Cuts in vocational learning, temp-to-perm, the world’s oddest job ad | Recruiters Weekly News

Funding cuts to vocational learning, better rights for lower-paid employees, and an exciting opportunity for aspiring henchmen. It’s the recruitment news round-up.

Staffing cuts hit vocational courses

Cuts to educational budgets in Britain are not only making the recruitment of new teaching staff problematic at the present, but risk creating a skills vacuum in future generations, teaching unions have warned this week.

Research carried out by the NUT and the ATL has found evidence of funding cuts hitting the classrooms in a way that will worry any recruiter with an eye on the long term skills market. The findings suggest that lack of resources is forcing schools to make tough decisions – and it is the classes which directly prepare students for a future career that are feeling the brunt of the cuts.

Of the 1,200 union members polled, 64 per cent had reported a clear reduction in the amount of classes in vocational subjects being offered in their own schools. Courses including business studies, modern languages, design technology and construction were among the hardest hit.

Baljinder Kuller of the online teacher resource The Supply Register suggested that targets and league tables were having a detrimental effect on vocational subjects, as these courses are not considered when evaluating a school’s overall standing. And, while core subjects such as English and maths generate the most prominent headlines when affected by budgetary restraints, recruiters will be more concerned about the impact on vocational courses and a lack of practical skills being learned in our education system.

The Education Policy Institute (EPI) predicts that an average secondary schools will see its annual budget reduced by about £300,000 by September 2019, and that primary schools are set to lose £75,000 of yearly funding within the same period.

Union bosses: temp-to-perm roles for Sports Direct workers

It seems as though barely a week goes by without the trend of temp-to-perm hiring making the headlines somewhere on our recruitment radar. The gig economy may be here to stay, but it has been a long time in the making.

Now, Unite the Union is calling on temporary staff at one high street retailer to bargain collectively for permanent positions.

Unite has called on management at Sports Direct to “eliminate its dependence” on agency workers who possess very few rights or prospects of jobs security. A BBC documentary in October 2015 discovered that agency workers at Sports Direct were regularly dismissed for accumulated minor infractions such as talking as they worked, or using the bathroom.

The appeal comes in the same week that the high street brand announced that its staff would have an elected representative attending company board meetings on their behalf in future. Store manager Alex Balacki will be the first to take on the role.

The week’s strangest job advert

As recruitment industry specialists, it might be tempting to believe that we have seen everything that the industry has to offer, and that there are no new ideas. Then we are confronted with something like this advert, which appeared last week on the Skyline Offices London website.

Advertising an opening within the company, the vacancy requests the services of “a hench(wo)man”, and offers incentives such as “a Monaco lifestyle on a Wetherspoons budget”, as well as full access to the company’s in-house “drinking globe”. The advert appears authentic, while also seemingly too good to be true.

Hopeful applicants will be expected to carry out duties that are limited only to “anything to help make me more money”, with the ideal candidate being somebody who is able to work independently, and who will “despise authority”.

Of course, this could be one to file under marketing, rather than recruitment – the advertised position has been posted by Victor Pardis, the Managing Director of Skyline Offices itself, and we’re sure it has attracted more than its share of web traffic in the last week.

We are all for trying new approaches here at eBoss – and we certainly respect the total honesty of Mr Pardis’ advert – but maybe there is a better way to find the ideal candidate in future?