Who’s the Boss? occupies a square-eyed quadrant somewhere between Gogglebox and The Apprentice. If you like those, you’ll probably like this jaunty workplace experiment in which it’s not the boss who hires applicants for a new job, but the workforce. In Ancient Rome they called it Saturnalia, when for one day of the year the hierarchy was reversed. Nowadays you’d call it Siliconalia because like more or less everything these days the idea originated in Silicon Valley.
It's quite a long way from California to a family fruit and veg distribution business in Hertfordshire. Reynolds needed a new operations manager and were prevailed upon to let its 700 employees choose between two applicants: smiley Jill and less smiley Andrew. So the pair set about a week’s worth of tasks – flogging fruit from a street stall, taking phone complaints, working out a delivery route, then joining the driver on it – while workers squirrelled away in the next-door room assessed their performance on viewing monitors (pictured below). The voiceover, written by someone with cloth ears, called this “putting the applicant to the fruit and veg sword”.
The wheeze, as we were very often reminded, was that the applicants had no idea they needed to impress not the CEO but the staff. As an experiment it felt ever so slightly unrepresentative of the reality that most job applicants don’t have a television crew following them around for a week. So what they were being auditioned for was an ability to be pleasing on camera. You don’t need to know much about business to suspect that the skillset is not necessarily the same as knowing your way round the South Circular.
Jill took an early lead when she gushed about the importance of working for a family firm, while Andrew put himself out of the running the moment he described himself as a hard taskmaster. “The man never had no feeling for the veg,” said rastaman delivery driver Clive. Along the way various recruitment gurus appeared on screen to babble about the philosophy behind hiring according to the X Factor model.
There was much talk of the wisdom of the crowd being better than psychometrics, plus an inevitable cameo for a fruit that looked like the middle portions of the female anatomy. If Who's the Boss were applying for a job, it probably wouldn't get hired.
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