John Linton ....it certainly doesn't feel like any Christmas I have experienced in the past.
Not the brightest day to start the last 'real' week of the commercial year with drizzle over the harbour and quite heavy cloud over the rest of the 'skyscape'.....it's not particularly warm either - even for this time of day. The EU financial press was equally gloomy and though I haven't read the Australian press this morning it's probably similar. The US media was as incomprehensible as usual, to me, with more space given to the Philippine floods than to financial maters - even the illegal migrant boat sinking off Indonesia got more space than the payroll tax credit extension. A sign of the time of year as far as the world's media is concerned.
It's difficult among all the 'wind down' activities that are so evident around every aspect of Sydney at the moment to maintain a sensible focus on year end commercial life. Even the roads were semi empty when we went in to the city yesterday for a Japanese lunch at The Rocks - far less traffic than any 'ordinary' Sunday. I re-made a 'must do before the end of year' list earlier this morning and it was surprisingly short - either reflecting an unusual level of efficiency this year or a lack of desire to complete the usual amount of work......I suspect a bit of both.
We have been doing a higher level of recruiting in Australia than we have done at any previous time in Exetel's brief 'life' - both for trainee sales personnel and for pre and post sales engineers. The number of applicants for engineering jobs is extraordinary high but the 'quality' of the applicants is far from the levels we are looking for which has been very disappointing to date and it is going to take much longer to fill those positions than we had planned. For the first time we are noticing that an increasing number of applicants are faking their qualifications rater than just faking their work experience attainments (a common practice of all types of applicants in Australia and probably most other countries). That is something I find quite strange and perhaps is a sign of today's society where theft, lies and pretences have infiltrated to an alarming degree in so many parts of today's 'life'.
In any event we are finding it more difficult than we expected to recruit good engineers and slightly less difficult to recruit sales trainees in Australia than in the past. This is, undoubtedly, partly due to applying slightly higher standards than in the past but mostly due to a lower percentage of candidates possessing the 'right' attributes. Perhaps, for reasons I can't determine, Exetel has become a less attractive potential employer than it has been in the past....or alternatively perhaps their are more attractive potential employers than have previously been available right now? For whatever reason we need to re-look at our recruiting methods that have been so successful in the past - just one more example of the need to constantly change and improve everything a commercial company does.
Apart from attempting to complete our recruiting, which it now seems we will not be able to do before the end of this coming week, there are only a few things that need to be done over the next few days....which is somewhat eerie as I don't recall experiencing this 'lack of pressure' in the past.
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