Lloyds Bank has come under fire for creating 2,000 new jobs.
At first glance, you could be forgiven for thinking that this is good news - more jobs, a better service for hard-pressed Lloyds customers. So not's what to like?
Well, it appears that Lloyds is in fact making exactly 6,240 people redundant in front line roles, whilst creating 8,240 new roles in IT and technology.
Technically, it is creating 2,000 new jobs, but that is not the real story. It never was.
It continues to surprise me that businesses with sophisticated and talented PR machines still think they can pull the wool over the eyes of equally talented and experienced journalists.
Lloyds now sits with egg on its face with all future press announcements facing much greater scrutiny. It is, after all, as much a game of trust.
Announcements about job cuts are a gloomy business, never more so than for those who are actually being made redundant, so the very least that a company can do is to be honest about its plans. That’s still the case even if those plans aren’t straightforward or if final decisions haven’t been made and the picture is complicated by cuts in some areas and hiring in others. Lloyds said yesterday that it would create “an additional 2,000 roles”. What the bank did not spell out was that it would create 8,240 new jobs in technology and innovation, while doing away with 6,240 jobs in more traditional areas. Both of these are oddly specific numbers that suggest Lloyds already knows exactly where it intends to make the changes.
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