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Home > All site sections > HR blogs and comment > HR blogs > Specialists' blog

The Apprentice: week 11

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The Apprentice

16 Dec 2010 | 10:20

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Articles more than one month old can be viewed only by CIPD members or PM Subscribers.

This week I almost turned off after 10 minutes. It was the interview round this week and I find it unbearable to watch every time - the interviewers get worse year-on-year. I know The Apprentice is reality TV but this round should be a little bit closer to ‘reality’ than it is. Joanna said it was like “mental torture”, and it wasn’t any less painful for us as viewers. It wasn’t the candidates that I found most cringeworthy but the interviewers. As a member of the HR community, I find the interview techniques condescending, outdated and aggressive.

If any one of us carried out interviews like that in our own companies we would instantly be in very hot water!

Not only were they intimidating and aggressive, they were insulting too. Accusing Stella of being a “glorified PA” when she is the only woman on a trading floor of all men not only offended thousands of PA’s but traders all over too.

Jamie, Stuart and Joanna got fired this week, leaving Stella and Chris as well-deserving finalists. It’s going to be a fabulous climax on Sunday when the winner will be revealed.

The last three fire-ees had come to the end of the road: Stuart because of his unreserved ‘blagging’; Jamie for his overuse of clichés (a man of many words with no substance); and Joanna because she will be better off on her own.

We had been waiting for a week to find out whether Stuart was telling the truth and he ran out of runway when Lord Sugar’s aid finally checked him out. What was frustrating about this is that he took the place of Liz who got fired instead of him last week.

The winner of the losers, however, is Joanna. The highlight for me was when she declared that no longer was she “Joanna the cleaner from Leicester” but “Joanna from Leicester the business woman”.

Past Apprentice candidates always have mixed views about their time in the show - some view it as the end of the world, while some view it as a beginning. My time in the show inspired me in so many ways. It invited me into circles that I had never experienced before and until this day is affords me a very privileged position as a media commentator. It tested me to my limits and revealed characteristics that I didn’t know I had (both good and bad). The key to any challenge such as this is to take the feedback, learn the lessons and grow as a result, using the outcomes in a positive fashion.

It’s a great ending for Joanna because she has decided that it will be. It’s a powerful life lesson that, when something doesn’t work out quite as we plan, it’s down to us to decide how the next chapter will pan out. Organisations are crying out for Joanna’s cup-half-full mentality and those that can engender it in their workforces will always outperform their competition.