Training day poster mistaken for IKEA job offer and thousands clog up council phone lines
Training day poster mistaken for IKEA job offer and thousands clog up council phone lines
AT LEAST 7,000 people packed into the council offices in Almussafes (Valencia) yesterday because they thought the Swedish furniture giant IKEA was offering jobs there.
In fact, the town hall was merely carrying out a training workshop for its unemployed residents to enable them to apply for work at IKEA in the future when it finally opened in neighbouring Alfafar.
But the council's advert was misread by hopeful jobseekers,who thought it was a recruitment day after seeing notices on Facebook urging people to turn up there with a copy of their CV.
As well as queues reaching down the streets, over 7,000 people telephoned the town hall, jamming up the line – which is shared with the Local Police – all day on Monday.
This is in fact the second of 13 training day workshops for unemployed people in Almussafes planned for this year, and are not in any way linked to concrete job offers.
And IKEA, which said it had known nothing about the training course or the fact that the wording of its advertising was misleading, stresses that all recruitment for the new store will be via its own website.
Company bosses have condemned Almussafes council's 'irresponsible behaviour' in placing an advert for a routine training day on a worldwide social network, using 'the logo of a private company' who 'knew nothing about it', and 'telling people how they could get jobs in Alfafar in 2014', and then only stating in very small letters at the bottom of the poster where the workshop was due to be held.
The Scandinavian flat-pack company will open in Alfafar in 2014, the first in the Comunidad Valenciana – at present Spain only has one branch Madrid and another in Murcia.
