Ironic Job Posting

I recently had a chance to review one of the most ironic job postings ever.  It was for a large logistics company posting a part time position for 10hrs day, one two to days per week.  Posting part time jobs isn’t necessarily anything unique or worthy of writing about.  What is ironic is that the individual who was promoting the job was doing it via email and they had a very interesting signature.  

The email signature included a pretty graphic that touts the company values including “Integrity, Pioneering, Family, Committed, Customer Centric”.   If you think about those words, and you think about the types of positions offered, there is an incongruency.  Can you see it?

We can break down the different company values as it relates to this posting fairly easily…

Integrity & Pioneering: Integrity defined is:

The quality of being honest and having strong moral principles; moral uprightness.  

If you are going to have a large workforce, it stands to reason that the majority of that workforce needs to have resources available to meet their life needs.  How do you help people live their lives if you don’t have a way to connect the dots for them to meet them?  It would take a pioneering program to do it, yet there was no sense of that in the posting or in the details of the job description.   

Family: Families cost money.. lots of it.  It’s hard to feed a family on 10 to 20 hours a week.  Let’s not forget health care needs for everyone.  Part time jobs don’t provide health care.  There was no info about onsite daycare or any other family service in the job order.  Not that there should be, it’s just if you are going to post a part time job, then a good target market is stay at home parents who need a little extra income.  If you are going to offer that, and supporting families is a core company value, important enough to be on every single email that goes out, then maybe offering childcare for the kids during work hours is another pioneering way to be family focused and meet the needs of the company at the same time.

Committed: Committed to what?  To the customers?  Well if your customer centric (next value point in the email) then of course  your committed to the customers.. But if your committed to your team then where are the HR programs?  I saw nothing outlined in the job description about the potential for career pathways in the company or about the additional services to help meet both the employee and company needs.  In reading the posting the only commitment I saw was a commitment to keeping the company’s costs as low as possible while meeting the minimum needs of the customers.

Customer Centric: has become as overused as ‘family’ in corporate value statements.  I think in most cases there is about as much commitment to the customer as there is to the families of employees.  I.e. customer centric doesn’t mean ‘all customers’ because to turn a phrase from george orwell, some customers are more equal than others.  To this end, and with full disclosure,   I can’t really comment on ‘customer centric’ at this specific company because I don’t see what innovative programs were put in place to make the customer’s lives and business transactions easier, faster, or better.  

The point of this post is not to beat up on one company who had a part time need.  It’s that this job posting was good example of how the high minded culture and ideals of an organization tend not to be practiced when it comes to implementing, organizing and structuring workforce / human resource programs.  When these values do not’ funnel down to the warehouse team, you can bet they don’t get very far into the offices of the Professional Individual Contributors either.