THE HUB RETAIL RECRUITMENT’S WEEKLY NEWS SNIPPETS
- Date: 21 September 2016
- Posted By: admin
It’s Wednesday again already. And to make your mid-week even brighter, here’s The Hub Retail Recruitment’s top picks from the last 7 days’ news stories: Kingfisher flying high; Bank of England publishes shock gender pay gap data; BHS’s top execs land at LK Bennett; Amazon customer reviews could be skewed; Tattoos in the workplace.
Kingfisher flying high: Thanks to strong sales at its 477 Screwfix branches, Kingfisher saw its revenue rise by 6.8%, and its pre-tax profits go up by 13%. Although its sales in France stayed flat, the surge was seen in the UK and Ireland. As it slogs on with its transformation programme ‘One Kingfisher’ which includes closing 65 branches of B & Q – 52 down, 13 to go – some commentators are questioning whether Kingfisher will be able to keep these impressive results going in the longer term. But as it stands, Kingfisher is doing very well and says it isn’t yet seeing any adverse effects of Brexit.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37416272
Bank of England publishes gender pay gap data: Measuring it by the mean and by the median, the BoE reports that its gender pay gap stands at 18.7% and 26.4% respectively. And that’s an improvement on last year! Both sets of data have dropped by about 1% each over the last year. Women make up 60% of its workforce in its two lowest quartiles, whilst at the top it’s only The mean pay across the whole business for women is just over £50k whereas for men, it’s £61k. The BoE says this is because there’s only 28% of women in senior management jobs, so that skews the data. It has a target to increase the number of women in senior management to 35% by 2020. As a public institution it should be an exemplar for other businesses – we wonder, does this data reflects that?
BHS’s top execs land at LK Bennett: Former CEO Darren Topp and CFO Michael Hitchcock of BHS escaped criticism over the collapse of the company when investigated by the parliamentary select committee. Which must have helped Topp and Hitchcock land their new jobs at LK Bennett. LK Bennett is where Theresa May bought her leopard print kitten heel shoes from – the ones she wore to the palace when she became Prime Minister. Topp and Hitchcock were at BHS for a year before its collapse, and it’ll be interesting to see what sort of a fist they make of it at LK Bennett.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37358547
Amazon customer reviews could be skewed: Apparently, Amazon offers incentives to some customers for giving reviews. What this articles is saying is that, whilst this is clearly marked against a review that has been incentivised, it doesn’t re-callibrate the star scoring to reflect this. The data in this article shows that reviews that have been made by people who received the product for free or discounted, were 4 times more likely to give a higher score. And because these aren’t disaggregated from the star scoring, it further undermines the efficacy of the reviews. And with scepticism increasing about whether to trust reviews more widely, this isn’t good news for Amazon.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/sep/20/incentivised-reviews-amazon-product-star-ratings
Tattoos in the workplace: Apparently, the issue of tattoos in the workplace is hotting up. Last week there was a news item about how the public felt less trust in police men and women whose had tattoos on display. This week, this first article tells us about one of the top female engineers in the country and how she kept her tattoos hidden for 13 years because she felt her career would be adversely affected. The second article is about ACAS getting involved in the debate – and how employers are missing out on great talent because of prejudice against people with visible tattoos. There’s bound to be more about this subject in the coming months. Let us know before then what you think about it.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/life/i-covered-it-up-for-13-years-the-politics-of-tattoos-in-the-work/
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-37419897
That’s it for another week – we hope our stories have piqued your interest. Next week will be our monthly Newsround – so look for that on 28th September. In the meantime, have a great week.