Dear Editor,
I was pleased to see in the recent news that government is working on re-suscitating/re-activating what used to be known as the Labour Exchange or Employment Bureau (hopefully, not of the ‘Andy Capp’ variety!).
This news coincided with my being utterly amazed at the several very costly half-page sized, repetitious and separate Vacancy Advertisements in all the newspapers for a Driver and an Office Assistant for the Environmental Protection Agency ‒ the very type of vacancies that used to be cost-effectively filled via the Employment Bureau/Labour Exchange in the past. Alternatively, the use of on-site notice-boards, internal circulars and other local channels as well as employer-kept rosters of ad hoc, drop-in inquiries/applications, etc, are also cost-effective sources that any pragmatic HR Department would normally use for such commonplace vacancies.
I vividly recall deliberating over the cost of newspaper advertisements when I was a younger Personnel Officer, when an advertisement that was a mere quarter the size of the referenced EPA advertisements was reserved for scarce, highly qualified/experienced potential applicants; to ‘waste’ such expenditure on routine, easy-to-fill vacancies was inconceivable, and to repeat them as often as was the case for the current EPA vacancies would have definitely resulted in an admonition or more serious disciplinary action.
It would be interesting to learn of the rationale for such apparent wasteful expenditure by the EPA (not to mention the valuable trees that were destroyed to produce the paper for their unusually lengthy, unnecessarily verbose and laboriously pedantic ads).
Yours faithfully,
Nowrang Persaud
