If It's This Bad At Cadbury's, It's Way Worse Than We Think

I received a job description via an agent recently with gems like this in it – this is for Cadbury's, a famous blue-chip company, not some dodgy fly-by-night outfit...

Create time to develop yourself and others, look to keep your functional and professional skills up to date. Translation: there's no formal training programme, there's not even an informal one and unless you book the days out, you could get swamped. Leave it to Cadbury's HR and your manager and you could work there a decade and never see a bar of chocolate. That isn't how it was back in the day.

Be resilient and tenacious when faced with difficulty, courageous and tough minded to overcome obstacles, promote change and act quickly, persuade and engage others, project yourself with impact and presence, gain support for and commitment to a course of action, build and maintain effective team relationships, understand how the organisation works, think and act beyond borders and functions, deal with conflict and criticism constructively - trust me that's about a quarter of the job description. Translation: your department has no clout, so you'll be brushed off with all sorts of excuses (“Project Moonshine is our top priority and we have no spare resource until H2 next year”), plus there are processes and procedures that will make you tear your hair out with their pointlessness, furthermore you'll have to figure out how things work for yourself because your manager doesn't know and if you don't go along, man are you ever not going to get along, because it's that kind of a place.

Exercise sound judgement of inputs to arrive at a balanced viewpoint, think in a rigorously analytical way, think differently about the future and how to get things done, anticipate events and possible alternatives. They have to ask for this? Why? Because so few people there do this?

This kind of HR job description twaddle was unknown thirty years ago. Companies accepted that no-one would do things the Cadbury way and took pride in training people to do it the Cadbury way – now they don't because no-one knows what the Cadbury way is anymore. A company would never have expected people to work against its own informal culture as this role is being expected to do. Because it would never have destroyed its traditions, networks and experience in twenty years of downsizing, sales, mergers, reorganisations and redundancies. Companies are a mess, so it becomes the role of the most junior of managers to do what the company once would have done automatically but now can no longer even describe in plain English.

You don't believe me? Here's the job: "to understand the role of price and promotion in driving growth and efficiency; using all data sources available and working closely with the Insights team to determine the role and context of price and promotion in the in store decision making process; develop market tracking reports to monitor price realisation for Cadbury UK and competitors; develop market place tracking for Cadbury UK & competitor pricing and format changes (standard and seasonal) by channel to inform how we price our products to deliver an improved revenue realisation; develop tracking reports to monitor and understand retailer, competitor and adjacent market promotional programmes and strategies to help inform promotional guidelines; develop and implement methods that combine market, customer, financial, and forecasting data in order that we can establish ongoing promotional evaluations, and therefore create future promotional guidelines; provide market data and selling rationale to support the price increase process; develop an agreed methodology to establish the link between Price and volume (price elasticity)".

Huh? Cadbury's don't have a price elasticity model? It's the end of the Oughties, they've been in business how long and they don't have a price elasticity model? They don't have an understanding of the role of price and promotion in the “store decision making process”? And they're in fmcg? What the heck have they been doing for the last thirty years? What act of corporate amnesia lost all the work on those things from the 80's and 90's? They would have had such models back then because I was reading ads like this for jobs like that back then. Do they really mean that no-one is tracking what the competition get up to now? Wouldn't that be something you'd do as natural as breathing? What the heck are the “Insights” team doing if they don't have an understanding of how shoppers make decisions? (By the way, the moment you see a company has an “Insight” team, you can safely assume they have no idea about their customers and never will. In the modern corporation, “insight” means “data dredging”.) How much trouble are they in? And what do you think happened to the previous guy?