Some of the most frequently visited FAQs on XpertHR during June concern the calculation of statutory payments - redundancy pay and SMP - where the employee in question has had a recent change in hours. Questions on the length of time that an ex-employee’s personnel record should be kept, and a change of heart on the employer’s part after a job applicant has accepted a position also feature.

Throughout May, some of the most frequently visited XpertHR FAQs were those recently added to the site as a result of subscriber suggestions - questions on a rise in the limit of a week's pay coinciding with the notice period for a redundant employee, and the qualification requirements for trade union officials who accompany workers to disciplinary or grievance hearings. Others concerned employees returning to work when they're signed off sick by a doctor, and asking job candidates about their sickness record.

Here’s an amusing recruiting video for Ernst & Young in Sweden. It has more than a touch of Monty Python about it - but it’s none the worse for that. It certainly makes me think that Ernst & Young in Sweden is a cool place to work - but then I’m hardly in the target candidate pool, being neither Swedish nor a recent graduate and never having considered a career in lion-taming accountancy.

Thanks to Andy Headworth at Sirona Says recruitment blog for finding this. See Andy’s post on this video here.

Two employment tribunal decisions demonstrate that individuals who are discriminated against for not having a particular religion or belief are protected by the Employment Equality (Religion or Belief) Regulations 2003.

There are some weird and wonderful jobs out there. Perhaps you have had to fill some of them. Maybe you've even done the job yourself. If so, we'd love to hear about it.

Of course, in the wonderful world of blogging, there is someone out there lovingly chronicling every last eccentric employment opportunity.

Here are some of the best of the odd jobs to be found on Eccentric Employment.

New telesales recruits at US online shoe retailer Zappos are offered $1,000 to quit the job after their first week's induction training - on the basis that if they accept the money it shows they don't have the level of commitment required, reports business writer Bill Taylor on his Harvard Business blog.

Testimonials from ex-employees don't get much more glowing than those published yesterday on the unofficial Google Operating System blog. OK, they all look like they come from software developers and related trades, or "engineers" as Google likes to call them, but wow, what an amazing bunch of recommendations about a great place to work - from people who have left.

The ongoing fall-out of the global credit crisis may be causing widespread angst and uncertainty, with sharp declines in business confidence (subscription required) afflicting many sectors and dire warnings on house prices (external website). But every cloud has a silver lining, as cliché would have it, and things would appear to be looking up for temps.

HR has been busy making changes to the way new employees are recruited and selected. IRS's latest survey (subscription required) of changes and trends in recruitment and selection has identified one clear winner: the internet.

Our three-part report is based on the experience of 133 organisations - covering a combined workforce of more than 1 million people - and shows that employers are now using the internet in all aspects of the recruitment and selection process.

We looked at changes and trends in three areas: candidate attraction; the application process; and, assessment and selection. In each of these key areas, the internet has grown in use and coverage.

We tend to hear a lot about NEETs (young people not in education, employment or training – presumably there are some ASBOS involved at some point too), or those who have just made their first billion. We don’t tend to hear much about those young people who just get on with it and go out and get an often unglamorous job.

Provisional statistics released by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (PDF, 146KB) show that the proportion of young people aged 18-30 entering higher education in England fell from 42% in the academic year 2005/06 to 40% in 2006/07.

One of the oldest pieces of employment legislation still on the statute book will disappear later this year when a Bill currently before the House of Lords passes into law.

The Servants’ Characters Act of 1792 set out to prevent “evil-disposed Persons” from supplying bogus references with which they or their accomplices could get jobs in good households and carry out inside-job burglaries.

Recruitment isn't easy - particularly when the some applicants aren’t necessarily honest. Many of the tasks associated with recruitment are less about finding the best person for the job and more about simply stopping the wrong individuals being hired.

Things become even more complicated where an organisation is dealing with vulnerable individuals. Public protection is a very serious issue indeed.

Fed up with sitting through lengthy job interviews when you've already concluded after two minutes that the candidate is a total no-hoper? Then how about introducing three-minute "speed interviews" to weed out the losers?

You cannot know just how many bad press releases you have been spared this Christmas.

Several of the most frequently asked HR questions throughout November concern sickness absence and cover the issues of covert surveillance where there are suspicions about the genuineness of the sickness, decreasing pay to reflect a phased return to work, and payment during the notice period where sick pay has been exhausted. The subject of rewarding low sickness absence also features.

So you are looking for someone to fill a job vacancy. What you really want is someone "left-brain" oriented: logical, focused on details, reality based and not inclined to take risks.

What you need is some sort of test to weed out all those touchy-feely creative thinkers – something to get rid of the "right-brain" thinkers.

It is now over a year since the Employment Equality (Age) Regulations 2006, which outlaw discrimination on grounds of age, came into effect. Such a fundamental change to employment law might have been expected to have far reaching effects on employers and their employment practices and no doubt many are still learning to adapt to the requirements. While a flood of age discrimination claims might have been anticipated, in fact in its annual statistics for 1 April 2006 to 31 March 2007 the employment tribunals service reported that only 972 claims were accepted, compared to 28,153 sex discrimination claims and 3,780 for race discrimination. Of course, as the new rules did not come into effect until 1 October 2006 it will take some time for claims to filter through to the tribunals.

You may have thought our report on the recent virtual reality picket line protest had nothing to do with you. But what happens when your boss tells you to organise something in Second Life for the next graduate recruitment round?

Recruitment firm TMP Worldwide teamed up with Royal Bank of Scotland, Yell UK and KPMG this week to run a three-day Second Life recruitment fair that offered students the chance to chat in real time with avatars from the three big firms.

Congratulations to the editor of Practical Family History, who is currently taking bids on eBay from eager genealogists who want to edit the magazine for a day.

Not only will the auction raise money for charity, it also opens up whole new vistas for a labour market in which people pay for the opportunity to work.

If anyone wants to do my job for me, I'm happy to look at any reasonable sum. Offers in an email, please. In the mean time, the bidding for Practical Family History currently stands at just £8.

The issue of pregnancy and maternity leave is high in our list of the top 10 most frequently asked HR questions during September – with fertility treatment, multiple births and regular time off sick during pregnancy all featuring. Don’t forget you can view a full range of common questions on this topic in the FAQ section of XpertHR.

Unsurprisingly, several of the questions featured in our top 10 most popular questions during August are recent additions to the FAQ section of XpertHR. But with almost 1000 FAQs available, why not browse some of the older questions? And, if you can’t find the answer to your particular question, you can always use the Suggest a question button [subscription required]. Even if your suggestion isn’t suitable for publication as an FAQ, it might still provide useful ideas for guidance that could be commissioned for other areas of the site, or prompt more detailed examination of a problematic subject.

The debate over the benefits, or otherwise, of Facebook continues unabated. But in the HR world the controversy has shifted slightly, with opinion sharply divided over whether firms should utilise the community based website as part of their recruitment strategy.

Talent management is a hot issue for HR practitioners as new business models, changing labour market demographics and international competition make the task of recruiting, developing and retaining key employees all the more difficult.

It surely says something about how the world of engineering is changing that search engine giant Google is now the employer of choice for Europe's engineering and IT students, having overtaken the likes of Porsche, Ferrari and BMW.

This year marks the 12th anniversary of the use of online recruitment in the UK. Our online survey has been designed to find out whether it has become a central part of employers’ resourcing practices or remains on the periphery, and identify the key issues linked to its effective use.