Monday 18 May 2009

Job Centre rant of the day

Every fortnight we trudge along to the Job Centre Plus, clutching to our chests our 'Looking For Work' booklets, inside scrawled the six 'job search steps' we've taken, six jobs applied for, or agencies visited or websites signed up to.

As agreed to previous, for ten minutes before our Job Centre Plus signing on appointment, we play on the Job Centre Plus computer terminals, searching for job vacancies with potential in the surrounding area. Screening officers, Air Conditioning Engineers, Sous Chefs, Database Analysts, Assistant Audiovisual Technician, Student Office Assistant, Watch Technician.

For almost every job on the database, when you click through for more details and the job description, the text box starts with the phrase:-
Description
This Local Employment Partnership employer shares
information about new starters with Jobcentreplus, for
statistical purposes only. See www.dwp.gov.uk for more
information.

Before going into details about the job itself.

Why? Why must I read this when trying to find about the nature of the job, any job, must I read the same information?

I'm guessing it was some guideline as a result of data-protection legislation, which has been implemented without fail on all applicable jobs.

Someone somewhere thought it was a good idea, but now it clutters up the job descriptions on the Jobcentreplus database.

Its inefficient, the same sentence copied and pasted hundreds of thousands of times.

Read with indifference by millions of job seekers every day.

For no good reason.

Read it again
Details
This Local Employment Partnership
employer shares information about new
starters with Jobcentreplus, for
statistical purposes only. See
www.dwp.gov.uk for more information.

Has your life been enriched? Are you any closer to getting a job? Do you feel like your data has been protected?

Where are the damned statistics? I've wasted seconds of my life reading these dame lines over and over again.
Details
This Local Employment Partnership
employer shares information about new
starters with Jobcentreplus, for
statistical purposes only. See
www.dwp.gov.uk for more information.

1 comment:

  1. did you try looking for the promised "more information" on the DWP website? What does it say?

    ReplyDelete