What The Fuck Is Going On In People’s Heads?

As regular readers of Pish will know, Tom and I are always on the lookout for opportunities to better ourselves and develop our careers as menial office fodder.
We’re both looking for other jobs just now and, having been on the lookout for a while now, you have to ask what the fuck people are thinking when they set out to recruit people these days.

Tom has been asked to go to an interview by Esure for an entry level job. In order to get it, Tom must subject himself to a 2 hour interview, 5 tests and fill out and submit 5 pages of medical forms which basically allow his prospective employers full access to his medical history.

They won’t tell him what the wages are of course, but they expect him to let them shine a flashlight up his arse.

Can I just make one thing perfectly clear to any management/recruitment bods who may stumble upon this entry.

The word “matrix” maybe used to mean something else, but it now means 3 alright films starring Keanu Reeves.

Using it in any other kind of context means you are an UTTER WANKER.

I’m hearing the word more and more often these days, usually as part of the kind of wee grids and graphs middle management create to justify their existence and to make sure they never get called out on their own judgement.

“I didn’t know he’d stab folk! He scored great on the competency matrix!”

In other words: “Don’t sack me, I’m not wrong, this grid is. Please oh please, I need stuff, my wife will leave me if we can’t afford new stuff.”

We get pish here about developing our “skills matrix”. What kind of an idiot would even think of using that phrase in any kind of serious context?

Just stop using the word. It’s not cool, you are not Keanu Reeves, it doesn’t make work “more fun”, just stop it, stop it, stop it. You are a dead husk sucking the life from the living. Go back to hell where you belong.

It used to be that you turned up for an interview and were judged on your merits. You were looking at an hour tops. You go the job or didn’t depending on how you did.

Nowadays the norm seems to be some Krypton Factor-esque psychometric nightmare the likes of which even Kafka could scarcely have imagined which takes up your entire day if you're lucky.

All for the off-chance of a job, and all because someone already employed there can’t be bothered doing theirs properly.

I think Big T’s going to give it all a miss tomorrow anyway and good on him. Turning up to these things only encourages them.