Tag Archives: recruitment

Fixing the UK economy – a grass roots approach

Posted on by deedeedoke

Reporting and writing about recruitment inevitably lead to thinking about the economy. While high finance isn’t exactly my thing, high finance may not hold all of the answers to the economic problems that continue to plague the UK now.

Personally, I tend to agree with those who predict that small businesses will drive the recovery. I’d take that a step further and suggest that smaller cities, towns and villages must play a leading role in achieving a balanced economy and creating a business landscape where technological advances and innovations give individuals, communities and small businesses a platform for sustainable local growth.

Recently, I signed on to participate in my little city’s town centre forum, to strengthen the business/consumer heart of our community. The biggest issue for many other participants is the future of free car parking. My view is, if you don’t have something interesting-useful-unique to offer, who cares if there’s free parking or not? I’m willing to pay to park my car (once I’ve earned my UK driving licence!) if the trip is going to pay off with a good customer experience. On the other hand, if there’s nothing at a specific location that I want or the customer service experience is crap, I’m not going to use it.

So what does this have to do with fixing the UK’s economy? Here are my thoughts on grass roots local rejuvenation.

1) Give business and home owners tax incentives to improve their properties. Mortgages are hard to come by, so let consumers ‘improve instead of move’. This will help get the local construction sector working. They’ll need additional help to carry out the new jobs, adding to the local ‘in employment’ figures.

2)  Take VAT down to 10% on materials required in these small-scale construction projects.

3)  Allow local authorities to impose a bottle-and-can bill. This would see consumers paying a 5p returnable fee for metal cans, 10p for plastic bottles and 15p for glass bottoles at point of purchase. When returned to the store, the fees would be refunded to the consumers for the number of cans and bottles returned. How would this generate revenue? What this would do would create financial incentives to not litter, potentially saving local authorities’ street and pavement cleaning spend, which they are tightening up on anyway. Instead of pitching or ignoring empty cans and bottles on pavement and on grassy park lawns, everyone from vagrants to school children raising money for projects could come to see these vessels as sources of potential income. This might also require additional jobs to be created at local stores for dealing with the returns.

4) Tax incentives to encourage landlords to allow pop-up and start-up businesses to use their empty properties at radically reduced rents and rates. Capture the energy of the ‘recession economy’ by providing new entrepreneurs — the crafters, the cupcake makers, etc — a place to build their name and their businesses! 

5) Tax relief/incentives on commuter public transport fares for home-to-work distances over 30 miles. This would promote greater consumer spending, probably at the very local level, on an extra meal out, new clothing, and so forth.

6) Tax incentives to people who use their taxable redundancy money to retrain or earn a qualification. Encourage people to learn new skills!

7)  At the national level, government should reward local authorities who encourage entrepreneurship, local environmental pride and small-scale construction. Celebrate the UK’s glorious tradition of small business and ownership!  

The grey market exists because the tax structure is at times so onerous and punitive for the straight shooters, and at the same time, so filled with loopholes for the sophisticated rich. There is an opportunity to use tax relief as an enticement to the middle class to better their quality of life and their communities. What would be the worst that could happen?.  

 

 

  

       

A micro view of recruitment – early 2012 in the UK

Posted on by deedeedoke

Ten days off, and I spend more time on the high street, shops and stores of my small home city, Ely, Cambridgeshire, at this time of year than I do i nthe previous 11 months. But recruitment is never far from mind. And there’s good news to share: even in a small city like Ely, recruitment hasn’t come to a grinding halt, in spite of the doom mongering about what allegedly lies ahead in 2012 and 2013 in economic terms.

Two businesses on Ely’s High Street have recruitment notices posted on their doors. One is a ‘value’ shoe chain, seeking a manager and an assistant. The other is Lloyd’s Pharmacy seeking both experienced and trainee dispensers. “Experience and qualifications less important than attitude,” the Lloyd’s notice announces. That’s a sign of the times, isn’t it? An open mindset toward potential and capability, not a tick box list of requirements. These notices tell me two different stories. The need for workers at the value shoe suggests that a steady stream of customers are seeking out bargain shoes to save money, ie, life in the new austerity. The need for dispensers and the willingness to seek out potential tells me that the war for talent in this field still rages amongst the pharmacy companies such as Lloyds and Boots, as well as the relative newcomers to pharmacy — Tesco, for example.

Speaking of Tesco and recruitment: a galloping lack of recruitment savvy on display at my local Tesco, again in Ely. From the checkout counters, a large board entitled “Staff Vacancies” at the front was visible. This board had holders for as many as nine to 12 cards, and each holder held a card. “Wha-hey,” I thought. “That’s a lot of jobs.” After paying for and bagging my groceries, I sauntered over to the board to see what jobs were on offer — you never know where you might find a story. Each card in each of the holders announced that there were no vacancies currently, no jobs whatsoever. (Yes, I read each card.) Did I feel misled?

Given the number of job seekers everywhere at the moment, filling each holder with a card that says there are no jobs is not only cruel but has the look of a ‘make work’ activity. (Remember the film “The Shining”, in which a crazed Jack Nicholson types “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” over and over again on each of 500 pages? That doesn’t bode well for the Tesco employee assigned the task of crafting these particular cards.) Leave the holders empty, for heaven’s sake; then job seekers can reasonably infer, no listings, no jobs.

On a larger, national scale, I’m sure I’m not alone in being delighted for Bombardier about their massive £188m contract win to build trains for Southern Rail. What this means for Bombardier’s recruitment is unclear at the moment — although it’s been exciting to follow Bombardier’s recruitment team’s online efforts in recent months — but the win does mean jobs for the Derby-based carriage maker. And jobs are what count for cities like Derby and smaller ones such as Ely in the months and years to come.

Call me shallow — Dave, a non-brush with “His Greatness” and me

Posted on by deedeedoke

Ok, I admit it: I’ve been holding a grudge against David Cameron (yes, the Prime Minister). I’ve told my husband about it, perhaps a few friends here and there. But I’ve mostly kept it to myself because I thought it might seem a bit, well, petty. But in light of recent revelations about his penchant for friendships with those at the glamourous end of the media as the phone hacking scandal at News International refuses to go away, I’ve decided that my little grudge may have more validity than I thought.
I belong to an organisation of people who work on UK magazines. Like I do. Occasionally this particular organisation features interesting guest speakers and topics at its sort-of regular get-togethers. One such occasion was an event at the Tory HQ at Millbank, an evening of drinks and canapes with “Call me Dave” before he could tell anyone to call him “Prime Minister”.
Typically at these events, you’ll find more of the glossy handbag-shoe-and-celebrity magazine brigade (the “Call me Xanthe”s) than business-to-business magazine types sucking up the wine and orange juice. But to meet Dave, well, we B2B geeks were out in force, naively expecting the chance to shake hands and say a few words about the concerns and issues of our respective industries — in my case, recruitment.
Dave began to cut his swath across the crowded room from the back, spending a few minutes in light chit-chat with each cluster of attendees before gracefully moving onto the next. Finally, he arrived at our group. A sentence or two in about running along the Thames, an aide moved in, whispered to Dave and delivered the editor of a leading handbag-shoe-celebrity title into our midst. Ah, how Dave lit up and turned on the charm. Oh, how a “she” (the fragrant Sam Cam, no doubt?) had “loved the article”, he raved. He and the lady at the forefront of the UK’s fashion-and-Cheryl Cole reportage (no doubt a perfectly nice, capable, intelligent woman) chatted animatedly for a good 10 to 15 minutes. She made her apologies, he then made one more stop, a brief one, at another group and was gone.
So here’s where the grudge comes in. A bit of an ego sap? Maybe just a bit. But that’s not all. Consider this: no fashion mag is going to ask the tough questions about the economy or individual business sectors. (Well, let’s not completely dismiss the often campaigning Marie Claire on that one, but it’s unlikely.) Readers of fashion mags may want to know when the PM’s lovely wife is going to design another world-beating bag in the wake of the “Nancy” but that’s not Dave’s turf. In this one little vignette, the chance to rub shoulders with the glossy, luxury fashion world won out over tapping into a nodding acquaintance with the minions of British industry news — a rich tapestry representing niche industries, sectors and businesses that I’m proud to be part of.
So are politicians immune to the dominance of “sleb” and fashion obsession that cheapens our culture? Not one soupcon. Should we be concerned? Yes.