25 posts tagged “hts”
Like you, I have occasionally experimented with inventing new words and phrases with a view to disseminating them and so enjoying the immortality that comes with permanently swelling the English lexicon. Who hasn't thought, at some point, 'Someone must be coming up with these new words - someone no less a slob than I. Why not give it a go?'
Who indeedum?
Just how popular your neologism becomes is a good measure of both your powers of influence and your catchinessability. But of course it helps to have technology behind you. Had the internet been around when I was a child, the term 'bingobongobango!' might be the superlative of choice for today's street youth, instead of the occasion for my family threatening to fling me from an upstairs window. That's why, when I heard a superb new term on the bus the other day, I decided to use the global reach of this 'web log' to give it wings.
Two women were discussing their favourite clothes shop.
"______* was packed on Saturday," said one.
"It's because there's a price pounce,' quoth the other.
Price pounce! I love it!
I love it because, like 'credit crunch', it combines catchiness, vividness, and the clunky use of a verb as a noun.
I love it because you can sort of guess what it means even though it's stupid. Presumably a 'price pounce' is when low prices, perhaps driven by that other alliterative economic condition, lead to a surge in purchasing. It could be used to describe specific situations (there's a price pounce going on at Tesco) or an overall market situation (consumer spending is soaring because of the Price Pounce) with equal ludicrousness.
I love it because it summons images of people leaping around shops.
As any economist knows, a recession is officially over when Radio 4 report a bit of good news about the economy for four days in a row. It hasn't happened yet; but perhaps (I've been wondering) that's because the media lack suitably delicious terms with which to describe financial felicitousness. Financial ruin and evil bankers make good soundbites (FUND-LOVING CRIMINALS!) but increased profits at M&S sounds as lively as loam. Bad news makes good headlines and vice versa.
But clearly the public - or at least the public on the otherwise awful Number 66(6) to Digbeth - are taking matters into their own mouths. We must support them.
Anyway, at hts we've been bandying 'price pounce' all week in the office. But we are a mere handful of spangle-pusses**; there's only so much that we can do.
Any suggestions for cheery economic terms welcome. Also welcome are suggestions about how we can get 'price pounce' in the OED.
* not real name
** worth a try
Gosh - is that the time (of year)?
Bloggering has been shelved for a while, since HTS got involved in a new Jobcentre scheme, the Jobsearch Support Service for Newly Unemployed Professionals, a scheme as admirable as it is time-devouring. But to avoid disappointing the droves of people who accidentally end up here by clicking the wrong icon on our website, and are wondering, perhaps angrily, why this blog is lying fallow, I thought I'd take a few minutes to post a blurry picture of a rubber hand.
There's more where that came from!
Regular service, which was never particularly regular in the first place, will resume anon.
Have a fruitful weekend, folks.
Sometimes, dear Reader, it takes more to maintain a blog than just occasionally thinking about writing a post, then eating some malted milk biscuits. I am starting to realise this - and it's been a humbling epiphany, let me tell you! Possibly tomorrow.
In my defence, there hasn't been much time for writing about hts' valiant battles with the dragon of recession, what with all the valiant battles we've been having with the dragon of recession. Dragons are notoriously intolerant of people blogging during battles, even if the people blogging aren't at the vanguard of the battle, but are quite far away from the fighting, behind some trees, maintaining the database and proofreading CVs. Nor do they relish being asked for a time-out while you read other people's blogs. So basically I haven't so much of sniffed Vox or any of its denizens since January.
Anyway, here's our news, since you asked:
1. We're finding that the dragon of recession (see above) isn't as sprightly as it was in January. It has slightly blunt nails and an intermittent cough. Will provide further economic insights as developments develop.
2. Varun has only gone and become a Dad, hasn't he! To a baby girl! Named Manya!
3. Danny did an abseil down the gigantic and weirdly carpeted side of the Fort Dunlop building! For charity! (The Stroke Association, to be specific.) With no previous abseiling experience and his children watching in terror admiration! Video to follow, as soon as we've edited out the bit where I put my head in front of the camera, thus turning the scene into a big curly nightmare.
4. Jayne passed her CERT-RP recruitment exam with flying colours! (She used crayons.) She can now commandeer light aircraft with her business card!
That's the news for now. Right, I'm off to read some blogs.
An HTS apocryphon tells of how once, in a simpler age, we landed a big deal on New Year's Eve while our competitors snoozed. That's the reason why most of the staff are in the office today - we're trying to restage a legend. The trouble is that in addition to those snoozing competitors, our clients and prospective candidates are at home, too, coughing and improvising recipes around sprouts, leaving us with nothing to do but formulate battle plans for 2009 and critique songs on the radio.
It has been a very grotty year for lots of people. As for the next one, our radio seems convinced that 2009 is going to be worse than 1666. But anyone who's taken the time to check out the reality behind this year's media horror stories will have noticed that the media has been amplifying the negatives in what I can only assume is a deliberate attempt to force us into a state of surrender. Which is not to say that things aren't bad. It's just that when a corporation lays off a hundred full time employees and forty thousand contractors whose contracts were up in a few months anyway, and then the newspapers run headlines like NOT A REAL COMPANY LTD.* TO LAY OFF 40,100 EMPLOYEES! you've got to wonder at least two things:
1. Whether reducing us to nervous jelly might actually be the media's metier, and
2. How much toxic news we gulp down without checking the ingredients.
Job loss seems to be one of the big terrors of the moment. But from the viewpoint of someone who spends every day following people's attempts to get jobs, and employers' attempts to get staff, it seems to me that 2009 may well be a good year, or at least a character-building year, for those who are willing to be more frugal, inventive and flexible than was considered healthy before The Crunch crunched.
New Year's Resolution:
- Put 10% of salary into an ISA
Things I did this festive season that I have never done before:
- Watched the spookily prescient 'Death Race 2000'.
Things I did this festive season that nobody has ever done before (admittedly in a challenge to do something that nobody has ever done before):
- Knighted a cat with a frozen lobster.
Have a fabuloso New Year.
* not a real company
relatedish:
Good news: Many companies' recruitment freezes are already starting to thaw. Meanwhile, Jayne has been getting a surprising number of replies to the email she's been sending to candidates:
'Despite all the gloom and doom in the media, our consultants are at the coal face of recruitment and are reporting a much more positive outlook for January and the year ahead. The indications are that many of our clients will be recruiting quite aggressively in the new year and that the current slowdown in recruitment is seasonal as much as anything else.
In light of this we recommend that if you do plan to keep an eye out for fresh challenges next year, you beat the January rush and register your updated details with HTS asap. We'll then get in touch to discuss anything that matches your skills, experience and preferences...'
Candidates on our database who haven't been in touch for ages are emailing to express appreciation for this glimmer of positivity. People are starving for a bit of good news, it seems.
I'm starting to suspect that the economy is a sort of phantom summoned by the collective wizardry of the population's beliefs and assumptions about the health of our national finances. Confidence - a mere mental state, last time I checked - feeds it; lack of confidence makes it wither. If nobody had ever thought that the economy was in such trouble, it might not have ended up in such trouble. So perhaps it is time for us to treat the economy (and the jobs market, by extension) as a servitor or golem, and effectively tell it what to do by spreading as much positive news as we can get our hands on...
Let's say you've been made redundant. It's a dashed grim time to be made redundant. And let's say you've been made redundant from a company situated only two miles from where you live. It was ideal, until they started culling staff.
But there's hope! Let's say that an agency rings you up to tell you about a great opportunity with a friendly, financially solid company that's twenty miles from where you live - a twenty-five minute direct motorway commute, but a whole eighteen miles further than you're going at the moment.
Which of the following do you think? -
1. Twenty miles versus two miles? Now that doesn't compare favourably. I'll say no, wait a month, and review my situation.
2. Twenty miles versus... being unemployed during an economic recession? Give me some of that.
The guy on the phone this morning was adamant that he wouldn't consider anything beyond a short commute for the next month. We're not a hard-sell kind of agency, so we stopped short of hectoring him, threatening to abduct his family, etc. His plan, he said, was to look for wish-list jobs now, and broaden his search later if that didn't work. Sounds like a reasonable strategy, no?
Trouble is, this opportunity won't be around in a month, and we don't get vacancies like this too often. In a month's time, comparable opportunities, if they exist, might be forty miles away - and this guy will be asking for jobs within a twenty mile radius. At which point he might consider reflecting that, had he been a little more prudent, he might already have an offer for a job a mere twenty miles away.
True, he (or we) might find something within walking distance from his house over the next month. In which case, all he would have had to do was withdraw the application to the twenty-miler. Submitting his CV to our client today wouldn't have bound him to anything; it would merely have broadened his range of possibilities, at a time when plenty of people would happily commute much further than twenty miles in order to have a secure job.
My advice to people being made redundant? Put yourself in your own future shoes, as it were. Be as flexible now as you think you will be in a month's time. If you think you'd look at a twenty mile commute in a month, don't rule it out now. If you'd look at jobs forty miles from where you live in a month's time, don't close doors on opportunities now. If you will be facing a life on the street, sleeping in skips and trapping cats for food, and would happily accept any job, then don't rule anything out now. Remember, an application doesn't bind you to accept a job - you'd have to be shortlisted, interviewed and given an offer first, and even then start-dates are negotiatiable.
Of course, if you definitely wouldn't consider a twenty mile commute in a month's time - for whatever reason - you've no reason to consider it now. But bear in mind that opportunities aren't raining down from the heavens at the moment; in tough times, flexibility is strength.
cee eff:
My intention to say something insightful about America's new President got mugged - along with my desire to sit around reading other people's blogs - by the pressures of trying to remain worthy of employment. And now, of course, the new-President business is old history. Fate has placed fresh news-stories atop the wobbling Jenga-stack of history. As a nation we're suffering a critical lack of sperm donors (we can all look forward to a wonderfully festive government ad campaign) - and unemployment is starting to rocket.
During a recession, it's good to have job security. Ask Jonathan Ross, who may have to wrap this year's Christmas presents in slightly lower denomination banknotes. I personally have even considered being grateful for having a job, though I have spent my life exploring legal alternatives. To those people facing the struggle of having to find a new job in a market where the hiring to redundancy ratio is something like 2-1, I offer sincere sympathy.
The good news is that companies are hiring. Some are availing themselves of the surfeit of terrified, jobless executives willing to work for half their usual salary. If a company is doing well and has some money in the bank, now is the time to get a cut-price Ops Director from one of its competitors.
A good agency, of course, will be able to 'sell' you directly to the people with the power to hire you, and they can circumvent the online-application-form process. A bad agency, on the other hand, won't understand your skills, won't have heard of your company's competitors, and will send your CV on a speculative basis, accompanied by badly written, vague cover-emails.
Regarding agencies, here are some tips. You'll note that they are implicitly self-aggrandising:
- Send your CV to agencies who deal specifically with companies in your field. Small and knowledgeable is better than big and clueless (though if your skills are more generic, big agencies are generally a better bet).
- Speak to an agent, and ascertain their expertise by getting a bit technical, if possible. Look for telltale signs. If they pronounce J2EE 'J-2-double-E' or spell out PMBOK or don't spell out ASP or say 'c hash' for C#, run for the hills.
- Get the agent to swear that they won't send your CV to companies without your permission - unless it really is okay with you. Some agencies will simply not know that the company they're sending your CV to is the parent company of the one you work for. (They'll know, of course, when you phone them up to say you've been fired.) Ask if the agency is on the PSL (preferred suppliers list) of the companies they're sending your CV to - many companies will not look at CVs from non-PSL companies.
- Have a perfect CV. A perfect CV has your name, your personal details (DOB, driving licence, nationality, HSMP/Tier1 if applicable), a brief blurb, a tidy list of your technical skills, your academic history (including dates), your employment details (brief descriptions of each job, including technical skills and dates... if you're in sales, you should put sales figures if they're at all impressive) and a list of your saner hobbies. Three pages max, I'd say. No spelling or grammar mistakes or punctuation mistakes - get someone else to read it through if you can. Employers / recruiters will look at your technical skills, the amount of time you spent in your last role (if it was too short, they'll look back through your history to see if you've stayed at previous jobs or if you've flitted), and how recently you've used the skills relevant to the job in question (which is why you need to say which skills you used in which role.)
- Bear in mind that if you're a contractor or have had a contract-heavy work history and you're looking for permanent work, it might be best to approach companies direct. Clients tend not to want to pay agency fees for candidates who have moved around a lot - they're scared that you'll leave in two months, and they'll have forked out a substantial fee.
Of course, if sperm donation becomes highly paid, um, work, many men's employment woes may be relieved, and HTS may well swim in a new direction (HTS will stand for something entirely different, of course). Till then, best of luck to anyone currently job-hunting.
(The lovely bike in the picture is a Pashley, BTW, in case you're wondering.)
See also:
Changelings! The terrifying truth about the CVs you submit to agencies
Tip of the day: If you're looking for a job and you're posting your CV on internet job boards and you're willing to relocate, you have to spell it out on your CV.
Recruitment folk are always a bit wary of candidates who say they'll relocate for the right opportunity. It's not that we don't believe them; it's just that people will usually prefer a mediocre opportunity close to home to a great opportunity requiring them to up-sticks. Usually, you'll learn about the mediocre opportunity on the morning of the interview you've arranged, when Bob from Manchester calls you five minutes before his interview to say that he won't be attending his meeting with the entire HR department/MD/technical design team of your Client in Bath, who are presently waiting in a specially tidied office with a pot of tea and fifty Malted Milk biscuits, because he's got a job offer from a company in Stretford, just near the Arndale Centre, which pays less, but doesn't require him to sell a house, buy a house, move the kids to a school where nobody will understand a word they say, and put butter on the cat's paws.
In short, the hassle of relocation means that great opportunities requiring relocation are easily trumped by middling opportunities not involving relocation. From a recruitment POV, it's best, therefore, to focus on matching good candidates to good local jobs, especially in today's market, where nobody wants to have to sell and buy property, and nobody wants to commute.
One upshot of all this is: ifyou have posted your CV on an internet job board like Monster, and you've indicated that you're willing to relocate, nobody will believe you, unless you've just moved to this country and haven't put down roots yet.
So if you're genuinely willing - and/or in a good position - to relocate, you need to say it upfront on your CV, along with the other information that should be at the top of the page. If (say) you're currently renting and have no ties, or if you're actively looking to move (for some reason), say so:
CV
Bob Job
PCB Design Engineer, BEng
DOB 11/08/1972
Full driving licence
Married, two children
NOTE: I am currently renting and am 100% flexible regarding relocation.
Because this conversation, I've found, just doesn't happen any more:
ME: I've found a fantastic person for the ______ job in the Hebrides! She's perfect! She lives in Portsmouth, but checked the 'willing to relocate' box on Monster!
VARUN: Send her CV directly to me, thou good and faithful Resourcer.
It has been replaced by this:
ME: I've found a fantastic person for the ______ job in the Hebrides! She's perfect! She lives in Portsmouth, but checked the 'willing to relocate' box on Monster!
VARUN whips me in the eye with a phone charger and fulminates against relocaters.
Point laboured.
Like many others who blog on behalf of their employers, I have felt pressure lately to resist the urge to diarise amusing pet incidents and instead write something informative about the economic situation. In fact, I have been avoiding writing anything at all until I learned something informative about the economic situation. Others are not so conscientious. It is doubtful, for example, that the people who own the old converted factory in which HTS is located know much more than me about the credit crunch, but they have not let this prevent them from getting up and doing something - specifically, turning the building's heating off and laughing while we freeze. It is in this spirit of 'act first, have some ideas later' that I have decided to share with you the few things I do know about our economic situation (before my frigid fingers turn black and drop off).
1. The economic crisis is too complex for any human to understand. At the same time, the measures that could have prevented it aren't that much more complex than those advocated by any number of fairy tales involving prudent and imprudent pigs, mice, wolves etc.
2. The credit crunch is a great time for keeping money circulating by buying stuff! Shares especially. If you have some savings squirreled away, it is also a good time to buy a house or a commercial bank.
3. Even though the situation is grim, you should start doing now what you should have done years ago (avoid spending on credit where possible and funnel at least 10% of your income into a high-interest account) but didn't do because you were waiting for some kind of upturn in your fortunes that would mean you could funnel 10% of your income into a high-interest account without you having to cut down on takeaways and bottles of wine. Note that by 'you' I was referring to 'me'.
4. Nancy Pelosi was right, although her 'golden parachute' metaphor was perhaps confusing, given that a parachute made of any kind of metal both wouldn't stop you falling, and would squash you after you'd hit the ground. But her point was spot on - taxpayers' money should not be used as a golden parachute (?) to save the fatcats who reduced the global economy to chaos! It's much better to let the economy melt down, witness the total collapse of society, then eat the fatcats or make them our slaves. And slowly build western civilisation back up to its peak of greatness, which for me was in the 1980s. Go hair metal!
Incidentally, I am also against using taxpayers' money to save people from sinking ships. Why give a golden parachute (?) to those fatcat ship-builders when their grasp of hull metrics proves faulty?
Anyway, I know some other things, but I will have to stop here, because my fingers have gone blue and I intend to warm them by making a cup of tea and holding it for ten minutes while pretending to look at something important on my computer monitor and occasionally nodding and stabbing Caps Lock. Darn those well-heated fatcats who own our building!
Of course, I'LL be the one laughing when I retire early thanks to my squirrelled-away 10% hi-interest savings, which I am going to start squirrelling away this very afternoon. Or I might wait till next week, and spend this week's 10% on a bottle of Balvenie Doublewood, which is on special offer at Waitrose, probably thanks to the credit crunch. Golden parachute, silver lining.
Clothes: do they affect your work?
To be more precise, lest you're worried that this might be a post advocating office nudism: does what you wear to work affect the way you work?
As of last week, hts has an Online Media recruitment division, headed up by a new division manager, Karl, who has suggested that perhaps our office ethos is not so much 'executive recruitment' as 'web startup'. None of us felt comfortable admitting that this was the ethos we'd deliberately aimed for: laid back, no hi-fives when someone makes a placement, lots of eating crisps. Karl had a word with the the Boss, who agreed with him that we are all a bunch of slobs, and now we have two new rules:
1. If you're going to scoff your lunch eat at your desk, do it between 12 and 2, rather than spend the whole day munching.
2. Dress smart.
Here's how the new policies have affected us:
- Some of us have quite enjoyed the novelty of wearing suits. We spent the first day pointing at each other and laughing. I don't own much in the way of fancy tailoring, and am wearing my sixth-form suit, which makes me look like Napoleon Dynamite. On Friday we had dress-down day, and the mood in the office was reminiscent of the bit in that Tarzan film where the eponymous apeman abandons Graystoke Manor and goes back to the jungle. Or the bit in The Emerald Forest where the tribespeople are rescued from the brothel.
My fear was that as soon as we put on suits, we'd start talking differently. Like those other recruitment people you hear about. Our consultants would take to standing on tables while haggling aggressively over rates. '17 PERCENT? Dammit, Barry, I'm cutting my wrists for you here,' they'd yell. 'I'm going no lower than 20%, Barry. If you're going to treat me like a limbo dancer, I expect you to be stuffing twenties in the elastic of my hula skirt.'
It hasn't happened yet, but I'm waiting, and I'll keep you posted.
- Formerly, we'd graze our way through the day, a phone in one hand, a cake in the other. It was not uncommon for the phone to ring and three consultants to simultaneously answer their baguettes. The weight we gained from eating biscuits was burned off through vigorously shaking the crumbs out of our keyboards. Now all that has changed. There is no munching until 12, at the stroke of which our office suddenly resembles a game of Hungry Hippos.
That's the extent of the upheaval, really. Pretty painless. So far I think we have proved that our cheerful and easygoing office culture was not dependant on round-the-clock consumption and wearing paint-splattered t-shirts commemorating membership of twice-visited fitness clubs. Putting on shirts has not turned us into Glengarry Glenn Ross, any more than wearing flipflops to work ever caused us to call candidates dude. We haven't started backstabbing each other or attempting to force our candidates to take jobs they will clearly hate. But then we haven't yet been told to wear ties.
Next: office nudism.
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