It's not like I didn't want to be contributing. I'm glad you noticed though! It's good to be missed, although a little confronting, logging into my "My Page", weary from a long couple of days interstate, without the time or ability to feed my addiction of RBC, only to be taken to task for not contributing. "You have no recent activity. Why not start something?"

... sorry. OK OK OK I hear myself sounding like Joe peski (?) in Lethal Weapon

The last few days have not been without incident, not that anyone will be really interested, however, give this guy a forum and he's going to exploit it. 2 plane trips each delayed 1 hour, great start, the hotel.. believe it or not, absolutely no mobile (cell for those American readers) phone reception, and even stranger a train line went under/through the hotel!! What the???

The trip however was not without its learnings... I am not a person predisposed to administration, in fact I look for whatever I can to get away from doing it. However, I was in Sydney due to a reduction in my team, doing an audit of our personel files... to my shock.. I found files of people in our employ, whose letters of offer were not there.. missing, or worse.. without signatures, none of our processes followed, no reference checks, no interview guides, no test results... NO KIDDING! I couldn't believe it.. now what? I can not go back to all these people and ask if I could do an interview again, or maybe do you mind if I talk to your referees again? IMAGINE IF WE WERE AUDITED, explain that to your CEO. (PART OF THE ARTICLE WHERE I COVER MY OWN BUT! SOME MAY THINK AS THE RECRUITING MANAGER THAT THIS COULD BE MY RESPONSIBILITY, IN MY DEFENCE OUR COMPANY REPORTED REGIONALLY, I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT! until now.. now it is my problem!)

When over the shock, fear and annoyance, I started to think why would his happen? Our processes are clear, straight foward and pretty common sensical I think, after all I am not a complicated man. I mean having a signed letter of offer in a personell file, that's almost a given isn't it?

Then I started to think about this person's background. One of the nicest guys you'd ever meet, everyone got along with him and he seemed to like everyone. This was his first role in an internal function, the first 13 years in his career was in an IT Recruitment Agency. Is this the difference in the two styles of Recruiting, are there different skills required? I will put this into a discussion, as it has intrigued me. I posted a discussion on ERE.Net once upon a time about the battle of Flair v Process in the Recruitment world, and which is more important. I have my thoughts, but I'll save them up to see what the discussion does.

It took me a while when I made the transition, I had differing opinions when I first stepped into an internal role... the agencies thought I had sold out (well the opposite even, as you don't initally make initially make the same amount of money), the corporate types thought I was too salesy, and initially candidates didn't know what to think. It is not an easy transition. Maybe we expected too much of this guy, his world was finding the candidates, getting the client and candidate to agree, get the fee, hope like hell the warrantee period went by without incident and move on. Which in affect is exactly what he did with us... everything except colled the fee (but for sake of this tale, that is what we will call his salary!)

This hasn't helped my current predicament, however writing this has been a cathartic.. thanks RBC for giving me a forum to vent this. I feel better now. phew.