Redeployment label on possible job

MrBrindle

Hiya, I wonder if someone can shed some light on what may be going on here. It's a bit complex, but hopefully I can explain properly.

I was made redundant back in July from my Design and Marketing position within the hospitality industry. I sent my CV out to various places, and applied for jobs. I was approached by the local authority media team, who interviewed me a few years ago for a Senior Designer role, asking if I was interested in working for them full time as a sub-contracted graphic designer. Their Senior Designer left in August and I started in September, so I was fortunate to be in the right place at the right time. There's a team of three designers overall, so over the past three months, I've been working under another designer there who's been the stand-in Senior Designer.

I wasn't given a contract, which looking back I perhaps should have secured. They told me when I started that this was a short term solution and they will be advertising for an employed designer in November. This then turned into December, and they have only just advertised a Senior Designer position today. The stand-in designer should be a shoe-in as she's been there 10 years and only narrowly missed out when they previously advertised the Senior job.  My hope was that she would get the Senior role and then her role would be advertised, which I would apply for. I would have applied for the Senior role anyway, as I reached the last 5 when it was last advertised.

I'm a bit disappointed by how things ended from my end. I was told start of December that they will be keeping me on until end of Jan as they hadn't sorted out the job yet, but just before xmas they abruptly told me that I will be finishing at the end of December due to budget, and low workload in January. I'm now unemployed again.

So anyway, they've now advertised the Senior Designer role, but it's only for staff on the redeployment scheme. I'm not familiar with redeployment, but from googling, I can only assume that they're making redundancies. Possibly cutting the three man design team down to two? Using redeployment means one of the designers can be promoted thus keeping both jobs safe. 

Does that sound right, or are there other reasons for the job to come under redeployment?

I've become friends with the stand in Senior Designer so could ask her about what's going on, but it's not really my place to get involved now.

KatrinaWaves

Your thoughts sound correct to me, I’ve only ever heard of redeployment in a ‘avoiding redundancies’ situation 

bartelbe

Sounds like bad luck I'm afraid, hopefully something else will turn up.

getmore4less

Might be policy if there is redeployment pool, all jobs have to matched to the pool first then go wider.

No one in the pool fits, current stand in gets the job and nothing else changes as they were not doing a job that needs replacing if they were stand in. 

Clearly something changed Dec if they suddenly terminated the contract, probably budget was the truth and there in no budget for an extra person. 

MrBrindle

Thanks for the advice all. It's such a shame because this work was really enjoyable, and the whole team were great to work with.

Would the employed designers have been told that their roles were at risk of redundancy quite a bit before this role was advertised? Both current designers have been with the council for 10+ years each so they must have know about this quite a while in advance.

Or am I barking up the wrong tree here? The acting Senior Designer didn't mention anything to me, not that she would/could.

getmore4less

There may be nothing going on with this group(they have reduced by one already)

There may be other sectors in the local authority  that have already put people in the redeployment pool and policy is all jobs go to them for consideration.

MrBrindle

getmore4less said:

There may be nothing going on with this group(they have reduced by one already)

There may be other sectors in the local authority  that have already put people in the redeployment pool and policy is all jobs go to them for consideration.

Oh right ok, I didn't realise other staff in the local authority could apply as well. There are sometimes jobs labelled for 'internal staff only', so wasn't sure there was a difference between 'internal' jobs and 'redeployment'.

So you don't think they're necessarily cutting down from 3 to 2? A whole host of other jobs have recently put up under redeployment as well. 

tooldle

Redeployment pool in my workplace is for those within 3 months of ending a fixed term contract. The redeployment pool gets the job vacancy first. If none of these people are suitable, the job then goes to open advert. 

MrBrindle

Having looking at the job description for the position again, it does that the Senior Designer is in charge of the full team as it was when I was subbing, so I'm presuming they're not making cuts at the moment.

The stand-in designer got back to me and said it should be made external next week, so I'l be applying for it anyway.

Do you think it's ok / reasonable to ask for feedback from the upper management regarding how the 3 month contract went? I guess I want to keep myself in their minds for any future vacancies. But if they do come back to me and say 'it wasn't working out' or whatever, then at least I can put it to bed and move on.

MrBrindle

Any advice on this?

Do you think it's ok / reasonable to ask for feedback from the upper management regarding how the 3 month contract went? I guess I want to keep myself in their minds for any future vacancies. But if they do come back to me and say 'it wasn't working out' or whatever, then at least I can put it to bed and move on.

Or if they were not happy with how things went then they just would have said so?

Perhaps I'm over thinking this all.

MrBrindle

Hi all, for anyone who has read this, the council have made the senior designer job external now, so I can apply.

However, is there any point in me applying? Because:

1/ I had to return all the equipment I used last week. Maybe this is a sign I wasn't in their long term plans?
2/ They stopped my contract suddenly, even though they said it was budget related and didn't mention performance.
3/ Even though I got down to the last 5 from 60 applicants, I didn't get the same job 3 years ago.