Each episode of The Apprentice will be scrutinised by Chloe Harrold, a senior employment lawyer with the progressive business services group, Outset, and she will pull out the HR blunders for your entertainment and education. Based in Maidstone TV Studios, watching out in case Lord Sugar lands on the helipad, Chloe has experience of advising employers and senior executives in all areas of employment law. She deals with contentious and non-contentious matters, including exit strategy, settlement agreements, discrimination, reorganisationand TUPE. Chloe is also a qualified New York lawyer who qualified as a UK solicitor in 2009 whilst specialising in employment law at a City firm. Having spent several years working in the City she joined Outset in 2016.
Gin-tastic
It’s week gin! Sorry, I mean ten…We’re just two weeks away from the final but, if the reports are to be believed, Lord Sugar has already told us who the winner is by inadvertently following them on Twitter (then very quickly unfollowing them). I shan’t tell you who it was, but if that is the case, it’s ruined the end for me. I wonder though whether it was all a publicity stunt in order to help boost the failing ratings…cynical much?
This week we saw Trishna and Grainne getting carried away tasting gins, getting increasingly merry, while Frances called them NINETEEN times to try to find out the ingredients to put on the label she was designing. In the end the deadline was looming so Frances did the best she could “Colony Gin, flavoured with exotic spices”. Then they coloured it, with artificial food colouring, but told the potential buyers it was natural. My own discomfort at the name they chose was shared both by members of the public and the people they pitched to.
Over on team Nebular Courtney stumbled through his pitches, trying to sell Giin (pronounced zsin) flavoured with raspberry (which no one could taste) in a bottle with blue colouring (because that evokes images of raspberries?) It was embarrassing to watch him try to sell: “it’s gin, for people who like gin” – ground-breaking stuff.
Trishna then got the hump big time; did she throw the team off their game? Perhaps, but there’s no excuse for fibbing to clients. Just imagine if an employee secured a real order based on false information? Sackable offence? Definitely. Criminal act? Potentially. A word of warning to employers where an employee has committed a potentially criminal act – don’t threaten to report them to the police in order to persuade them to do something (pay back any loss, for example). That’s blackmail and can lead to a whole host of problems of its own.
Courtney’s monotonous tones weren’t as bad though as fake, orange coloured Colony gin with no ingredients on the label. Team Nebular obliterated the Titans, with over £70,000 in sales, compared to around £5,000.
Ultimately, Trishna’s decision to make the gin orange and stomp around in a huff was her downfall. She was put out of her misery and shown Lord Sugar’s pointy finger.
We’re nearly at the end, just five candidates left and its exciting stuff next week – the interviews!
