100 rpm

Exposing those cv porky pies

CIPR Midlands is running an event You're Hired! aimed at helping interviewers get the most out of prospective candidates - a great idea for a session, since small companies and agencies sometimes lack the ability to coach or train new managers in this area.

Unless there were blatant lies on a cv, it could take until interview stage to expose some of the best works of fiction on a cv:

Interviewer:  "You say you enjoy going to the theatre?  What's the last play you went to see?"

Interviewee:  "Um, I saw some Shakespeare at school ... I like the idea of going though."

Interviewer:  "It's great that you're interested in current affairs - did you hear our client interviewed by John Humphrys on the Today programme this morning?"

Interviewee:  "No ... I don't watch Channel 4 news" (pause as interviewer scrapes herself off the floor)

However, thanks to Twitter, we don't have to waste our time at interview stage finding out that the candidate we're talking bears no resemblence to the person on the cv. 

You say you're interested in current affairs?  I'll expect you to follow at least a couple of national daily newspapers or online news sites (and not just those recommended to you when you sign up to Twitter).   And since you're working in PR, you must be fascinated by the media in all its forms, so I'll expect to see you following @mediaguardian at the very least.   And while the sort of PR people you want to follow might depend on the nature of PR you're interested in, I'd expect you to follow at least a couple of these PR/social media people or the people they're connected to:  @stedavies, @jangles, @markpinsent, @wadds @emilycagle @mediaczar @armano, @trevoryoung, @shelholtz, @harrietcrosse @behindthespin (these names have been picked at random from people I follow who posted today, in case you were wondering why you were included or missed out).   

If you don't follow any PR people (or journalists) I'll smell a rat straight away - are you really interested in a career in PR, or did it just seem like a nice idea?  And if you say you love politics, I'll expect you to follow at least a handful of politicians.   

And  of course it's not just about following ... it's about how you use Twitter as well. 

Do we want woolly news?

"Labour fails to tackle knife crime as killings increase" claims the Express

"Anger over failure to tackle knife deaths" says the Independent

And so on - the general impression received from reading the news reports this morning (22 July) was that the government's Tackling Knives Action Programme ''failed'.   However, thinking a bit more carefully about what's being reported, the rise in knife crime doesn't actually mean that the initiative 'failed'. (And I'm not an apologist for the government, I just get rankled by lazy journalism and an even lazier approach to research). 

It's easy to take one 'fact', relate it to another and create a causal link between the two. However, life isn't that simple.  What we don't know, and can't establish, is whether without the initiative the increase in knife crime in the areas targeted would have been higher (or lower).  And since we can't repeat the experiment, we don't know.  Therefore, although the initiative may have 'failed' we can't prove that it has, which puts any such claim on shaky ground.   However, 'Government knife drive may or may not have worked' is not a great headline.  Which is why we end up with what was reported above.

The same argument was made by academic-turned-journalist Michael Hutchinson in Cycling Weekly a couple of years ago (offline) in response to the 'helmets save lives' debate.  They might, but due to the unwillingness of most cyclists to repeat their accidents sans helmet, we'll never know whether the helmet did save their life or not. We simply can't test the hypothesis.  Likewise, there are both practical and ethical problems in repeating the experiment with dead cyclists who didn't (or did) wear helmets.  Would they have lived with (or without) a helmet?    We don't know, and can't find out. 

There are (at least) two sides to every story.  Unfortunately, at least one side is usually a bit woolly and inconclusive.  This doesn't make for great reading, but may be a bit more accurate.

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