I don’t deal directly with recruitment. My job is to assess the need of an extra member of staff on my team, pick the people I want to see based on their CV, do the interviews, and then pick the person I think is best suited for the position. Everything else (which is admittedly a lot) is done by the very excellent HR (Human Resources) team so I don’t normally deal with recruitment agencies.

The girl on reception knows exactly what cold calling is and is fully prepared to say that I’m in a meeting or something. However, I decided to talk to this guy as I haven’t heard of the company before and thought I would just inform them that HR are the people to deal with. This is only polite and saves them from wasting time asking for me in the future.

I’m not going to say the name of the agency, or the agent, but this guy just seemed to phone up with the sole purpose of insulting people. After his initial pitch I understood that he was with an agency and said that I didn’t deal with recruitment agencies directly and that he would have better luck talking to HR. However, he came out with the following sentence, which he said in his most condescending manner.

Oh, I thought that you being Lead Developer of Research and Development, you would be involved in recruitment.

I was so tempted to put the phone down the the guy without even saying goodbye. I just told him that I would transfer him over to HR who would be able to help him. Transferred the call, and hung up.

Speaking to HR later on I learned that this guy had just flat-out lied to them. He said that he had been in contact with me for years, well before my time at Just Search. I have never heard this guys name before, or even his company’s name so that clearly wasn’t true. Not only that, but if he did know me, he should have at least asked me how I was. Aside from being impolite, I really don’t like people who lie, so I think it is safe to say that we won’t be dealing with them any more!

He had probably just picked my name and job title up from one of my social networking sites (eg. LinkedIn) and tried his luck. Part of me thinks that it must be some kind of crank call.

The thing is that the seminars available would have cost about £800 to see, even if you were an exhibitor, and the ones that were free to view were just a glorified sales pitch.  This one guy talked about the future of the advertising industry, although I couldn’t have really figured that out if I hadn’t seen the title first.  His talk was essentially about him being a venture capitalist and how he made lots of money.  He was even samelessly plugged all of the latest things that he was investing in.  So I wasn’t really impressed with the talks.  Was it too much to expect some exchange of information?

Try it out for yourself.

James (my manager) is a Mac enthusiast and he has already started to convert me by putting a Mac Mini on my desk. This will eventually be a testing platform, but I don’t really know what to do with it at the moment. It doesn’t look THAT good really. I don’t know what the fuss is about…

1. Lead Research and Development Programmer
2. Lead Programmer, Research and Development
3. Head Research and Development Programmer
4. Head Programmer, Research and Development
5. Technical Director of Research and Development
6. Lead Developer, Research and Development
7. Programmer, Research and Development

I’m yet to decide, but if you had the opportunity of giving yourself your own job title, what would you choose?

I’ve been really stressed about the job for the past few days. For the past two of three nights I have been having nightmares about it. For example, I would turn up to work and someone who knew a lot more web development would get sacked for not knowing enough. Or numerous crazy things would happen when I tried to get to work in the morning and I would turn up late.

I left work today feeling really stressed as well, I was given the task of validating a site, and I couldn’t even remember what a div tag was. However, on the way home I realised that I was starting to get the hang of things and I think I should have a better day of it tomorrow. I was warned that there is quite a bit to learn, and they ain’t kidding!

One thing that annoyed me today was that the internet kept turning off periodically. As you can imagine, a web company without an internet connection is like a horse with no legs!

I do have the feeling like I am going to enjoy myself in this role, I’m just really stressed as I have risked everything to come here and work for this company. However, I have a good work ethic, I’m quite a tallented programmer and I just need to pick up a few tricks of the trade as it were.

She did mention that there was a position comming up in September for another tyle of role in the same department. However, I think this will be unsuitable for me as it was basically contact work. Having a family I can’t risk the inconsistency of contract work. I mean, although it would be great to work in that role, I don’t know what I would do when it was over.

The fact that it is so difficult to get a job around here if you don’t talk Welsh realy annoys me. Every job advert around says “Welsh is desirable”, but I would have thought that my web development ability would be more important. The 2001 Welsh speakers census found that just 36% of the population of Ceredigion are able to speak Welsh, and 100% can speak English. So why is it so important that IT positions always have Welsh as a desirable attribute?

They said that they would let me know this morning. So I’m now sat in work waiting for a phone call. So my heart skips a beat every time the phone rings!

It would be a fantastic opportunity to move into web development. Not only that, it’s a fantastic opportunity to move away from training people who absolutely don’t want to be trained, which is what I really don’t want to be stuck doing for the rest of my career.