2 posts tagged “media”

Arise, sir cat

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:

your job search one month from now

New dress policy

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.