October 15, 2026

In March 2013 I wrote about cover letters and how to impress with a really good one. On re-reading, I notice that two years ago I was fantasizing about Ryan Gosling. Still am. And he still hasn’t called. The thought occurred that in the previous blog article I didn’t answer the initial question, “Why do I send a cover letter?” I could therefore usefully have called this blog “WHY do I modestly cover myself?” but I didn’t think that was as amusing a heading as the one I have chosen. Either way, you knew immediately from the title that I

 A statement like that does wonder for the old self esteem. NOT. We all have to face it in life at some time, though. If it’s in the singular, you’re not what he/she wants, it could be rejection, major bummer, by the person you want to be your life partner if only the feeling were reciprocated. It could be that you can’t get into a particular club, college, society, branch of the Military, let’s not depress ourselves further by thinking of more examples.  What I’m thinking of is rejection by a company which you had hoped would offer you a

Of course, we’re all total angels at Merit and would practicallynever dream of criticizing candidates’ behavior….. No, it’s just supposed to be a headline that grabs your attention. What my colleagues and I thought might be useful to y’all would be a blog letting you know what the recruitment process is like from OUR side of the eyeballs. Any comments are supposed to be helpful to you – the fact that I might find it cathartic to write them is purely a bonus. How often should you contact us? Not too often and definitely not too infrequently either is the

Lord love a duck.***(***Stupid English i.e. not British, specifically English… expression uttered when nothing else will fit… often used when stunned or dismayed.) We sit here day and night searching for candidates and clients and suitable jobs, try to put everything together in order to make a few pence, keep the wolf from the door, stop us ending up in the poorhouse. And what thanks do we get? In no order of importance, here are some observations about the rôle of staffing services, what we do, what we shouldn’t do, what the candidates should do, what the candidates shouldn’t do….

We had a nice candidate walk through our doors the other day, charming but clueless. She had never been to a staffing service before and presumably didn’t know what to expect. When told about a rather fabby job we had, she somehow didn’t believe her luck and started grilling us; e.g. Us: “Billions in assets”. Her: “Well, it has to be a major corporation”.   Us: “Unless you think we mean billions of quetzbogs, not billions of dollars, we can assume it’s a major corporation”. Ok, conversation didn’t go 100% like that, but the naive woman clearly had a trust

A super line attributed to Dorothy Parker –if you don’t know who she is, check her out on google, and even better, read some of her stuff. Brilliant. She used the line, apparently, in the office whenever the telephone rang. Things were puttering along nicely in the early years of the new Millennium, those first few years of the noughties, as the BBC called the years between 2000 and 2009. But then, in about 2007, there were signs that the economy was changing, and not for the better. It got worse in 2008 and some of us began to panic