MI5 today begins a recruitment campaign targeting women because the mayhem and murder of the Spooks TV show is scaring away would-be female recruits.Seriously? Is this real, or disinformation?
Men make up 59 per cent of Security Service staff and the organisation wants to bolster the number of women intelligence officers.
But officials say the over-the-top violence of Spooks, one of the BBC's longest-running dramas, is having a deterrent effect on potential candidates.
Let's hope it's merely the HR department jumping on the bandwagon and using the interest in tonight's season finale to get the message out that they are recruiting into newspapers, in the hopes of reaching those who might be interested, yet also intelligent enough NOT to think 'a hard day at the office' means you need to wash the blood of some Russian assassin out of your best silk blouse. Again...
Spooks has a noticeable impact on visits to the website of MI5, which is still recruiting staff despite cuts to the overall counter-terrorism budget./facepalm
Visits triple on a Monday night when Spooks is on, from an average of 500 an hour to 1,500.
During Spooks, seven of the top ten terms used in search engines to access the MI5 website are careers-related, such as ‘MI5 careers’, ‘MI5 jobs’, and ‘How to join MI5’.
However, the dramatic violence and over-the-top risk to life is putting some women off filling out the forms to join. The top Spooks-related question searched on the MI5 website is: ‘How realistic is Spooks?’
Officials want candidates with strong analytical and communication skills, patience, dedication, discretion, honesty and integrity, who work well in a team under pressure – not the ability to defuse nuclear devices or leap from exploding cars.Pretty certain anyone with the necessary skills for this sort of role would already be able to figure that out for themselves...
5 comments:
FFS! "putting some women off filling out the forms "
Is the writer American? In the UK we fill in forms.
If they are part of the CIA they can fill out all they want. For the people who originally thought up the English language, we should still fill in.
As long as the dozy bints remember that the evil Israelis are the enemy and those cuddly Muslims are our frieeeends....
Surely the smart thing for MI5s HR dept. to do is give the 'defuse nuclear devices and leap from exploding cars' crowd MI6 forms? (snigger)
"Is the writer American? In the UK we fill in forms."
Sadly, this is one more US import that's become ubiquitous....
"As long as the dozy bints remember that the evil Israelis are the enemy..."
It was a little unfortunate for iDave's visit that it was the Chinese. AGAIN!
"Surely the smart thing for MI5s HR dept. to do is give the 'defuse nuclear devices and leap from exploding cars' crowd MI6 forms? "
Like!
You're making me lazy Julia - I now don't bother with the press on my commute, and just read you. MI5 HRM types could use this technique in principle. Just as I trust you to filter out all the press nerkdom and produce something funny or pertinent, the MI5 selectors should use Spooks to filter out idiots who need to ask how realistic the programme is, or are scared off thinking they might have to take a bullet, lie back and think of England, defuse nuclear bombies, or kill Johnny Foreigner for Blighty.
The HRM types appear not to have disclosed whether more women think Spooks is real than men, though this sad, gendered conclusion does seem possible. If Usama had mammary glands he would be bint Laden, so I can't see even MI5 hiring bints. Perhaps they should fall back on tradition and start hiring heavy drinking Cambridge homosexuals again - though this technique would require, for diversity purposes, a large population of lesbian binge drinkers not set on becoming HRM managers.
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