Friday 6 September 2013

BBC - Major retailer humiliates graduate in group dance at interview

A while ago I posted about interviewers asking stupid "Blind Date" style questions at interviews (along the "if you were a ...blank... what would it be and why" theme), now the latest extreme technique is this story about a group dance at an interview for a major retailer.

A campaign group spokeswoman commented on the "more innovative ways to interview people when there's more competition and people are having to jump through more and more hoops to get a job", but thought this was "outrageous". Companies class these as "team building exercises", people with Asperger's often get criticised for not being "team players", now I don't think it is that they can't work in teams, but certainly find this type of exercise difficult.

Thursday 20 June 2013

BBC - Work Programme not doing enough for sick and disabled

This article is about providers of the Work Programme calling for other public sector to be redirected to the programme. A few of the comments were already highlighting what I've often said throughout this blog there is such a lot of need for the re-education of employers, as uniformly sending the jobseekers for ever more 'coaching' does not address that the employer can cherry pick. I even posted for the first time here. I know I don't post so much in this blog now I have that job, but still follow the subject of un/employment of disabled people as I'm mindful of how long it took to find work before that lucky moment in the right place at the right time.

Wednesday 1 May 2013

"Mumbo-jumbo" personality tests

Found this on the BBC news. An opposition politican has criticised government ministers getting jobseekers to waste time on "mumbo-jumbo" personality tests when they should be looking for work, while the Department for Work and Pensions said the questionnaire was designed to highlight things that people were good at, and reaction to it had been positive. People would be asked which of five answers - "very much like me", "like me", "neutral", "unlike me" or "very much unlike me" - best describes their view of themselves in response to a variety of different of statements.

Took me back to the "Flexible Routeway" I'd been on in 2008-09 when I'd had one, which had been on the BBC website, where I'd been described as a "Realist", one of 16 possible types, determined by 4 sub-types:
Planner / Spontaneous - where I'd been a planner as expected
Facts / Ideas - Again I expected to come out as Facts
Heads / Hearts - logical or emotional thinking, again I was the former
Introvert / Extrovert - unsurprisingly introvert.
That was actually an interesting exercise, the point being to use the "buzzwords" out of the report, such as "logical thinking" in job letters.

Tuesday 5 February 2013

'Pushing jobless into self-employment'

This BBC article covers people on the government's welfare-to-work scheme being inappropriately pushed towards self-employment, which is not something that would suit everyone. Clients of six different Work Programme providers said that they were encouraged to pretend to be working for themselves or set up businesses they did not consider viable and invent their 16 hours a week to get tax credit, so the programme providers got their payments "by results" for getting the clients off Jobseekers.

From a personal point of view self-employment would not be for me. I often had well meaning friends ask if I'd considered it, admittedly they had not known I had Aspergers when they said this. I'd said no, as I'd known that selling a product on a self-employed basis is similarly difficult to selling oneself in a conventional job interview, not to mention the dealings with bank managers, solicitors and auditors. There was an interesting topic on an Aspergers forum, where a social enterprise set-up was being founded with the principle that it would be a business network made up of ASpies who make and produce the goods, and non-ASpies who market, sell, and handle the customer-care side. The posters of this were parents setting their sons up, I think that idea could work in principle.