'Join us' call to Northern Rock staff

Aug 1 2008 by Sam Wood, The Journal

NORTHERN ROCK employees on their way to work yesterday were greeted by a job advert from another North East building society.

Just a day after the Rock announced 1,300 redundancies, 800 compulsory, Newcastle Building Society paraded a billboard on the back of a bike up and down Newcastle’s Gosforth High Street.

The society has around 200 vacancies in the region for various roles and could give hope to some of those who lose their jobs.

Colin Seccombe, chief executive at Newcastle Building Society, said: “This is obviously a very difficult time for many hundreds of Northern Rock employees, but we believe that the employment opportunities that The Newcastle has available will offer many of them a very attractive future career option.

“We have already created 160 new jobs in the first half of 2008, with even more in the pipeline, and we are actively recruiting for around 200 vacancies at the moment that will match the skills of many current Rock employees.

“These vacancies range from customer service telephone advisers, team leaders and team managers, through to IT, marketing, project management, business analysts and finance support staff, and we’re confident that there are strong candidates for all these roles within the regional financial services sector.

“We have already taken on 40 former Rock staff this year, and now that these redundancy figures have been confirmed, we would expect to see both the number of enquiries we receive from Rock staff and the number of such applicants that we subsequently employ to rise significantly over the coming months – and we have indeed already seen enquiry numbers increasing over the last 24 hours.

“Having grown our workforce by around 20% last year, we are committed to creating at least 500 additional jobs by 2012, and would encourage Northern Rock employees to visit our www.newcastle.co.uk website to find out about all our current vacancies.”

Ron Stout, assistant director at Northern Rock, said he welcomed the adverts placed by the other building society.

He said: “We are working to minimise job losses in the company’s restructuring. It is important to remember that we have 600 jobs which can be filled from within the company.

“We are grateful to the external initiatives on job placement led by One NorthEast.

“The news of a recruitment drive by the Newcastle Building Society is welcome news for our staff and the North East.”

The Journal told yesterday of the first confirmation of redundancies at the troubled bank.

The bank is to make about 800 job cuts as part of efforts to shrink the business.

After talks with unions, it is agreed a further 500 will leave voluntarily, making 1,300 redundancies.