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.