Understanding Vacancies April 23, 2008
Posted by Jeff Riley in : Human Rights, skills, vacancies , trackback
This post has now been updated since it was first published. The Business & Human Rights Resource Centre monitors the impact the business sector has on human rights – positive and negative. They don’t have any internships available at the moment but the post has a more general point to make about applications and in any case you might be interested in the work of this international monitoring organisations. Here’s the updated post.
The words employers use on vacancies are superficially straightforward. We all know what team work means don’t we? Don’t we? A powerful application though will be based on a more nuanced understanding of what employers really mean when they use certain words to describe skills and qualities and why they are specifically asking for them. A finance organisation may use the word ‘analytical’ to describe the ability of someone to interpret what is going on in a column of figures while a consultancy may use it to describe the ability to uncover an underlying business issue through looking at reports, interviewing customers and staff as well as numbers. I recently came across an interesting internship with the Business & Human Rights Resource Centre in London on our JobOnline service. I went along to find out more about what they do (collate information on the impact companies have on Human Rights around the world) but also to get some more information on why they ask for certain skills. For example ‘initiative’ Joe Westby and his colleagues explained to me wasn’t creating lots of new areas of scrutiny but more about being able to manage yourself. It’s a small team there and they don’t have a human resources department to design a sophisticated training programme. Also the whole focus of their work, the interface between human rights and business, is still developing and initiative may be needed to help shape the way the increasing mass of information available is categorised, ‘tagged’ and accessed. Similarly with ‘team work’. In this case it wasn’t so much about resolving disputes but more about being willing to pitch in. You can read more about understanding vacancies by looking at the resources on the applications page of our site. Use Careers Tagged to find more organisations involved with human rights and you can find more ‘human rights’ opportunities on JobOnline by doing a keyword search using the phrase ‘human rights’
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Cheers! Sandra. R.
Well, good on ya for that. Nice feedback no. 2 for today. I’m chuffed maximus.