{"id":9530,"date":"2019-04-26T13:47:23","date_gmt":"2019-04-26T11:47:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/?p=9530"},"modified":"2019-04-26T13:47:23","modified_gmt":"2019-04-26T11:47:23","slug":"and-your-knob-size-sir","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/9530\/","title":{"rendered":"And your knob size, sir?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve written<\/a> about the absolute state of oil and gas recruiters based in the Middle East before. The other day I got this email:<\/p>\n

Intertek Global International LLC is the leading Technical Staffing Services in Qatar that provides consultants to one of our biggest oil and gas clients based in Qatar. I went through your CV in an oil & gas online candidates portal and would like to ask few questions for us to determine if we can possibly propose your profile for an assignment with our client.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I expect there’s a GDPR violation going on right there.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

They send me an email on a Wednesday with the deadline for application the Thursday for a job which starts on Monday. Sounds like a pro outfit.<\/p>\n

If interested, please respond to this email along with a copy of your updated CV w\/ ID photo\/picture with full details of job description, in Microsoft word format<\/em><\/strong> along with the following details. Kindly fill out the attached forms and send it back to me.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here’s one of the forms:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

I don’t know whether this is indicative of standards in the oil industry or standards in the HR profession, or possibly both.<\/p>\n

A few weeks back in one of my HR lectures I queried the practice of companies asking candidates to state their expected salary early on in the recruitment process. I was told this is standard everywhere now. As far as I’m concerned, it shows their HR or finance department to be either incompetent or untrustworthy. Companies should know the market rate for any given position as well as what package their financial model can support. Candidates on the other hand are often pitching in the dark, particularly if they are interviewing for a job in a different industry, city, or country. What companies think they’re doing is weeding out people who will demand too high a salary early on, whereas what they’re actually doing is weeding out potentially suitable candidates who don’t know the market rate but don’t want to undersell themselves. What some companies are doing – and I have experience of this – is using the asymmetry of information to get what they see as a bargain, whereby a candidate undersells himself relative to their market rate. This is so mind-bogglingly stupid on the part of the management it’s hard to find words to describe it, but it does happen, even in major corporations.<\/p>\n

It also brings into play a contradiction which I’m sure affects all MBA courses. Are we being taught to play the HR game in order to land a job, or to be able to set up a competent HR department in our future careers? As this example shows, the two are not necessarily the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve written about the absolute state of oil and gas recruiters based in the Middle East before. The other day I got this email: Intertek Global International LLC is the leading Technical Staffing Services in Qatar that provides consultants to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[113],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9530"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9530"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9530\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9535,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9530\/revisions\/9535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9530"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9530"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.desertsun.co.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9530"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}