WEEKEND COLUMNISTS The competition to find the best ideas for Mrs Moneypenny to write about in the future has yielded many entries, including one reader who said: “Mrs M should write about the sort of people she would choose to take on once it is clear that the recession is over.” There are two problems with this suggestion. The first is that I am not sure if it will ever be clear that the recession is over, and the second is that, even though it is certainly not over yet, we have started hiring again.
This month has seen two new faces join our team. It had become apparent to me over the summer months that, even though the recession was still rumbling on, it would be very short-sighted to stop hiring young people and training them. Like many other businesses, we shelved our plans to hire a graduate this year. But then we changed our minds and ran some advertisements on university websites. We even approached one or two recruitment companies that we knew and told them what kind of person we were looking for.
This was all very last-minute. My ideal way of employing someone is to have them work for us for at least one if not two university holidays before they graduate, which has proved a good way of teaching them what we do (and why it is so fascinating) and also teaching us what they are like. Our sole graduate hire in 2008, who came to us from Edinburgh University, worked her way up via this route. But this year we had to resort instead to some swift recruitment activity.
As it turned out, we took on not one but three graduates: two of them into permanent jobs and one, who is off to do a master’s later this month, for a two-week project to compile a new Mrs Moneypenny book. One came from the ad, one from a recruitment agency and one from word of mouth. Which universities? Another from Edinburgh, one from Bath and one from University College London.
We don’t employ anyone who went to Oxford or Cambridge. (Actually, that is not strictly true – one of our team went to Oxford for a week, decided it was not for her and sought refuge at Bristol). This is not deliberate bias – it’s just the way things turned out – but as a result, I don’t rub shoulders with Oxbridge graduates on a daily basis.
I do rub shoulders, or at least bylines, with Richard McCann (whose mother was the first victim of Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper), Aasia Mahmood (who grew up in Pakistan and has lived in Scotland for the past 24 years, working as a bilingual support teacher) and am within byline-rubbing distance of Jimmy Carr, the comedian. We are all contributors to Grandparents, a new anthology of articles on that subject co-edited by Sarah Brown, our PM’s wife. At a tea party to launch the book, I met Carr and like a starstruck teenager asked him to sign my copy.
Cost Centre #1 and I saw Carr for the first time in 2002, in a show entitled Bare-Faced Ambition, at the Edinburgh Fringe. It was a small venue, and Carr noticed CC#1 walk in with me and showed theatrical concern over the suitability of his show for a boy of 12.
These days Carr plays much bigger venues, including City Hall, Newcastle, where he will be appearing at the end of October. CC#1 is off to Newcastle University this month and will turn 20 on October 31, so a ticket to Carr’s show seems a good birthday idea. I will still be basking in my new-found “I’m in a book with Jimmy Carr” street cred and trying to ignore the fact that he is on page 40 while I am a lot further in. Still, the Archbishop of Canterbury is even further in. As you can tell, I am delighted to be in such exalted company – although since both Carr and the Archbishop are Cambridge graduates, I probably wouldn’t hire them even if the recession were over.
