Quote of the Week, w/e 15 May 2015

I have to admit that this week’s quote of the week is quite amusing. This week I caught up with my former Head of Internal Audit friend who was asked to leave. He seemed quite chipper, despite the fact he wasn’t having much success on the interview front. One worrying aspect was that employers no longer want just a plain generalist auditor, they want auditors who are specialists who can critique a system.

Ignoring this ominous step change, the more interesting aspect was our discussion about interviews and recruitment. My friend had been to several interviews and not had much success. He had reached the final stage interview with one firm (after several rounds) but was unsuccessful. The interview was with the Head of Internal Audit down a telephone line and the feedback was “the candidate wouldn’t be credible with senior management”.

However, this wasn’t the rub. The real rub was from the Recruitment Consultancy. On imparting this feedback to the candidate the following words were uttered:

“Good luck with your search…”

For those of us who are slightly slow on the uptake, this was what you could call the ‘golden words’, which roughly translated was ‘sod off and don’t darken our door again!’ So my friend only had one shot at the title before the recruiter had washed their hands of him. Funnily enough, I’ve had similar experiences; I think with particular recruiters you only have a limited shelf life before you go stale as the recruiters often want a quick placement and don’t want a hard graft.