Robert Kirby: Loose Cannon When your weekend newspaper starts to depress your spirits, don’t just reach out automatically for the brandy bottle or the Prozac, there are easier ways to shed the gloom. An excellent selection of low comedy is to be enjoyed merely by turning to the Appointments section in the paper. Reading through these garrulous adverts invariably lifts the spirits.
And there’s also no better way to see how they’re thinking out there on what someone like Raymond Parsons called the career enhancement plateau. By his job offers and head-hunting shall you know, not only your private sector best, but your bureaucrats, too.
In their search for the finest human cloth, the giants of industry and the government ministries these days actually employ advertising agencies to conceive, shape and fashion the recruitment advertisements.
Ad agencies now have entire specialist divisions, crammed with creative directors and visualisers and all manner of inventive and inner-track seminal staff. Gifted writers to spin verbal magic, to concoct lines that will lure the very best of applicants to the shipside.
Like this one, from a recent weekend newspaper. It was for an assistant law adviser – an engaging sinecure if ever there was one. “Parliament of the RSA is currently offering a career opportunity to a sufficiently qualified and properly equipped person who is desirous to become part of the exciting world of parliamentarians.”
Matching the grammar to the job on offer? And it wasn’t done by mistake. Gifted copywriters burnt midnight oil in the Saatchi & Saatchi recruitment division concept meetings to come up with phrases like “desirous to become”. Champagne corks popped as they thought up “exciting world of parliamentarians”. Either that or they’d been reading the Dimitri Tsafendas memoirs, Fish-knife up My Sleeve: Diaries of a Parliamentary Messenger.
It’s when you get down into Saatchi & Saatchi’s elegantly phrased career description that things become even more exciting. In this case applicants are required to possess “legal skills and an unbiased approach to matters” especially when at such arcane duties as “drafting legislation regarding parliamentary matters” and “also expected to advise on legal matters”. Simply tons of matters the applicants can be desirous to enjoy.
Indeed, it’s nearly always the long advertisements looking for senior bureaucratic staff that offer the most rewarding reading. Here, equivocality, couched in a certain mystic furriness, is a virtue. A Department of Constitutional Development advertisement, inviting applications for the pleasingly alliterative position of a “principal planner” in the “directorate provincial government”, is an example of “bureauspeak” at its best.
The successful applicant for this job would be required to “assist with the following key departmental focal areas in the provinces”. These “focal areas” read like clues in The Times crossword. 12 across: “Co-operative governance and intergovernmental relations (including financial and fiscal) (5,4,7)”
Once the successful applicant has cleaned out that focal area, he or she would have to “assist with the development of a profile of each province and with the compilation of reports on provinces and monitor the administration and well as implementation of national policy and legislation in the provincial sphere of government”.
To most of us that sounds like a clear invitation to grab a career that will involve not much more than welding a cellphone to the side of your head and sinking slowly into hibernative stupor in the certain knowledge that, at the present corruption expansion-rate, it could be all of 20 years before Mungo Soggot and Andy Duffy get around to knocking on your door.
The constitutional employers don’t even ask for a valid driving licence. Ever since that embarrassing business with Frene Ginwala’s understudy lassie, virtually every government job-ad carries the line “a valid driver’s licence is essential”.
And, of course, there’s that now-familiar stinger at the end of the constitutional “principal planner” advertisement – today’s equivalent of the old “whites only need apply” which those disgusting apartheid racist shitheads used to favour. Nowadays job-reservation – especially of the kind emanating from the Department of Constitutional Development – comes in fancy dress: “Candidates whose appointment will promote representivity will receive preference.”
These days the Appointments pages provide some of the gladdest reading. Okay, you have to put up with a lot of honk-inducing phrases like “very good incentivised package and strategisationally challenging motivation-oriented communicative skill- profile development”, but in the end there’s a lot to enjoy.
It is all quite fascinating. A half-hour with Appointments will do you a power of good. Start with the Mail & Guardian, which offers one of the finest selections around.