The recruitment minefield

3 December 2007

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Every recruitment campaign is different, and every company recruits differently. Of course, the seniority of the vacant, or newly created, position is just one influencing factor. The consistent theme is that recruitment is a minefield, where even the seemingly perfect acquisition can prove to be horribly misguided.


The lifting business is an interesting industry, where everyone seems to know everyone, and the same faces tend to crop up all over the place. People are often moving around, some move up the ladder of seniority, some move laterally, others set up on their own. But most people stay under the lifting umbrella.

recruitment

One high profile recruitment campaign in the business at the moment is the search for a successor to LEEA chief executive Derrick Bailes, who is due to retire from full-time employment at the beginning of 2009.

LEEA hopes to name a chief executive designate to work alongside Bailes for a period in order to ensure smooth transition from one to the other.

"This will also allow the chief executive designate time to absorb the ethos of heading up a trade association which is markedly different to a more 'normal' job," said outgoing chairman Stuart Everitt. He has a point.

The ideal candidate will currently be working at a senior level in the lifting business, with LEEA likely to recruit from its existing membership.

(By the way, anyone interested, or with recommendations, should contact LEEA as soon as possible by email: mail@leea.co.uk, or tel: +44 (0)1480 432 801).

This site has reported on plenty of other people news recently...

Pekka Lettijeff has been appointed chief procurement officer (CPO) at Konecranes Plc. His areas of responsibility will include all direct and indirect purchasing across the Konecranes Group.

Lettijeff will be a member of the Konecranes Group executive board and will report to Pekka Lundmark, president and CEO. Lettijeff will start in his new position on February 1 2008.

Going the other way, Konecranes group director, administration and business development and member of the group executive board, Arto Juosila, will leave his position to pursue personal interests. Juosila has worked for Konecranes more than 27 years. His responsibilities will initially be divided between existing executive board members.

Cattron Group International, meanwhile, has named Marlon Piva as industrial sales manager for Cattron-Theimeg Americas. Piva will be responsible for sales of the company's industrial products throughout Brazil. He will report directly to Laercio Neves, general manager of Cattron-Theimeg Americas.

Here, Street Crane has appointed its first directly employed sales manger to cover the whole of Ireland. Stephen Hirst, a lifting engineer with 20 years mechanical handling experience, took up the post in September.

Award winners

Repaying the faith, two employees of Certex UK have been singled out for prestigious industry-based training accolades.

Trina McAnulty and Paul Harrison both received the Cyril McCauley trophy for best papers in the LEEA correspondence courses, and McAnulty's entry went on to win the Harry Brown memorial shield for best overall paper out of all of this year's national LEEA courses. She is the first woman in the history of the LEEA to have received this distinction. The prizes were presented at the association's AGM on Friday 23 November.

The LEEA correspondence course is a non-compulsory safety training course for the lifting goods and services industry. It runs for seven months and covers 20 specialised subjects, ranging from evaluating design, through to manufacture, assembly, testing, examination and certification. There are five courses per year (covering different areas) and the best papers from each course are then judged against each other for the best overall paper.

McAnulty, who is Certex's HSEQ (Health, Safety, Environment and Quality) manager, based at the company's head office in Harworth, Nottinghamshire, took the 'general lifting gear' qualification.

Harrison is lifting centre manager at Certex's St Helens branch and has worked in the lifting industry for 14 years.

Kevin Smith, operations director at Certex is a former LEEA best paper winner.

So, whether it's down to luck or better judgement, Certex seems to have chosen well.

There's a link below (which I found whilst researching an article) directing you to some advice on this. Some of it I agree with, other parts I don't, but I hope it helps you in some form when starting out on your next search for personnel...

Keep in touch,

Richard Howes, Editor