Abubilla Music

My Recruiting Experience, Day 1

Written by Louise

It is Monday. I had a lie in this morning (worked over the weekend so don’t beat me up), met Sophie for lunch (had oddly delicious cauliflower and cheese soup), then came back to my flat and got back to some emails from Jimmy. I then thought, ‘oh yeah, we posted that job on Saturday, I wonder if anyone’s replied’. So I went to the Abubilla email account and, lo and bleedin’ behold, we’ve only got 11 responses! ELEVEN! In two days! Bodes well, doesn’t it.

Now, when I was 18, just done my A-levels and was planning my gap year trip to Eastern Africa, I had a temping job working in HR for Richmond and Twickenham PCT. I used to get up extra early (back in the day) in order to catch a bus that wouldn’t get stuck in traffic. I’d sit in the cafe by Tedddington Hospital (the department’s moved now, but it used to be in the hospital), have two pieces of toast with Marmite and every morning Daniel Bedingfield would be on the radio singing ‘If you’re not the one’ (ah, I love that song now, which is ever so slightly embarrassing). Anyway, the point being that in this HR job, I mainly worked on recruitment. Which involved photocopying CVs, application forms, other forms for the interview panel to mark with (you know, with boxes so they could mark the applicants out of ten) and compiling them all into little packs with a plastic envelope, you know the kind. I would then chase up references, CRB forms from those employed and cater to anything the interview panel wanted. I also did A LOT of filing, which I hated because it damages and hurts your cuticles. If you’ve never filed before, you won’t understand.

So, here I am, eight years on (my, how they’ve flown), recruiting again. But this time to replace me. If there’s one thing I’m learning it’s that it is absolutely unnecessary to have more than 2 pages for your CV. FACT. Also, it is imperative that any applicants reference the advert you spent hours working on: tell me why you tick all those boxes specifically – do you really think we’ve spent just 5 minutes writing a general employment advert? No. We’ve thought about this quite carefully and, in the advert, you will find everything you need to know (apart from the money side of it, but don’t ask about that because you will find out if you get to the interview stage) including what we’re looking for! To be fair, 99% of the applicants so far have talked about liking dogs, which is pretty much spot on.

Oh, look, I’ve just finished my packet of digestives. Bum.