Concerning online applications, interviews, panels and competency tests.

In these days of commitment to fairness, balance and some sort of equity in the interview process many employers, from large corporations to small businesses and SMEs, utilise a technique known as competency based interviewing. This means that candidates are judged against a set of criteria and each question is asked and marked against these. For example: communication skills; relationships; influencing; decision-making; teamworking; flexibility. The questions are often about how the interviewee would approach the job or undertake a particular task. Question: give an example of how you contributed to a team? How do you deal with difficult colleagues? How do you cope with stress? When did you last make a mistake or miss a deadline? How do you cope with setbacks (testing resilience)? A question which many candidates underestimate is the one asking why they want the job. There is an element of mystery about the job application process, whether it is for shelf-stacking in a supermarket or aspiring to join a venerable institution, company or public sector organisation. It might not be on a par with the big bang or the origins of the universe but recent experience would indicate that it is up there with such elusive conundrums as the hunting of the snark, the white rhino or the hen’s tooth. The first hurdle to the aspirant applicant, to organisations large and small, is the online application form. The wired world has replaced the ‘snail mail’ process of old - papers posted along with a stamp-addressed envelope for return of acknowledgment card and an anxiously anticipated phonecall - with the keyboard and screen-induced anxiety of the internet failure at the moment the ‘send’ button is pushed or before the multiple-choice test is finished. The pre-interview-test test is designed to put the applicant in ‘real-time’ situations to probe, supposedly, the common sense as well as ability of the potential employee. In organisations with defined hierarchies, structural layers and bureaucracy underpinned by HR departments, what is being ‘probed’ ‘teased out’ and generally ‘reinforced’ is the absolutely fundamental requirement to recognise when to refer to management in the form of section leader, team head or department co-ordinator. Whether the challenge is returning the baked beans to the shelf of origin whilst simultaneously advising a customer on laxative powder or deciding to help a colleague in the midst of editing a piece for the evening news, the ability to spot the referral to management moment is key. These pre-tests often come in the form of ‘best-worst’/’effective-least effective’ outcome scenarios, with or without the optional extra of the said scenario being presented in the form of a short video. The next challenge begins with the email, text or telephone call summoning the applicant to the organisational presence. It is at this point that it is revealed to the future mover and shaker whether he or she is to face a ‘panel’. These specially-created bodies are designed to reassure folk as to the impartial, unbiased, discrimination-reducing nature of the process but often have the effect on the interviewee of being hauled before the grand inquisitorial committee of the central board of inquiry. Whatever user-friendly measures are put in place – cheery smiles and ‘informal dress – the fundamental terms of trade inherent in the process is one of question and answer and justification of a life lived thus far. One technique employed is the expansion of the personal experience question: ‘tell us about a time when you….. saved the paper clip fund’ or ‘give us an example of fortitude in the face of disappointment’. This invites the applicant to exemplify by way of illustrative example but not to lurch into anecdotage or after-dinner-style yarn spinning. This does not mean that the panel dynamic of ‘good cop/bad cop’ is entirely eliminated. The inter-panel competitive sport of who can ask the hardest question can take over proceedings at any time resulting in the applicant experiencing the interview equivalent of the hospital pass on a rain-soaked muddy field with the question in ever-diminishing prospect of being answered. In the case of a well-known publicly-funded broadcaster it has ever been thus: the late veteran foreign correspondent Charles Wheeler described his panel interview at which he was advised that it was not an advantage to learn a language and that moreover he shouldn’t be under the impression that ‘we take anyone off the street’. The political journalist John Sergeant describes his panel interview experience as being akin to being summoned by a heavenly committee whereat he was asked whether the writing work he had done for the award-winning satirical TV programme That Was the Week That Was was not an example of his ‘tendency towards puerile schoolboy humour’ – a suggestion at which he did not demur but he had been refereed in his application by leading playwright Alan Bennett. It is perhaps reassuring to note that Charles Wheeler went on to become one of the finest broadcast journalists of the twentieth century and John Sergeant had an illustrious career as political correspondent and found fame as Strictly Come Dancing competitor. The frustrations of seeking gainful employment in a world of competition overlayed with Kafkaesque absurdity are nothing new. In fact, twas ever thus.

Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother – The Official Biography by William Shawcross

The writer William Shawcross has a long history of orbiting around royalty and the Royal Family, having written extensively about monarchy, so was regarded as well-placed to write about The Queen Mother’s long life. It is, subsequently, a long book. Born Elizabeth Bowes Lyon in the year 1900 to a comfortably upper class background, the woman who was to become Duchess of York, Queen Consort and then Queen Mother lived the entire span of the twentieth century. Every decade of that century was a significant decade for her and it is sobering to note that she was a widow for 50 years. Shawcross paints a portrait of a vivacious, fun-loving outward-looking daughter of the Scottish aristocracy who fell into the royal family because the King’s second son Bertie fell in love with her, pursued her and ‘won her hand’. The couple, feted by the public and the popular press, were not to know of the trials and tribulations that lay ahead and the happy family that Elizabeth and Bertie created as Duke and Duchess of York was to be altered forever by the Abdication Crisis which saw the Duke’s elder brother King Edward VIII step down from the throne thus casting them into the forefront of the nation’s affairs with all the attendant pressures. The highpoints and lows, the triumphs, tragedies and comedies of life and living in the twentieth century are captured through the prism of Elizabeth’s life. The familiar weigh-stations of the historical record are noted along with the personal details that serve to illuminate them. The accession of George VI, the outbreak of the Second World War, the death of the King, the coronation of Elizabeth II along with tales of house parties, dress fittings, letter-writing and horse-racing. And of course the story of the monarchy in the later half of the century with unhappy heirs, marriage failures and disgruntled subjects all set against a background of a changing world and the certainties of Edwardian society – into which Elizabeth Bowes Lyon had been born – giving way to the questioning and scepticism of postwar society. In many ways a social conservative the Queen Mother adapted to a much changed world in her way and on her own terms. This book is a study in how she managed to achieve this in her own life and that of the nation she served.

Book Review - Look Me In the Eye - A Life in Television by Jeremy Isaacs (published by Little Brown, 2006)

Jeremy Isaacs, son of Glasgow, has lived many lives at the glittering forefront of the arts and media in Britain. The list of his appointments and achievements is long and distinguished in a career that took him from beginnings as a producer at Granada TV, when commercial television began in the mid-1950s, to current affairs at the BBC and on to the highest pinnacle of the arts establishment as General Director of the Royal Opera House in the 1990s – a period of his life chronicled with typical verve and style in his memoir Never Mind the Moon. These were the days when television was controlled by the great panjandrums who were the abiters of taste and lords of the airwaves, enlightened autocrats who oversaw the more limited schedules then on offer, compared to our multi-channelled opportunities, according to their view of the world. The old two-state system of the BBC and ITV held sway until Isaacs was appointed first Chief Executive of Channel Four, courting much controversy along the way. The roster of his pioneering firsts in television production include the epic history of the Second World War, the World at War, which further developed the use of eye-witness account allied to documentary film footage and voice-over (provided by Laurence Olivier) and the development of the independent production industry when founding director of Channel Four. The book deals with big issues, as befits a big character, with Isaac’s usual ebullience and brio – he robustly defends the medium of television and celebrates its power to inform, educate and entertain. His is a life marked by personal tragedy borne stoically: his brother was killed by a bomb in Israel and his wife Tamara died of cancer but also a life of great abundance with the arts his joy, consolation and constant comforter. Isaacs has that rare ability to see large things largely and he paints the picture of his life and times in primary colours for all to see.

Recommended Reads

Some recommended reads:
Gore Vidal, Point to Point Navigation (Vintage, 2007) and Palimpsest (Abacus, 1996)

Clive James, Unreliable Memoirs (Picador)
- the writer and broadcaster’s ‘hymn to an Australian childhood’
- published aged 40 which became a bestseller and laid the foundations for successive memoir editions (North Face of Soho, The Blaze of Obscurity)

Peter Ustinov, Dear Me (Penguin)
the actor, writer, director, polymath introduced a new style of memoir which set up a dialogue with himself as debater and protagonist in his own story

David Niven, The Moon’s A Balloon, Bring on the Empty Horses (Corgi)
The quintessential Hollywood Englishman accomplishes excellence in writing that eluded him in acting, telling the tales of his life set against a backdrop of the movies
Andrew Marr, My Trade
The distinguished political commentator on the media and his life as a journalist

Jeremy Isaacs, Never Mind the Moon (Bantam Books)
An account of life as Director-General of the Royal Opera House

Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited
An elegy for a lost age – the author remembers his youthful friendship with an aristocratic family

The Art of the Memoir

‘We met at eight, we met at nine, I was on time, no you were late’
‘Ah yes, I remember it well’ (Gigi, Lerner & Loewe)
‘We dined aloneWe dined with friends’
‘A tenor sang/A baritone’
‘Ah yes, I remember it well’

It is often said that the past is another country or as the title of one wartime memoir puts it, the past is myself. The art of the memoir has been celebrated across the ages and in modern times the whole concept of memory, recollection and recall is bound up with issues surrounding increasing advanced old age in the general population and the attendant challenges and difficulties – we may all be living longer thanks to advances in medical sciences in the 20th century but we are surviving into an advanced old age which brings with it the danger of developing conditions which rob the mind of the very essence of humanity: memory and personality. If we are our memories, what is to become of us when recollection fails and the past plays tricks? A kind of sum of all we remember. As Shakespeare has it – “ I summon up remembrance of things past”.

The novelist, essayist, actor and chronicler of American political and cultural life Gore Vidal has turned to the memoir, like many before him, as a way of telling a story and as a summing up process. Like many artists and public figures down through the ages the act of sitting in the garden when day is done and ruminating on the life lived and the race run is as much a mental as physical one. The memoir as a literary device is different from that of the autobiography, which often has one eye on history and thus can be self-justifying at the expense of objective revelations. The memoir is almost entirely subjective and does not pretend an objectivity. The opening lines of Point to Point Navigation could stand as a working definition of a collected personal memory:

“As a writer and political activist, I have accumulated a number of cloudy trophies in my melancholy luggage. Some real, some imagined. Some acquired from life, such as it is, some from movies such as they are. Sometimes in time, where we are as well as were, it is not easy to tell the two apart. “

The beauty of the memoir as a literary form is that it can take many forms, encompass time, genre and style and stand the test of time whilst having a contemporary feel. Yet a memoir is not autobiography, although it can contain elements of it. A memoir does not have to justify or explain so much as give an impression – it is impressionism rather than portraiture. It often evokes time and place but is not bound by them. A memoir can start at the begiiniing and procees to the en vi a middle or it can start with the end. It is a most flexible of forms. I think therefore I am or perhaps I recollect therefore I am…

Out of Cornwall, Eden and the World

“ if you want to do the impossible, ask the young because they don’t know it cannot be done “

Cornwall boasts many delights to its residents, tourists and visitors: countryside, beaches, cliffs and coves, wild flora and fauna. But it also has something which goes far beyond these attractions and which celebrates them all. It may not be widely appreciated by many people outside Cornwall but near the small village of St Austell, on the site of a reclaimed clay pit, stands the Seventh Wonder of the World. The Eden Project. The largest botanic conservatory in the world housing the largest collection of plants outside their natural habitat the world has ever seen.

The ambition is stratospheric – to become the leading educational and research centre for the study of, and contribution to, man’s future on planet earth. Sited under specially created conservatories or biomes, which re-create a tropical rainforest, a Mediterranean habitat the project seeks to harness the power of story-telling and theatre to the narrative of the natural world building up the connections between people and the natural world through the plants that enable humankind to exist on the planet. One of the many mottos, aphorisms and inspirational sayings that adorn the exhibitions and displays such “the future depends on the stories we tell ourselves”.

These stories are told beautifully through poetry and sculpture, music and painting as well as narrative prose. For example, in the Mediterranean Biome the visitor learns of the ‘Tribunal of the Waters’ – a dispute-resolution council which has been meeting every Tuesday in Valencia, Spain to adjudicate farmer’s disputes since the times when the Moors ruled.

In the Rainforest Biome, for example, we learn of the connections between deforestation and the palm oil industry of Indonesia. It is about regeneration and education according to Chief Executive and co-founder of the Eden Project Tim Smit. (www.edenproject.com). It won a Reader’s Choice award at the Rough Guide to Accessible Britain Awards earlier in the year.

http://www.edenproject.com/come-and-visit/plan-your-visit/access-guide/index.php
http://www.edenproject.com/media/eden-top-uk-accessible-attraction-pr.php

From the appreciation of flora and fauna of the natural world to another sort of Cornish paradise. The beaches, inlets and coves are a surfer’s paradise and there are many surfing schools catering for those hungry to learn the art of taking the wave. One school, in Bude, has taken customer service that one step further and teaches in British Sign Language (BSL), which the instructor Becky Price has added to her other languages of French and Italian. There are internationally recognised hand signals in surfing and she regards BSL as a logical progression from that.

The Big Blue Surf School
www.bigbluesurfschool.co.uk
UK Deaf Sport
www.ukdeafsport.org.uk

Old School by Tobias Wolff ( Bloomsbury, 2005)

Tobias Wolff, a celebrated novelist and short story writer, has crafted a wonderful short novel which is both part-memoir and part literary criticism. It is set in an East Coast American boys boarding school, known as a prep school, in the early 1960s and is something of a coming-of-age, rites of passage story. But it is also much more than that – Wolff deals with big themes such as class, trust, loyalty, honour and the nature of friendship as well as the writer’s art, and artifice.

The plot is concerned with a story-writing competition amongst sixth form boys at the unnamed prestigious school, which could be one of a dozen such establishments, from Groton to Andover, that has educated the mainly white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) offspring of networked established families of the East Coast elite from the mid-19th century until the present day.

The focus on literature is an important part of the school’s educational agenda. It provides the driving narrative of the story, which is in the first person. The visiting writer chooses the winner of the competition among the senior boys, the prize being a private audience with the visitor and publication in the school magazine.

The rivalry amongst the book-obsessed aspiring writers that make up the sixth form student body is intense. One of the themes taken up by Wolff is that of identity: the narrator has a fear that his Jewish origins will be discovered, which he has kept a secret.

The climax of the novel brilliantly brings these overt and hidden themes together. The narrator wins the competition but is expelled for copying another’s work and passing it off as his own. He discovers a story written some years before by a pupil from a nearby girls’ school and so closely identifies the events of the story with his own life that he believes it to be something he could and should have written himself. It deals with Jewish identity kept secret; privilege and class and self-concealment. It itself encompasses the strands of the wider novel. A story within a story expertly accomplished. The deed is discovered and punished by banishment for breaking the honour code.

This event is what forms the author as a writer, but the story does not end with disgrace and humiliation. Many years later his former master tells him a postscript to the saga which provides an insightful twist: the senior teacher known as the Dean resigned from his post the day of the expulsion. So who is the writer whose work is to prove both the undoing and salvation of more than one character in the novel? It is Ernest Hemingway.