Government backtracks over job role with “luxury” benefits

Friday 29 March 2019

A job advert for a government “change specialist” has been deleted in under 24 hours of being posted, after its benefits including “luxury five star accommodation” and full food and drink expenses drew strong criticism from islanders.

Despite only being listed on UK recruitment sites, the £500 to £550-a-day ‘Job Evaluation – Agenda for Change specialist’ posting drew ridicule from eagle-eyed members of the public within just hours of it going live this morning.

However, by the afternoon it had vanished, with government officials telling Express that the job had been posted before receiving final approval.

Pictured: An extract of the original job post on Network HR.

In the posting, the Government was described as an “attractive organisation” in which the successful applicant to the role would be expected to “work collaboratively with a team of four” to “deliver a thorough job benchmarking exercise for a large volume of vacancies, assessing against market rates and working with the wider business to devise a plan for internal appointments and external hires”.

But what really caught islanders’ eyes were the benefits it listed.

“The role will be based from the organisation's headquarters in Jersey Monday – Thursday with flights, luxury 5 star accommodation, food and drink fully expensed. You will then be home based on a Friday,” the job description read.

“Due to the flexibility of travel arrangements this means that the successful candidate can reside anywhere providing you are able to get to a main airport Monday morning and return from their [sic] Thursday evening.”

It was not long before the role was shared and widely panned in local political forums on social media. Others questioned whether the ad had been a hoax, querying the spelling mistakes and informal language in the ad.

Pictured: The successful applicant was invited to come and work at the headquarters - now based in Broad Street - of an "attractive organisation".

Following questions by Express, a government spokesperson confirmed that the job advertisement was real - created to enable the evaluation of "existing, amended and new roles under the OneGov transformation" - but said that it had now been deleted.

To help recruit, they explained that "a small number of on and off-island agencies had been engaged to assess candidates for this specialist skill sets", but that the two off-island providers that had posted the ad "had not been authorised to do so".

In an apparent backtrack over the benefits listed, the spokesperson said: "The wording was a redraft of a previously advertised job for a private Channel Island organisation and had not been seen or approved by anyone in the Government of Jersey. The terms and conditions listed are not correct and bear no relation to the policies in place for employing temporary and interim staff."

Challenged by Express over the original post's listed benefits, government officials did not deny that five-star accommodation and expenses benefits were part of the package, instead stating: "The standard policy for interim workers that are engaged by the Government of Jersey from off-island is that they are required to work on-island, initially for 5 days per week.

"While here, accommodation is provided on a bed and breakfast basis and is booked directly by the government using their contract rates with accommodation providers."

Express has asked, again, whether these accommodation providers are five-star and whether full food and drink expenses will be awarded under the role, and is awaiting a response.