Monday 30 September 2013

recruiting

The owners have started interviewing for a new plant centre assistant cum tea room operative.  It sounded from the manager as though the quality of the field was mixed.  If you seriously want a job in a plant centre then spending most of the interview grumbling about your back problems is not really the way to get one.  Two more hopefuls rang up today.  One sounded competent, brisk, cheerful, and faintly geezerish over the phone, and I warmed to him immediately.  The other didn't sound like a natural fit to me.  I warned him that the interview process had already started, so he would do well to get his application in as quickly as possible, ideally by e-mail, which produced a long explanation about how his outgoing e-mails were not working, how his wife was trying to sort it out because she needed it for her work with her church, how he could not ring back that afternoon when the owner might be there because he was going out, and how he was currently engaged as a part time support worker but found it rather stressful and thought that working with plants would be less so.  Plants possibly, yes, less stressful, but the plant centre is another matter.

I am not involved in the interview process, so it is nothing to do with me.  In the past decade the owners have managed to recruit three real gems, and a couple of complete horrors.  I don't know how that success (or failure) rate compares with the average for small businesses, though I could have told them that both the horrors were indeed going to be horrific after meeting either of them for five minutes.

It was pretty quiet, which was disappointing as the weekend was very busy, and so was Friday. They had a panic yesterday over the tank for the irrigation not filling, which meant that there was quite a lot of watering to do this morning.  Apart from that I stuck price labels on pansies and heuchera, fielded telephone calls, and moved on to pulling dead leaves off hemerocallis.  I'd have happily dispensed my horticultural wisdom, but nobody wanted any.

When I got home I found that the replacement roof panel for my greenhouse had arrived, but that there was no sign of my Peter Nyssen bulb order, nor any word from the booking secretary of the garden club I am supposed to be talking to tomorrow evening.  I rang her and found her caught up in the tail end of domestic drama involving her mother-in-law falling over, but expecting me.  Maybe the bulbs will turn up soon.  It is already getting late to be planting daffodils.

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