Farewell to 2024

Including my first ever article voiceover!

Hello!

Thank you for joining me, I’m so glad you’re here.

If you would prefer to listen to this post, please click the “voiceover” at the top.

I hadn’t planned to take a couple of weeks off, but I think I just really needed the break. Filling my weekends with loved ones has been exactly what I needed, and even more so now that I’m an aunty!

In the mini break from writing, I’ve had a few days where there have been an unusually large amount of new subscribers come in. The source of the subscribers has been “direct” (when sometimes it’ll list the website, or social media platform) so I can’t tell where all these people have found me.

If you are new here, firstly welcome! But also if you wouldn’t mind either hitting reply or commenting below to let me know where you found me, I’d be so grateful!

The Christmas Tree Festival at a local church

A few weeks ago, I wrote about reasonable adjustments in interviews:

Making adjustments reasonable

As a small update, I wanted to tell you that in an interview process before Christmas, I set things up so that candidates had the questions in front of them, basically the interview pack with space to write notes.

I told the candidates beforehand that this would be happening, and offered an opt-out if they didn’t want to test this out (none opted out). All of them (including someone who had disclosed dyslexia) said that this made for a much better interview experience.

An unexpected positive from this format was that while the interviewers were finishing their notes, candidates read ahead and mentally prepared themselves for the next question.

An unexpected challenge, however, was that it was not clear that the notes space wasn’t a written submission of the answer; I need to make it really very clear that this is notes space for their benefit and will not have to be submitted.

I’ll be running this with a few more different roles in the new year. Luckily, we have a really wide range of roles being recruited right now, so there’s a good selection of physical, and knowledge worker roles to test this further.

I like to share this with you, firstly because from conversations with people on the education side of careers, it seems it’s not really known what support students can have as they start their careers. Also, for colleagues on the employer side, I think we all need to be working together a little better to make recruitment more inclusive, and, well, less crap. It’s a candidate-driven market right now, but that will change. Candidates will remember those orgs who made them feel bad.

Around this time of year, my favourite type of TV show comes out - the “behind the scenes at work” show. They started with the 2013 Liberty of London, where we followed different employees of the famous London department store.

It was a huge success and I’m not sure why they stopped because it was quite popular if I remember rightly. Since then, there have been a number of other similar shows, including Inside the Ritz Hotel, which included a brilliant florist apprentice.

This type of show is not to be confused with the “behind the scenes” style shows that are just talking heads discussing the shop. Hearing Denise Van Outen talk about the things she’s supposedly bought in the “middle aisle” (as if she’s not clearly a Waitrose woman) isn’t nearly as good as following real people going about their real jobs.

This year’s offering is the delightful John Lewis at Christmas (Channel 4) which follows employees making the new Christmas advert (which I actually really rate this year, but that may just be because I am a sister and so it spoke to me), as well as those setting shops up for Christmas.

It’s not quite as deep into employee stories as Liberty or The Ritz went, but it still shows a nice range of jobs (including one where people abseil down the front of the shop to hang the Christmas lights).

I love these little nuggets of careers education and really wish there were more of them.

If you’ve spotted any more shows of a similar nature please do let me know!

In the office last week, we were talking about “ensh*ttification”. This is where things get worse through high volume against low quality, probably making money for people who already have power and money.

Think about those tub of chocolates at Christmas, which seem to be double the price and also half the size they were in previous years.

Think about those AI generated Facebook posts that fill up our feeds:

The conversation came up in the office when someone was discussing how many AI applications we receive to our vacancies these days, and how someone popping out 100 applications in a day rather than 2 or 3 intentional ones, is an example of ensh*tification.

Read more about AI in applications here:

AI-cing on the cake

I predict that we’re going to see a lot more ensh*tification in 2025. It’s up to us to decide what to do with it. Personally, I am blocking the AI spam on Facebook, picking local businesses over mass-profit conglomerates as much as possible, and rejecting candidates who don’t answer our in-application competency questions.

Bruce Daisley

did a great post on the subject (which ended up in my spam which is why I have censored the word here. Highly recommend the read:

Resisting the Enshittification of Work

Links

LinkedIn

Continuing with ensh*tification, here’s a post I wrote about the new Meta AI profiles, which are of course wonderfully diverse, but the AI themselves started talking about the lack of diversity in the teams who created them.

Loved this post from Cambridge University asking the husband of one of their students to describe her dissertation. Despite the commenters below missing the point and being sad that the man is speaking for the women, I think this is such a cute concept and the “describe your son/daughter/partner’s job” genre of content has a lot of unused mileage.

This post from Tesco from International Day of Persons with Disabilities last month has a great twist on the “day in the life” content. It’s so important to show how people with disabilities can contribute meaningfully. One of the hardest tasks I have ever done is to try and find 10 SEND students work experience placements. I would cold call companies in Cambridge to find them spots - and didn’t find a single one.

Threads

This recruitment advert from Lidl has caused a stir:

Reddit

Interesting job alert! Here’s a thread from someone who has worked as an OnlyFans “Chatter” - basically engaging with viewers while a creator is performing. Just goes to show there are all kinds of roles out there!

Substack

I included a voiceover for this post! It’s all thanks to reading

Adrian Neibauer

’s post over Christmas, where he wrote about how useful voiceovers are. I decided to try it out - please let me know if you listened, and if so, what you think!

Gratitude

I’m near the email length limit so will cut it off here.

As always, please do get in contact if you’d like to chat about any of today’s themes!

Have a great week ahead.

Until next week,

Charlotte