Hypothetically, a zero-hours contract, it is

Benched and unsubstituted

He reads with a wry smile the many congratulations that greet the announcement of being engaged in a new role beneath which is a story generally untold of process and procedure that confers invisibility and humiliation on the subject affected.

In a similar engagement just 5 years before, an associate role gave contract terms of 100% billing for client assignments and where there were no assignments you were benched at 50% of your daily contract rate. It placed the onus on the organisation to ensure that he spent as less time as possible on the bench, for they had to find him billable work to do.

That bench rate disappeared from associate roles after a year, and then responsibilities shifted in radically consequential ways. Now, he could be on contract but without a client assignment and hence, nothing to bill; effectively there is no income.

It was not working for him

Without rewriting the general terms of engagement, the apparent flexibility and fluidity the new construct brings would be ideal if he did not have to revisit the employment market, it is however exceedingly precarious, there was a period that engagements fell from 90% utilisation to 55% utilisation year-on-year that it was prudent to exit that arrangement.

They decided to reignite the associate relationship recently where the matter of full engagement was discussed at length and assurances were given that projects abound for him to rotate other full-time employees out of roles for longer stretches of time. These were convincing enough to lay trust in the prospect, there was work on offer.

After a presentation and discussion that constituted an interview, a contract engagement was offered as he was assigned to a manager who was yet to begin in his role. The scheduled start date of two weeks time was moved back a week because onboarding processes were ahead of the organisational line of management.

More snags and frustration

Then the proposed assignments with clients could not be taken up because they were of a security-sensitive nature for which enhanced vetting was required and the agency that should have immediately transferred the security status would only offer to share it and that would take months to conclude, even as the term of its validity was running out. This was besides the fact that there was no contracted activity with a sister executive agency he was assigned to for over 4 months already.

Now, having confirmed that the assignee had the necessary clearances even if not in possession of the new sponsor, this should have sufficed, but it took a barrage of pleading emails to engage that thought process and by then, the opportunities being considered for had slipped away.

Zero hours with style

Whilst a valid contract without client assignment seems to break you out of a stretch of unemployment, the critical element of earning an income is lost in the circumstances such that even the agency that facilitated the contract has abandoned the contractor in frustration and resignation.

The many times I have read about ‘zero-hours contracts’ I thought it was redolent of gig-economy stints, piecework, or on-call job roles where you were engaged but not guaranteed any work, along with other strictures that engender such contracts. You never consider this can apply to technical and specialist roles that pay well on an assignment, but nothing at all when not assigned to a client.

Some may suggest, you are at liberty to find other work and return to this associate role when available, it seems an ideal quite different from experience. The only apparent change to the situation is he does not have to undergo the interview and onboarding process anymore, he has everything to be assigned an immediate role, but until then, he is on the most sophisticated castle-in-the-sky highly remunerated zero-hours contract.

Each hour he is still scanning the job boards to send his CV and a cover letter still applying for a role in mid-December. It is going to be a cold lonely Christmas with little to cheer about if nothing changes soon. Bills due, rent due, what a sordid tale, it is. 

And another recruitment agent called

What you can do with knowledge

I can imagine that not many recruitment consultants would have the time to go through my curriculum vitae (CV) in a professional quest to know their candidate, it makes me wonder if they devote any time to knowing their client too. Maybe, it would take time for the recruitment industry to adopt the due diligence activities of the financial institutions to ‘know your customer’ (KYC) as part of anti-money laundering (AML) requirements and regulations.

Now, I raise this because, if the recruitment consultant that called me this morning had bothered to KYC by reading my CV and before that, KYC by fully appreciating what their customer requirements along with details of the opportunity being offered, we might have had a different conversation along with my offering some grudging respect to a professional cohort that rarely works hard enough to earn it.

Know the location

It transpired that this recruitment called me about a job in Marburg in Germany, I asked there exactly Marburg was, she didn’t know (KYC) and eventually found it was near Frankfurt, between Bonn and Frankfurt, she said, but it has no relation to the former.

I know a bit of German geography and places, it is indeed near Frankfurt am Main to be differentiated from Frankfurt an der Oder on the Polish border, for there are many same name towns in Germany that need to be qualified by their regions, else you might end up hundreds of kilometres away from your intended destination.

One must make that point; if you are a recruitment consultant seeking to place a candidate abroad, do the research, find out about the place, the history, the cost of living, the interesting things. Sell the place as you sell the opportunity. Don’t appear stupid, it is annoying.

A chilling discovery

The offer was not exciting though, you don’t take me from an exciting English city and plonk me in the middle of a provincial German town for a pittance, though it does have centuries of interesting history and recent notoriety. It did not occur to me in these Coronavirus times until I checked that Marburg is an eponym for the Marburg virus which was first described in 1967 when German workers were exposed to tissues of infected grivet monkeys. The Marburg virus is in the class of the Ebola virus, they are both haemorrhagic fever viruses.

Obviously, I found myself going down this rabbit hole, in search of why grivet monkeys that are native to a region of East Africa were leaving infected tissue in provincial Germany. Then for the grace of absolution, the entry for the hapless grivet monkey does not cross-reference to the virus. They must have edited their Wikipedia entry to remove the stigma.

Going from my reaction, I began to understand why for posterity reasons, the new Coronavirus, first identified in Wuhan, China, ended up with the name COVID-19 rather than the Wuhan virus, for a sudden irrational thought somewhere in the future, might unwittingly taint any desire to be anywhere near Wuhan for anything. Much as we somewhat identify many other diseases that are eponymously named. [List of eponymously named diseases – Wikipedia][Science Magazine – WHO rules for Naming Diseases]

Don’t waste my time

Then, back to the crux of this blog, I wrote two blogs yesterday, one about recruitment agents and the other about the Coronavirus, there are links to my blogs from within my CV if it looks interesting enough to the reader.

In the case of the recruitment agent who had not done her homework and was completely out of her depth matching my profile to the requirements, if she understood either, a little more attention to detail rather than shuffling papers and manning a phonebank to earn commission might have achieved more for her, probably not with me, but with someone who might have seen the Marburg role as an opportunity.

Finally, if you are recruiting for an architect, don’t suggest the remuneration of a technician, it is a waste of time for both parties. It is not arrogance, just a bit of self-respect, many candidates are not hungry dogs jumping at any bone tossed at them and recruitment agents need to begin to earn their commissions by really putting in the work.