Fire Starter

A Brighton-based accountancy firm called Crunch is advertising for a “PR/Journalist Fire Starter”.

The job involves “Researching, writing and distributing press releases to targeted media, collating and analysing media coverage, helping to organise events”, and similar tasks. There is no mention of setting fires.

The ideal candidate will have “experience as a journalist... experience of planning, developing and delivering end to end PR campaigns across a variety of communication channels, [an] understanding of social media and its PR leverage”, and so on.

The advert doesn’t mention fire-starting anywhere. Very few other PR jobs involve setting fires, and it’s hard to see how doing so would be useful to a firm of accountants. Isn’t the whole point of accounting to keep strict records of everything? I would imagine having someone starting fires in the office would be exactly what they wouldn’t want to happen.

Brighton has form in the field of confusing job ads; last year, the city council spent £14,000 on a recruitment campaign for four strategic directors (salary: £125,000 each). They spent seven thousand on creating a recruitment website called saynotostatusquo.co.uk. Its headline read “Status Quo fans need not apply”. The band’s manager called it a “direct insult to the capabilities of millions of Quo fans, many of whom are probably totally overqualified for these jobs.”

Cllr John Barradell eventually apologised, saying that “the question of musical preference will not be asked at interview; it is not relevant to the recruitment of these jobs”. He explained the title: “What we mean is that we want people who will come to the council with brilliant and original ideas about how to make residents' lives better.” Geddit?