Job Search

When Who You Are Isn’t Good Enough

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga

Anyone who is looking for professional employment in the current economy is probably familiar with how much information there is about the “proper” way to conduct a job search, including how much of this information can seem to be conflicting. If you have your resume reviewed by ten different people, you will get ten different opinions (people often say the same thing about economists, legal advice, and the IRS).  In my own case, it was business cards. After changing the template multiple times, I finally had to have something printed because a job fair was imminent, only to be presented with even more suggestions for changes to the printed “final” version.  In essence, no matter how many changes you make to your job search infrastructures (resume, business cards, Linked In profile, web page, etc.) you will invariably be told that you need to change something yet again.

Although these perennial suggestions for change can seem like a Sisyphean burden, they usually come from well-intentioned friends and job-search professionals who truly want to help you and are themselves inundated with perennially changing advice and information. There is, however, a much darker side to the process. The real reason you cannot seem to get these things right is that you yourself must be conformed—maybe even deformed—into something that the so-called “market” requires. This is something much more insidious than tweaking or reframing your skills and experience to fit a job description.

C. Wright Mills, in his 1951 White Collar: The American Middle Classes, argues that the white collar worker in some ways has it worse than the blue collar worker. The blue collar worker’s job may be physically more demanding, but there was (at least in the 1950s) a definite demarcation between “work time” and “non-work” time, in which the worker was free to do as he saw fit and free to be his authentic self. Conversely, the white collar worker may have enjoyed a better salary and higher status, but the white collar worker’s time and energy was not his own at the end of the day. In essence, the white collar worker was not just selling his skills and labor power over a discrete period of time, but was literally selling himself. In Mills’ own words, “The decline of the free entrepreneur and the rise of the dependent employee on the American scene has paralleled the decline of the independent individual and the rise of the little man in the American mind.”  The white collar professional has thus become a generalized “Little Man…pushed by forces beyond his control…who is acted upon but does not act…never talking back, never taking a stand.”

One book among the plethora of job search resources actually alleges that there exists an “ideal worker persona” which you must demonstrate to employers during interviews. Here is a synopsis of some of the suggested “right” answers in a job interview situation:

  • The only reason you ever leave a job (assuming you weren’t subject to a layoff) is because you are desirous of more responsibility, opportunity to grow and make a contribution. However, you may have to “tone down” this eagerness if there is a chance that the interviewer may view you as overqualified or angling for his or her job.
  • If the interviewer expresses overt concern that you may be overqualified, you can say that you are looking for things like more time with family, less travel, more structure, etc., but here again you have to be careful not to suggest that you may “prefer” a workplace that is not in constant turmoil and actually plan to have a life outside of work.
  • Never admit to any personal weakness that you cannot demonstrate how you turned it into something positive that resulted in a miraculous benefit to a previous employer.
  • You must be infinitely creative, while at the same time reassure the interviewer that you won’t be bored to tears with the tedium that the actual job may entail.
  • Use every chance you get to demonstrate how you thrive on pressure and challenge, and spend every spare minute on self-improvement (only job-related). Every personal goal must be strategized for the sole purpose of creating value for the potential employer. If you are questioned about multiple past employers (so–called “job hopping”), each and every transition was about learning new skills. In short, everything that has happened to you in your past working life is a Panglossian “best of all outcomes in the best of all possible worlds.”

Thus, the “ideal worker persona” seems to resemble a paradoxical combination of Donald Trump, Mother Teresa, and the Energizer Bunny. That is, you will spare no mercy when it comes to getting the job done and meeting the employer’s objectives, yet you will ignore your own needs (and those of your family, friends, and community) in order to be of the highest service to the organization. While a service ethic in and of itself is often a good thing, in the world of corporate work, this ethic elevates the bottom line and the dictates of cost savings and efficiencies above everything else. Woe be to the interviewee who breathes even a whiff of having alternative, humanistic, or contrarian personal values.

Dr. Karen Kelsky is a former academic and author of both a blog and a book entitled The Professor is In. Dr. Kelsky tells the truth about the abysmal dearth of tenured professorships and the more likely scenario of an academic career spent in the wasteland and poverty of adjunct Hell. However, she sets forth a detailed program to enhance one’s chances (along with the caveat that even following her advice to the letter is no guarantee) of securing a coveted tenure track position.  There is even a chapter expressly entitled “Why ‘Yourself’ is the Last Person You Should Be.” Of course, there is the practical necessity of shedding the ways of graduate student-hood and demonstrating that you are worthy of joining the scholarship ranks. Just like in the non-academic job search literature, Dr. Kelsky admonishes the seeker to adopt a “professional persona.” This involves more than just a research and teaching agenda, but also a “steely-eyed grasp of the needs of the actual hiring departments, which ultimately revolve, in the current market, around money.”

Toward the final chapters of The Professor is In, Dr. Kelsky suggests that, out of either choice or out of necessity, many seekers of tenure-track positions will eventually decide to “declare independence” and earn a living in free-lance and entrepreneurial pursuits. Dr. Kelsky laments that her own time in academia was consumed by the “principle of external validation.” This is a condition in which one’s only value as an academic (and possibly even as a human being) is based entirely on the judgment and approval of those higher up the food chain. Dr. Kelsky is not surprised that, “the young of the profession are so servile.” Maybe it is the result of all those years as an adjunct. I’m sure there are studies about how people who are paid poverty wages and treated with disrespect at some point no longer even value themselves.

So there you have it. In order to have any kind of chance at decent employment (that is, anything that provides opportunity to fully use professional skills and education, pay that supports a middle class lifestyle, and conditions that are not unreasonably insecure and unpredictable), one must conform to the dictates of some impersonal “market.” Your own talent, skills, values, and even your own God-given mission are meaningless unless you convince some ivory tower Pooh-bah that your work will bring the department greater prestige (or funding). This market cares not whether what you actually do is compatible with your own personal values or even ultimately benefits society as a whole. We have created a world of work in which we are all fungible parts in the machinery of production, including the academics who are supposed to be the vanguards of new thinking and social change.

Your Dream Job as a Pooper Scooper

Published on by Brynne VanHettinga

dog-on-toilet Because I am perennially seeking paid work (to supplement my unpaid creative and critical work), I frequently receive emails with job listings. Most of these jobs are corporate, which I tend to ignore except for research purposes. That is, these announcements provide information about workplace trends, not only with respect to the jobs themselves but about how they are “marketed.”

There is a site that most job seekers are familiar with called Glass Door. While this site (like so many others) also tends to be corporate, it provides a valuable service by aggregating employee-provided inside information about companies. Glass Door provides much needed transparency about pay scales and diversity, but also more intangible things like corporate culture and opportunity, which are often effectively hidden from job seekers. Today, Glass Door sent an email alleging they had a list of “dream jobs.” These were not mere work-for-a-living jobs, but purportedly jobs that you could look forward to doing “with passion” every day. I followed the link to the list, and the jobs described were basically underwhelming. But the job described below got my attention:

Pet Caretaker, Thompsons Station, TN.  Turn your love of animals into a full-time job. Mars—the maker of candy bars and pet food including Pedigree, Whiskas and Iams— is looking for a caretaker to provide daily care for the pets within the MARS Petcare Feeding Facility including cleaning of the facilities and implementation of the environmental enrichment programs. Opened in 2014, The Pet Feeding Center houses 180 dogs, living in pairs in circular kennels and spend time playing together in the outdoor access areas. Up to 120 cats also live together inside the area, which features conservatory viewing areas and play areas. And yes, there are plenty of free Twix, Snickers and Skittles on site.

One of my pre-credential, young adult “survival” jobs was as an animal caretaker at a medical research laboratory. Job duties consisted of feeding the animals and cleaning their cages; i.e., you were a pooper scooper in a lab coat. I only lasted there two days. This was not so much because I was unwilling to handle shit, but when a group of rabbits (or, what was left of them) came back from an experiment, I could not handle that. The Doctor in charge of the lab was surprisingly sympathetic, stating “Not many people last here very long.”

I am generally not shocked at how language is used to deceive. It is the essence of all marketing messages. In the United States, some $6.7 billion a year is spent on marketing research. The goal of this research is to change behavior—that is, to get people to spend money on something they might not otherwise want or need—rather than improving products, processes and institutions to make our lives better. However, I WAS surprised that Glass Door—a paragon of transparency (as the name implies)—would describe pooper scooping as a “dream job.” Admittedly, the animals in the advertisement are used in pet food and not medical research, so the jobholder is not likely to encounter butchered bunnies.  But a “dream job”???  Was it because of the all-you-care-to-eat junk food? Work this job for too long and you will end up looking like the Good Year blimp and smelling like a barnyard. But…if you clap your hands loud and long enough and TRULY BELIEVE, it can be your dream job!

Psychologists (and now neuroscientists) have long recognized a process they term “rationalization.”  Rationalization happens when we are (in some way) forced to do something that conflicts with our core beliefs or inner values. Psychologists say we do this in order to avoid cognitive dissonance, or the mental conflict that occurs when our decisions or behavior is inconsistent with who we are and what we truly believe.

Rationalization is understandable at the level of the individual job-holder. Imagine that you have work skills and experience, as well as academic or professional credentials. If you (like many people) have difficulty finding appropriate work and money is running out, you take a job that neither pays for nor uses your highest skill level. Even if the job is doing little more than providing some social contact and keeping a roof over your head, you feel like you “should” be grateful for it. You also do not want to feel like a loser, because in today’s society, even being perceived as a loser is a certain career-killer. So…you rationalize how “good” the job is, maybe even exaggerating its benefits and complexities…even if only to yourself. At some point (according to psycho-science), you actually begin to believe your own rationalizations.

While this rationalization process—as perverted as it is—is understandable at the individual level, it becomes even more problematical at the societal level. Over the course of time, all of us begin to forget what a good job even looks like and what work should really be about. How we describe who we are and what we do becomes more about hype, spin, and the creation of image rather than substance. Taken to extremes, we collectively disconnect from reality. In the words of George Orwell, “War is peace. Freedom is slavery.  Ignorance is strength.”

As a perennial job-seeker, I am familiar with data supporting the improbability of being selected through mass advertised job openings and applicant tracking algorithms. In a world where there are many more job seekers than jobs (including those who already have jobs they are not happy about), the “system” is set up to operate as a screening and a sorting device to eliminate candidates. Indeed, some job-search gurus advise serious job seekers to avoid applying through these systems altogether. So, when you see some jobs being over-hyped and touted as “dream jobs,” your first reaction should be one of suspicion. If you (like me) are proficient in the art of critical thinking, most of the time you will be able to read between the lines to find the truth. If not, then simply remember the old adage, “If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.”