AspenDew

My son, who is not a British citizen, but who was granted indefinite leave to remain (and work) in the UK over eight years ago, has been out of work since his call centre job ended in March.

Last week, he saw the adverts for jobs with the NHS National Pandemic Flu Hotline and he promptly called the recruitment agency (we’ll call them Agency A) on Friday evening.

He called two recruitment agencies, actually; his last employer (a well-known staffing agency we’ll call Agency M) had also advertised the job.

He was invited for an interview in Glasgow on Saturday with his old employer. Before he left, he was also invited to an interview in Glasgow on Sunday with Agency A.

He was successful at the interview on Saturday with his old employer, Agency M. They told him they would be in touch on Tuesday to let him know where and when to show up for work.

In the meantime, as a courtesy, he called Agency A on Sunday morning to let them know that he would not be attending their interview that afternoon. They were very interested to hear that he’d been interviewed for the position. They told him that if he wanted to work on this job, he had better come to their interview that afternoon, because they were the only company with the contract, and that Agency M must have been hiring as a contingency in case Agency A couldn’t hire enough people.

So not knowing what to do, and desperate for a job, he went to the interview with Agency A. He was successful again, and was told to start training Tuesday evening.

Please keep in mind that this all took place during Glasgow Fair weekend. I’d be willing to bet that under normal circumstances, those offices would have been pretty much deserted from Friday afternoon until Tuesday morning. This should give an idea of the urgency under which the hiring was being done.

He planned on calling his old employer, Agency M, on Tuesday morning to let them know that he had taken the job with the other agency. However, Agency M beat him to the punch, calling him first thing Tuesday morning to tell him that the contract start date had been pushed back a week, and they would be in touch in a few days. So he didn’t say anything about the other job, as that pretty much confirmed what he’d been told about which agency actually had the contract.

He started training with Agency A on Tuesday evening, 21 July, working from 7.30-22.30 pm. They told him to be back for more training at 3pm the next day, Wednesday, 22 July. He trained that day from 3pm until 8pm. At the end of that shift, they told him to be back the next morning, Thursday, 23 July, at 8am, to start taking live calls when the service went live later that day.

Thursday morning, shortly after he got to work, he was pulled aside by one of the Agency A representatives and told there was a problem with his references, and he would have to leave the job. His temporary pass was taken from him and he was escorted out the door. The rep told him that she had tried to phone him Wednesday night, but she apparently had the wrong number. (She must have really been burning the midnight oil Wednesday night. He was onsite from 3pm until 8pm, so presumably the problem only cropped up after that. Otherwise, why was he told to return the following morning?)

Needless to say, he was gutted.*

We couldn’t figure out why there would be a problem with his references. He called the two people he’d put on the application form, and neither of them had been contacted. So he called Agency A’s Glasgow office to find out what had happened. They had no idea. They didn’t even know he’d been told to leave the site. It was several hours before they called him back to say there were problems with his “employment reference,” and that the NHS was a very strict client, so they had no choice but to tell him to leave.

He thought it was rather puzzling that the employment reference would be a problem, since the job application only asked for a two-year job history, and he only had one employer during that time: Agency M, for whom he had worked for a year and a half, up until his assignment ended in March. And Agency M had already hired him for this very job, so presumably they felt he was suitable for it.  So he called Agency M to ask about the status of the assignment with them. “Oh,” they said, “We still don’t know when it’s going to start. But I understand that Agency A is hiring for it, so you might want to apply to them.”

So, to recap, he’d been told by Agency A that he couldn’t stay in the job because of his employment reference, presumably from Agency M. But Agency M had hired him for the same job AND suggested he also apply to Agency A, since they didn’t know when their assignment would start. So why would they give him a bad employment reference?

Or did someone in the NHS suffer a sudden late-night knee trauma, in reaction to the above Daily Express cover and accompanying article? This front page and article came out on Wednesday, 22 July — the day my son was working until 8pm, only to be told when he returned to work the next morning that there was a problem with his “references.”

---

* Did I mention that before he went to work Wednesday afternoon, he went to the Job Centre to sign off his Jobseekers claim so that there would be no question of even appearing to be on Jobseekers after he’d started work? And that he was due for a thirteen week interview the following week on that Jobseeker’s claim? And that every time he’d asked his Jobseeker advisors if he could be considered for any training opportunities, he was told that he’d have to wait to find out about them at his thirteen week interview? But figuring that even a temporary job was better than being on Jobseekers, he jumped at the chance for this job. And he followed the rules and told Jobseekers as soon as he could after starting work. Unfortunately, when he called them back on Thursday to ask if he could reinstate his claim so that he would still be able to attend his 13-week interview, he was told he had to start back at zero weeks.