Monday, January 22, 2007

Back in Tomorrow

Well the holiday is over. I'm back in at 7:30am to do cash office until 12:00 and then personnel after lunch. All of the store offices are due to repainted overnight tonight as part of our store "revitalise", so fingers crossed for a colour scheme I can live with. I'm also going to walk into a store that's been completely re-laid last week, so I won't have a clue where anything is when elderly ladies come dothering over to ask at the most inconvenient moments.

Top of my list of jobs tomorrow is to recruit two new checkout operators for evening shifts. When I started this task, before going on holiday, I'd vetted the application forms, selected suitable people and organised interviews for tomorrow. But no matter how hard I try, I can never get it right.

They always say they can work any hour under the sun, but once they're safely out of their trial period they start getting fussy about working evenings and weekends. They say they've been supervisors before; it only takes 5 minutes, once they've began employment with us, for me to wonder just how badly their previous employer wanted shot of them. And never chose somebody because they have neat handwriting - they always turn out to be airheads.

There's been two occasions when I've been forced to employ people who submitted bloody awful application forms. They turned out to be excellent workers and are both assets. Just shows, you can't judge them by the forms they hand in.

So at some point this week I shall probably have to conduct a dreaded induction. I loathe them with a passion. It's a measure of how sad I am when I can sing along to the lyrics of the songs on the Customer Service video. I'll have to sign my name so many times I'll start to doubt I'm spelling it correctly. I'll have to read the new starters through around 100 sheets of induction material - and there's still a good few days for me to develop a sore throat, to make this task particularly cringeworthy.

And then it'll all be repeated again this time next month when both of the new recruits have to be replaced.

1 comment:

Al said...

I never had to go through the one day induction with my company. Instead I got a hastily condensed two hour one (including those crap videos etc.). This stroke of good fortune was a result of them being unsure as to whether they were employing me or not (I actually got two letters, on the same day, one saying yes the other no).

I've seen some of them on the full day one though, half of them look bored to death, the other half are trying desperately not to show it.