geared around ensuring unemployed people achieve their outcome, by finding paid work within a finite amount of time so that Job Centres can prove they are meeting targets and the Government can boast about these trends when the next unemployment figures come out. Wasn't it Mark Twain who said about lies, damned lies and statistics? Or for a more contemporary viewpoint, the Guinness adverts tell us that 98.6% of statistics are made up.

I have known 2 or 3 good friends over the years find themselves at the mercy of the Job Centre as they have found themselves out of work for a period of time. These are people that have had a genuine wish to get back into work as soon as they could and who are honest individuals who wouldn't dream of using loopholes in the system. And yet, they have found themselves subjected to the Job Centre's bureaucratic and faceless procedures. In one instance, a friend who was on the Job Centre's books for a period of time received a warning letter that he'd have benefits stopped and need to support himself all because in amongst the many application letters he was sending out at the time, he hadn't applied for a particular job that he'd discussed applying for with his Personal Advisor. Seems a bit draconian and petty to me, he didn't wilfully ignore the job, he had simply forgotten about it.

This is my problem with the Job Centre and its obsession with outcomes. It is so fixated with people achieving outcomes and getting them off their books, demonstrating that the applicant has achieved "move on" that it does not give any real consideration to whether it is lining people up with suitable work, work that matches the applicant's skill profile and which ties in with what their desired career path is. Now obviously there needs to be some give and take here, I understand that. If the applicant wants to be an astronaut, there are very limited opportunities available while if the applicant wants to be a tiler but is afraid of heights, the opportunities are going to be equally restricted unless they specialise in re-tiling bungalows.

However, the bigger picture here is that if you line people up with inappropriate work to get them off your books, it won't be long before that person doesn't like the work and comes back to the Job Centre faster than a boomerang. Personal Advisors need to be far more focused around supporting the individual and advising them of what will be possible and what will not be and setting up opportunities to go for work that matches that individual's career aspirations and their skills and competencies. It's not going to be a perfect circle, least of all at the moment where there simply are not many permanent jobs being advertised as some businesses have introduced a recruitment freeze. And individuals will need to lower expectations too because it is a competitive market out there. But Job Centres should do all they can to send people in the right direction and get long term unemployed job ready.

The problem that is going to be more of an issue in the next year or so is that because of compulsory redundancies in certain industries where businesses have lived beyond their means, you are going to get amongst the unemployed statistics some people that have stayed a long time in their last job and who now need to move into another environment and possibly need to be re-trained and learn new skills. People in manufacturing or construction work will find that kind of work limited and much of the work that's available will require some I.T. knowledge or skills, something which will be completely alien to some of those with more Luddite tendencies out there. Therefore, if some of the money going into Job Centres can be spent on enabling such applicants to access basic and intermediate I.T. skills training then that will be good use of money. Without it, these are going to be people on the Job Centre's books for some time unless they fancy a spot of shelf stacking at Sainsbury's.

Obviously at the end of the day, Job Centres can only do so much and the applicant has to be the person driving the process around them finding work. But Job Centres can do more to help the people they are supposed to be supporting. No-one wants to see people taking advantage of the benefits system unfairly and so if people are not showing adequate evidence of pursuing work then it is fair enough that they are penalised. But applying pressure to people who are giving it their best shot is unnecessary and Job Centres should be there to encourage and inform rather than to coerce.

Hopefully the money put into improving Job Centres can be put to good use, but some of the changes have to come from within. Personal Advisors have to take responsibility here and not just throw the rulebook at people who are one minute late for an appointment, but actually offer practical advice and support to the people on their caseload and not just throw out completely unsuitable jobs because the job was listed in a keyword search. It should be a collaborative process between Personal Advisor and applicant, built on trust and understanding. So let's see some collaboration and maybe we can get the system to work and see more people stay in work.

5. How long before Sir Alan is fired?
Well the latest fix of reality TV is about to hit our screens with the fifth series of The Apprentice airing on Wednesday night at 9:00 pm with fifteen more candidates vying for the coveted position of being Sir Alan Sugar's lapdog, sorry, apprentice. In the past this series has proved to be compulsive television for me, particularly as with my background as a Business Studies student, I like to see how many candidates show blatant disregard for the basics of business. I must say, however, that as this series approaches I do wonder whether this programme has now had its day in its present form.

The format has got rather predictable now with the same tasks pretty much coming up in one guise or another in each series. I suppose that is fair enough in a way because like an assessment centre or interview questions, each task is designed to test the candidate's ability to meet different competencies required in order to do the job. However, it does result in each series becoming pretty samey after a while, even though tasks are run in a different order in each series. And the interview section of the programme has got rather embarrassing now, with each of Sir Alan's rottweilers trying to outdo each other with seeing who can ask the most outrageous question. Not so much an interview as a cross examination and with very little consideration given to employment law when the questions are fired in a scattergun manner.

This begs the question of how long the series can go on for in its present guise. But perhaps more pertinently, how long can it go on with Sir Alan Sugar being the man who does the hiring and firing? The former AMSTRAD head honcho's fans will say that he has to be part of the programme because he is so intrinsically linked to it and no-one else could match his plain speaking, no nonsense approach. Certainly, Sugar has become the public face of the show and that is to be expected. He is, after all, the person offering a £100,000 a year job.

But against that, consider a few other things. First of all, what does Sir Alan have to offer these days? The company that bore his initials is no longer owned by him. He sold AMSTRAD to BSkyB in 2007 so that BSkyB could take control of the production of what had become AMSTRAD's core product, satellite dishes. Sure, Sir Alan is still wealthy and has a wealth of business insight and contacts, but anyone working as the apprentice now will be working for him as his own entity. Sugar's wealth these days is made from his property business. There is always money to be made in property, but it is a saturated market.

AMSTRAD's headquarters which are used for filming the show are also scheduled for closure next year. Incidentally, despite the show centring around London, the actual AMSTRAD offices where the filming takes place are in the less than glamorous location of Brentwood in Essex. Not exactly the place to be for the aspiring business highflyer. But anyway, once those offices are no longer used, where will the boardroom scenes get played out? In Sir Alan's living room? Or round the table of the local community centre?

Also, without wishing to sound ageist, Sugar and his two advisors, Margaret Mountford and Nick Hewer are knocking on now. Sugar is 62 later this year and I think both Nick and Margaret are older than him. Surely these are people at a stage of life now where they will want to wind down and have more leisure time. I can't imagine Sugar will be wanting to do this forever when he could be retiring to his Spanish villa and playing tennis or indulging in his new hobby of cycling.

It wouldn't surprise me if this series coming up is Sugar's last as the man with the itchy trigger finger. There isn't a whole lot more road he can take the programme down and whereas in the early days of the show, Sugar very rarely got it wrong with his firings, it has been noticeable how he has made some bad calls in the past series or two. He seems to have a problem in trusting feisty women, hence how Ruth Badger, Kristina Grimes and most recently Claire Young all fell at the last hurdle when they probably should have earned his apprenticeship. He also has a bit of a weak area when it comes to understanding the rudiments of marketing. Sugar used to say he had written books about marketing - chequebooks, but the fact of the matter is you would be hard pushed to remember a single AMSTRAD commercial.

Over in the States, Donald Trump, he of the comedy wig and golf course empire only lasted a couple of series before the American equivalent was pulled from the schedules. So Sir Alan has done well to make it to series five and I'm sure this series will still pull in the ratings. But I wonder whether it might be time for a new boss with a different attitude and a different job up for grabs to take the reins when series six begins. Someone like James Caan from Dragons' Den might bring a fresh approach, or possibly someone from a retail background could come at it from a different perspective.

I suppose the other problem now with The Apprentice is that there will be some who will switch off due to the thought of some upstart getting a £100,000 a year job at a time when unemployment is rife and the economy is in meltdown will be seen as immoral. However, I don't think the moralists will make much difference to the ratings, especially as the escapism served up by The Apprentice will be a welcome remedy to some viewers current travails. That said, it has been noticeable how more people enter The Apprentice now to play the celebrity game and get themselves noticed rather than because they have a great desire to work for Sir Alan. It stands to reason really, in the long run you can earn more for appearing on Celebrity Love Island or for doing after dinner speeches and seminars on the business circuit than for trying to get people to rent Sir Alan's bedsits or selling ideas for country clubs to planning committees.

The new series will start a man light with one contender pulling out at the last minute. There will still be 15 contenders in the field though, with the usual motley crew of science teachers, travelling salesmen and in one case, a former footballer. The basic principles will remain the same though. Everyone will work as a team until the task is lost and then let the backstabbing begin in the board room as Sir Alan tells the losers "they are a bloody shambles". Oh, and a man will win the competition.