Quite a few of my friends are moving jobs at the moment for various reasons and hence I’ve been chatting to a lot of people recently about working in Geneva, and job hunting in general. Coincidentally I’ve also had to do a lot of interviewing at work over the last few months. I therefore thought I’d take a moment to reflect on what I’ve learned about the hiring process from writing job descriptions, sifting through piles (or folders) of CVs and meeting some very interesting people on Skype or in person. Here are two points based on some recent experience, in the form of “factors that not many applicants seem to consider when applying/interviewing for a job”. They could be really obvious to you, but I definitely under-appreciated both before having the opportunity to act as a hiring manager.

First, I don’t think many people writing an application or going to a job interview realize that

Last Friday I received a very nice email from the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) Business Research group, letting me know about a new report they thought I’d find interesting. Called “The Search for Growth: Opportunities and risks for institutional investors“, it provides data and analysis from a March 2011 (I believe) survey of 800 (mostly financial) firms which asked for perceptions of growth prospects in different sectors and regions as well as an assessment of risks and opportunities for the next 12 months (pdf here). Having read it on the plane from London to Riyadh yesterday then used one of their charts in a presentation today, it’s worth a look if you’re interested in outlooks on global risks.

I can see why EIU thought I’d like it – it dovetails very nicely with the Forum’s Global Risks 2011, supporting our Global Risks Survey data with slightly more recent data. As with our work, EIU asked respondents (among other things) to assess the likelihood and impact of range of global uncertainties, then married that with expert interviews. Apart from taking 1 year rather than a 10 year outlook, what’s different in the EIU approach is that these are termed “scenarios” and, from what I can gather from the helpful appendix showing the results, were posed in two sets – the first set being clearly negative “scenarios” (e.g. Break-up of the Eurozone), and a second being rather more positive “scenarios” (e.g. Housing industry in the US rebounds).  Thus, their impact axis,

Note: I wrote this last weekend and didn’t post it as I wasn’t quite happy with it. Since then, according to some side mentions in the German press, it does indeed look like the ECB will agree to debt restructuring in the Eurozone periphery countries (despite ongoing official speeches to the contrary). Apologies for the length – too busy to write a shorter blog post...

One way in which I’m justifying the fact that it’s been 77 days since I last wrote a blog post is the argument that it is valuable to leave the brain fallow for a while. I’m a big fan of “percolation” – raising an issue or question, then letting a day or so pass before returning to a detailed analysis of the issue. So I like to think that what’s been happening these past few months is a crucial period of percolation prior to some awesome, insightful blog posting.

Of course that might be true if I hadn’t been destroying brain cells through excessive travel, lack of sleep and a fair amount of whisky consumption. Worth it though – since I last posted I’ve been to two fascinating conferences in Estonia and Oxford, spent almost 3 weeks in Australia attending my little sister’s wedding and meeting great people in Adelaide, Brisbane and Sydney (not to mention attending a lot of late night phone conferences), and kicked off an exciting new project titled The Political and Economic Implications of Resource Scarcity. And I’ve enjoyed a fair amount of Springbank and Ardbeg, my two favourite whiskies along the way.

However of all the big things percolating in my brain over the last few months, the biggest is what’s going on around me here in Europe at the moment. Not sexist E. Coli, but rather Europe’s sovereign debt crisis that I’m worried is about to get less theoretical and more real in the form of a European banking crisis.

This morning I seized some early-morning jet-lag energy and used it to continue reading Foreign Policy’s new e-book Revolution in the Arab World, which draws together a whole raft of recent pieces about the region written by FP journalists. I strongly urge you to buy and read it if you’re interested in what’s been going on – fascinating stuff.

The fact that it doesn’t try to make sense of events after the fact, but instead provides a collection of articles “as they happened” (so to speak), is actually quite helpful. For example, some of the articles focus on the “will they / won’t they” questions about regime change in Egypt and Tunisia before Ben Ali or Mubarak stepped down – such musings may seem irrelevant now but the thinking behind them still applies to countries such as Saudi, Jordan and Morocco.

Although I can’t for the life of me find the original reference, I read somewhere recently that the rise of the celebrity-chef was one of the signals that heralded the end of the Roman Empire. The argument goes something along the lines of: When a society is affluent and decadent enough to glorify food to the extent that it creates a cult of celebrity around food-preparation, it will tend to lose touch with the basic tenets of social and moral cohesion, which in turn make it fragile to internal or external disruption. Foodandwine.net has an interesting version of this theory as applied to Ireland (Eimear, your response?).

Of course there are many other competing arguments for the fall or transformation of the empire (including another favourite of mine, Tainter’s idea of declining returns of investment in energy, education and technological innovation in the face of increasing complexity), but the old idea that a combination of economic disparity and frivolous activity can bring a society down remains attractive. Which begs the question whether Jamie Oliver, Martha Stewart et al are harbingers of doom for our modern empire(s).

Which brings me, naturally, to Charlie Sheen.