Friday 24 April 2015

You Can't Get the Staff


By the time I became a Manager in 2002, the Coffee company for whom I worked had established a very strict recruitment procedure from which we were instructed not to deviate, comprising of an extensive, structured interview and the diligent completion of a hefty written assessment of each and every applicant. I would always sneak a question or two about musical tastes into every interview though - it had to be done. If I had my way, I would never have employed anyone who didn't at least like The Buzzcocks and The Ramones, though on reflection, the implementation of this policy would probably have left our stores extremely short-handed for most of the time.

Here's a less frequently aired favourite from each of those great bands.


7 comments:

Dirk said...

Mind you, Swede, personally I'd rather be served slowly by someone wearing a Ramones badge with pride than fastly by some young chick in one of those en vogue fake Clash shirts, you know, the ones where the dragon is framed with false gems and the person wearing it doesn't even know who on earth the Clash were!!

Old Pa's Corner said...

Reminds me of a guy I worked with who took a character assesement test. It came back arrogant, self obsessed....he complained that it was ridiculous.....boy it was spot on! Essential to get musical tastes, well done TS.

Scott said...

Having spent a large part of the last 25 years working in record stores or bookstores I have had the good fortune to interview many people and discuss their fave records and books. Once or twice I have literally forgotten that I was interviewing as we were so caught up swapping stories of our musical and literary heroes.

The Swede said...

Dirk. Serving slowly and wearing a non-regulation badge, just two of the many offences that could have led to a disciplinary hearing, if an auditor turned up unannounced! Luckily, I seemed to be a pretty good judge of character and employed a lot of very nice people over the years, the vast majority of whom didn't share my musical tastes in any way!

Old Pa. All the Managers had to take one of those tests, to get used to the format before we started using them ourselves as part of the recruitment process. My result came out much like your mates did! Everyone else in the room howled with laughter when the result was read out - it was about as far off beam as it was possible to be. I guess no system is infallible. But you can learn a lot about someone from their taste in music!

The Swede said...

Scott. Exactly. I usually learned much more about a person's character from informal conversation, rather than from the questions that I had to be seen to ask in order to tick a few boxes. Of course if an Area Manager sat in on an interview, I had to play it by the book.

Charity Chic said...

A friend of mine was a manager of a bingo hall. one of his staff asked him what music he liked. The Ramones he responded to the reply of oh those guys in the white hats who sang Sugar Baby love?

The Swede said...

Charity Chic. That's brilliant - you couldn't make it up! I wrote a guest post over at Tune Doctor a couple of years ago on a similar topic.
http://tunedr.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/guest-spot-57-motorhead-ramones.html

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