Happy hiring: The firm that recruits Mr Men characters
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
> "We purely interview for personality," says Mr Timpson, who has been leading his family's firm for the past 42 years.
> In explaining the thinking behind this rather novel approach to recruitment, Mr Timpson, 74, says that while you can train someone to do a job, you cannot train their personality.
Timpson are good in the UK because for a long time they've been happy to interview ex-offenders.
https://www.timpson.co.uk/about/careers-at-timpson
> Timpson really are an equal opportunities employer. We consider anyone for our vacancies as long as they are able to do the job. This includes ex-offenders and other marginalised groups. We recruit exclusively on personality and expect all of colleagues to be happy, confident and chatty individuals.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandcon...
> Susanna Stephens is laughing as she explains an early quirk of her job. "It did seem quite weird that I was going out of a prison to cut keys," says the 37-year-old who works for Timpson, the shoe repairer and key-cutter that has been a family business for five generations.
[...]
> But Stephens is no conventional recruit because, like 270 other Timpson staff, she joined the company from jail – for a while going to work in the day and returning to jail at night, under the Prison Service’s Release on Temporary Licence scheme.
> "If they tick all the right boxes then we put them in the shop for half the day."
is also very important.
So it was just a really happy coincidence that the owners son (James Timpson) becamse the chief executive officer? ;)
It's a pretty trainable job to anybody, and the ideal job for somebody who can't get another one. I'm not sure about the Mr Happy thing though, because i've met plenty of grumpy staff there.
While it was interesting, I'd hate for people reading this article to think it was genuinely a good idea as a hiring practice. People are complicated, and cannot and should not be pigeonholed into such simple categories.
Frankly I'd rather deal with someone who displays extensive familiarity with the Mr Men than some buzzword-regurgitating follower of the latest management guru or MBA fad who has mistaken novelty for innovation.
There's been enough discussion about how fundamentally broken the current recruitment process is (in tech) that this doesn't seem much worse.
I wonder if they would be more or less likely to cut me a set of bump keys if asked?
If you consider that presenting a cheerful face for customers is part of the retail job description, then the Mr. Men-themed interview is essentially a work sample.
"If they tick all the right boxes then we put them in the shop for half the day."
Which is followed by a longer work sample, it appears.
The idea and context reminded me of the identical Mr. Prestos in The Stars My Destination:
Key cutting is exactly the job I least want ex-convicts to do. It is low-skill, so anyone can do it, but high-risk (you are literally giving your keys to the person, asking them to convert them to a numeric code, easily retained, and produce copies...)
(Obviously, I'd prefer an in-house locksmith or resettable locking system, but instead, I use a vendor I've known for 20+ years who uses PGP to authenticate orders.)
I'm not sure what is the point of mentioning that your physical security vendor uses PGP other than signaling how awesome your security practices are, but I guess since you're a vendor of security services you have a good reason to advertise that.
No doubt you have your reasons for feeling prejudiced about ex-convicts, and as a security professional you can leverage rational paranoia into cash. However, it would be interesting to hear what sort of jobs you do want ex-convicts to do. It's easy to think of security reasons to disqualify people from any given job, not so easy to furnish people with legit alternative opportunities.
There are exceptions, and famously if someone's going to be providing quality information based on a "nefarious past" like Frank Abagnale, sure, but for a low-level clerk position, eliminating risk by barring 5% of the population from 5% of the jobs (not even particularly good ones) is a reasonable tradeoff.
I'd trust an ex-con with finances of the cash register variety, but not unsupervised and unaccounted-for access to large amounts of cash. (It's not something you'd want to have to trust an $8-12/hr employee with in general, but in some cases it's unavoidable.)
If someone had higher skills (say, an auto mechanic who was also convicted of a serious felony), the risk/reward of having that person working as an auto mechanic is probably a lot better than a low skill person taking a key cutter job vs. another form of retail job.
(There's also the forced/destructive vs. covert vs. surreptitious entry issue. Someone entering without leaving a trace and without making a sound is far more concerning than someone breaking out an angle grinder and grinding away for 5 minutes on video with an alarm going off.)
I suspect that you've never visited a Timpson's, which are your general, run of the mill high-street key-cutter. You walk in with your keys, ask them to make copies, they cut them while you wait (and watch if you want), you walk out with your new keys.
For most people that's pretty much fine whoever is cutting the keys as they don't know where you live.
If you're paranoid and/or have threat models that include lots of things that your average man on the street doesn't have to worry about, then you should be cutting the keys yourself.
This must be different from any key-cutting system I've ever seen. Any time I've ever gotten keys cut, the machine is setup with a jig, so they put the original on one side, and the blank on the other, and you trace the original against the guide, while the blank gets ground to match. I suppose they could cut an extra, but it'd be hard to do when I'm standing right there watching them.