Why aren’t applicants for backstage jobs asked to demonstrate their skills practically rather than just presenting a CV and having a jolly chat aka an interview?
No director, venue, company or agent would consider hiring a performer without hearing/seeing him or her sing, dance act, juggle or whatever. In other industries a competence demo is quite usual too. If you apply for a teaching job in almost any mainstream school, for example, as well as being interviewed you will now also be expected to teach a class observed by selectors before a decision is made. No hairdresser will get a job without proving his or her prowess with the scissors. A parish appointing a new priest-in-charge usually wants to see the applicant take a service - among other things.
Yet lighting technicians, sound experts, stage managers and the like, unless they are already working in the company are generally taken on trust, instinct and hope - a pretty inexact and inefficient way of working when you think about it.
Part of the trouble is that the industry (should we start to call it ‘industries’?) has become very diverse and the technology gets more complex almost daily. Think of the relatively new theatrical science of automation. So it isn’t a question of whether you’re trained. It’s more a matter of precisely what training you had and when.
For example the applicant may be fully trained and A1 competent on lighting rig A but never have used rig B. So you’ve appointed the equivalent of a skilled Yahama biker when what you really wanted was 52 seater coach driver.
Given the widely publicised backstage skills shortage (yes, there are still opportunities here even in a recession) mutterings are mounting in some quarters about the need for a backstage skills passport - a bit like the European computer driving licence. But it would need a lot of careful overseeing to make sure that the system was tightly coherent rather than ever more complicatedly diverse.
Meanwhile couldn’t managements protect themselves from the most fundamental of recruitment errors by ‘auditioning’ backstage employees as they would performers? It might help if they talked more often to training providers about the industry’s changing needs too.
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