This weeks guru
Is recruitment crisis sending HR off rails?
Guru assumes that most children no longer say they want to be train drivers
when they grow up.
Recruitment is going to be a serious problem for the sector, following the
critical Cullen report into the Paddington crash, closely followed by a damning
Health and Safety Executive report.
Guru imagines that the only HR professionals moving into the sector are ones
who like a challenge. It has become so tough that the incumbent HR staff have
had enough.
A rail operator’s HR director told Guru the other day that she couldn’t
comment on the current staffing and safety crisis because she was about to
leave the sector. She had decided to hand in her resignation that afternoon.
Trip sheds little light on future
What is the future of HR? Guru obviously knows, but the Powergen HR team
weren’t so sure.
To find, out they decided to go to Silicon Valley, California. The IT sector
in the US is doing all sorts of clever things with their HR to keep staff happy
and productive.
Apparently, Powergen learnt quite a lot about the direction of HR, but
didn’t want to let Guru in on the exact details.
They would have learnt a whole lot more but the electricity kept cutting out
during meetings.
By the end of the trip, the Powergen delegates were wondering whether it
should have been an exchange visit.
While they learn more about HR in the US, Californian power engineers should
have come to the UK to learn about constant flows of electricity.
Refugee red tape left us seeing red
There is nothing more frustrating than being caught up in swathes of red
tape, as Guru found out last week.
Having written to the Home Office on 10 May asking about the excessive
bureaucracy involved in placing skilled refugees into employment . Guru finally
received a letter in reply on 2 July.
The reply stated that the letter has now been forwarded to the Immigration
and Nationality Directorate (briefing and complaints section). Now Personnel
Today has launched its Refugees in Employment campaign response is getting
swifter (see news pages).
But Guru thinks that he is beginning to understand why refugees largely
remain an untapped resource for UK employers…
Kidnap? It’s team building gone mad
Team building events are getting out of hand. Guru was recently on his fifth
course at a black-tie dinner in Newport, South Wales, when British ambassador
Sir Lawrence Creighton-Ward stood up to address the audience. Suddenly six
masked men burst through windows and fired sub-machine guns over the heads of
diners. A senior partner of the host company was then abducted and the
terrorists challenged the audience to rescue him.
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As the terrorists left and the Mission: Impossible theme tune finished, one
of the organisers explained to Guru that it was a team-building exercise rather
than a real hostage situation and all the masked men and the ambassador were
former members of the SAS. Only then would Guru come out from under the table.
Whatever happened to team-building exercises that simply involved staff
using paperclips and egg cartons to bridge a stream?
