Employment Bites
(Angela Atkins, Harper Collins)
It’s not often Craccum gets sent a book about employment because Craccum contributors don’t often have the time or skills required to be employed. Even rarer than that? Getting a book about employment that is clearly targeted at the employer, rather than the employee. It made us wonder if perhaps this book has been sent to the wrong place and our copy of How to be a Decently Employable Student Worker got somehow lost in the mail. But Craccum book contributors are famed for being pioneering mavericks and taking bold leaps to places we perhaps shouldn’t go. With that in mind, we decided to give Employment Bites a go, if for no other reason than to see how the other half goes about their business.
Let me begin by saying that this book is completely and totally irrelevant to the average student. If you’re looking for a book you can read and enjoy (or even understand), the typical student may instead want to look in the fiction section. Or even the part of the non-fiction section that doesn’t directly relate to employment advice and management regulations. However, if you legitimately consider yourself a fan of intricacies of employment law and human resource management, you could have just lucked the fuck out.
The strength of this book (as far as I can tell, having absolutely zero experience with anything this book talks about) is that it consistently uses local examples to make its points, which is important because apparently employment law differs from country to country. When you combined this with real-life examples, explained through somewhat humorous anecdotes, ‘time-poor’ managers and knowledge-hungry students will lap this shit up.
The book is structured, as the title would suggest, as a number of useful ‘bite-sized’ segments. Everything a decent employer would (I assume) need to know is here, from hiring to firing and everything in between. What I found particularly interesting (I say interesting, I just mean less boring) was how intangible things were taken into consideration. Things like motivation, implementing changes in sensible ways and transference of employee skills are all pretty major things for an employer to worry about. Who’d have thunk it?
If you happen to be managing a small business on top of whatever it is you’re doing here at Uni, this book could be a perfect place to start learning how to effectively deal with the chumps you employ. It could also be a total waste of time, full of misinformation and useless examples with no tactical relevance. I literally have no idea.
????? – Daisy, Daisy, Give me your answer true.
– John Daily, with additional research provided by Captain James. T Pang.
