Steve Boese - mind reading for fun and profit

Here

Steve's analysis towards the end is spot-on.

Ten Reasons You Don't need a blog

I love this from the cynical girl. In fact I love most of her stuff - and aspire to it. It doesn't matter since as she says - no-one's reading.

My New Job - and an earnest plea for a better candidate experience

I don't wish to load this down with personal stuff. But.

I have recently been pleased to have been offered a full time employee job to replace my self-employment. I did enjoy sailing my own ship, but there are particular reasons for wanting to do this now (which I won't bore anyone else with).

As I know my new employer, the process was painless.

I'd have been a fool to take the first offer I got (actually as it turns out not a fool at all); and I took some time talking to recruiters.

I realised that some of these people seem to operate in an odd parallel universe. Most people talking to me seem to realise I am not a young and inexperienced person. I therefore wonder how it is that they can take up so much of my time telling me about a job and then casually mention later that the salary we spoke about is actually 10-30k less.

I mean what on earth is the point of that? They wasted their own time, and mine, why?

Perhaps the funniest was the one who accused me of not ever having been serious about her job after I turned it down. I made it clear at the outset that one thing I'd like to do was reacquaint myself with the house I'm paying the mortgage on, and the people who live there, including a small one who calls me Daddy when she recognises me. In this day and age there is no serious excuse for forcing people to live out of a suitcase all the time.

This lady seemed to understand - then I spoke (telephone interviews) to two existing staff members at the prospective employer - both of them gave the impression that I wouldn't be seeing much of home - "if the client is paying they expect to see you there" and "you'll have to decide if you want to continue living the contractor lifestyle" were not giving me much reassurance.

I just don't get this - do some people just shrug and say "Oh well 10K less than every conversation we had? Not to worry, I mean it'll be a struggle paying the mortgage, but it's a great basis for starting a new employer/employee relationship knowing that they either employed a liar or an incompetant to recruit me - or they are liars and/or imcompetants themselves. Or both"

So please, recruiters, don't waste my time and your own. Tell the truth about the job - including salary and maybe you'll have an easier life too.

I'm quite happy with my new job - and because recruiters couldn't tell the truth, no money changed hands to get me here. Instead I dealt with people I know, trust and have worked with before.

So, then, This Fusion Malarkey

I've been trying to get a proper idea what Fusion Apps will bring us - as usual someone else has asked the questions I wish I'd asked, and in a better way here.

Pensions Reform

Not to be outdone by HMRC in terms of creating potentially onerous requirements for payroll software, the Pensions Regulator has published a "guide to software developers".

I've read this and at first glance it seems to have a lot of extra data and transactions that need to incorporated into payroll systems. This is all around the new requirements to automatically enroll employees in a pension scheme in certain circumstances.

Once again, it'll be interesting to see the Oracle response.

RTI - a challenge to All UK payroll software

I'll try and keep this brief, if only because there is such a wealth of information already around about RTI. I am trying to focus on how this will/may affect PeopleSoft GP UK payroll.

HMRC has decided to use BACS for capturing a whole load of data that it either already captures via EDI, or doesn't capture at all for now. Part of the reason for this is the major overhaul of the benefits system that is due to take place.

What this means for GP is that major development work will be needed. The BACS delivery for GP in the UK in "vanilla" is highly inconsistent anyway in that it doesn't produce the files in a ready to send (i.e. with headers, footers and contra entries) format - PeopleSoft financials does. However there are other factors here - certain kinds of transactions - new joiners, etc, will need to generate data in the BACS file. This will involve some quite major changes.

I'll be fascinated to see how Oracle address this - it will all need to be live by 2013. That sounds a while away - but it seems like only yesterday we were celebrating the UK getting the Olympics.

Twitter - I am late to the party

I thought Twitter was a load of nonsense for self-obsessed morons with too much time, a sort of "Facebook lite". I was (not for the first time), utterly, utterly mistaken. Don't get me wrong - there are plenty of self-obsessed morons (they would probably speak highly of me), but there is some wonderful content on there too.

After I happened across a thread on Mumsnet I found a good explanation of what it was, from a Mum advocating the benefits to her small business - the key to this is that I tend to ignore geeks and meeja trendoids advocacy of this week's next greatest thing, but this was a real person citing real benefits.

Taking a new look at Twitter has led me to an ocean of quality comment and information in the world of HR and Payroll systems (which is what I do). I can't believe there is so much expertise out there that I hadn't tapped into. Most of these people write blogs and tweet their blog entries so because I hadn't done a Google (or any other) search for blogs about HR systems, I'd missed out entirely.

This is not news to anyone who already uses Twitter I guess, but it was pleasant surprise to me.