Please employers..?

Remember those halcyon days before the internet?

When you looked at newspapers or magazines, noticed a job advert and sent for an information pack? It gave you the whole family tree about who was who, the bosses, your colleagues, what the department did, and everything under the sun.

Not any more. You search on the internet and find a job and there is a minimum amount of information.

Or, in my case you go into the Gibraltar Job Centre, there is a meaningless job title on a card, no further information, and no salary. And you are meant to send a CV to try and get a job with zilch info?

Alternatively, you get a little info out of one of the job centre staff because the employer has thought to send in six lines. Trouble is, those six lines don’t say what the job involves.

Why the hell not? It would be much easier to write my CV accordingly, depending on the skills and experience I need to emphasise for a particular job.

If the job you are advertising is property and estate management, dealing with contractors, chasing invoices (didn’t know anyone needed to do that, chasing payment – YES!) and paying bills – SAY SO. Don’t call it corporate services that needs team and office management.

Class question of the interview: ‘Have you any experience of dealing with painters?’

No. I’ve lived with one for nearly 30 years and we’ve had our own decorating/property maintenance business. I’ve never met his colleagues, I’ve never dealt with the staff we employed in the UK, and I’ve never worked on a job either. [Extreme irony. For the benefit of anyone who doesn’t know, I’ve worked on decorating jobs in the UK, Spain, and Gibraltar.]

I was so stunned I didn’t know what to say. And that’s the trouble. I was totally thrown by a question like that.

I didn’t need to blather on about my civil service experience or my journalism. I might as well have stuck to, ‘We’ve had our own business since I can’t remember when, I’ve run the books and dealt with tradespeople.’

Simple really.

So FCO, half a page of job information is not good enough. Office management is not dealing with construction contractors. I can do both and have done, but I would really like to be slightly better prepared in future. And not be thinking about managing secretaries, letters, paperwork, political aspects of the governor’s office when I need to be thinking about estimates, speaking Spanish to tradespeople who don’t want to/can’t speak English, and checking out to see whether people are meeting the job spec. If there is one. I’m doubting it given the non-person spec/minimal job spec.

Ah well, shit happens.

Speaking of which, I noticed one of my few email followers had disappeared from Roughseas. (Most people follow via WordPress but this was someone without a blog who got email updates).

Not only am I persona non grata with an ex-friend who emailed me regularly – I was dumped a month ago – even my blogs are now no longer interesting to him. 😦

OK, so I’ve been through this before, but still, it doesn’t make it any easier.

Sometimes

If you read the above self-indulgent link, there was a happy ending. After three months I received an email. Something tells me I won’t this time. Especially when he’s not reading my blogs any more.

I suppose I can write a poem. Well, an attempt at a poem.

In the meantime I shall consider curling up and writing today off as total crap.