Even the most experienced candidates should aim for a two page CVSnow and ice, credit card bills, Trump, Brexit and the premature deaths of celebrities are all cited as reasons that Blue Monday – the most depressing Monday of the year – is going to be a record-breaker this year.
There’s always some dispute about which Monday is Blue Monday, and until the government sees sense and makes it a public holiday, arguments will continue.
A forward-thinking HR department will already have laid in extra boxes of tissues and employee counselling leaflets. A walk through any part of an office will find people in deep concentration as they stare at their screens because those CVs don’t lay themselves out – really, what is it with tab stops? For similar reasons, the 10 metre printer dash is much in evidence, as people lunge for the print out and whisk their job application away before anyone else sees it.
Meanwhile, recruitment agencies are bracing themselves for the late flood of Blue Monday CVs. These are best placed in a holding pattern, because as soon as the candidate books their holiday, keeps their credit card within limit for a month and is able to drive home in the light, they cheer up. So it’s entirely pointless for the recruiter to phone them up – they have no intention of leaving their job and CV writing is just the office equivalent of Prozac.
The ones who spend Blue Monday doing a job application and are desperate enough to press ‘send’ are usually so horrified at the idea of having to drive to the new location that they withdraw. Any who have a day’s holiday to use up and actually attend the interview tend to come away with a ‘better the devil you know’ kind of look. This means that if offered the job they will turn it down gracefully, citing the lack of spiralized vegetables in the staff restaurant as the main reason they can’t accept.
Luckily, for employers doing their utmost to help their staff through this trying time, the academics at Sussex University and the London School of Economics have developed a ‘mappiness’ database and discovered that the only thing that makes people more unhappy than work, is illness. As you might imagine, their research makes a lot of use of terms like ‘disutility’ but it appears to boil down to the fact that while people say they love their jobs, the mappiness app which they click on to register their feelings, records that they are very unhappy while at work compared to almost any other time of day.
Enterprising employers will immediately install the app as part of their performance management dashboards. The HR department will need live indicator boards in their section, so they can see trouble coming and know when to lock the doors and put the ‘HR staff development day’ sign up. As for managers, the app will tell them when it’s safe to stroll through the office, and when they’re better off staying safe and snug on the top floor and waiting for Tuesday.
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