Dueling Conundrums: Existential, Institutional
“An ‘unemployed’ existence is a worse negation of life than death itself.” – Jose Ortega y Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses, 1930 1
The unemployment rate is 9.2 percent and flat. A few jobs are changing hands, but a paltry number of new jobs is emerging. In the quiet and forgotten arenas of the unemployed there are all kinds of people: n00bz like me, specialists, generalists, the indefatigably loyal, the tirelessly disloyal, careerists, altruists, micromanagers, macromanagers, the fastidiously ethical, petty Eichmanns, the imaginative, the uptight, rule-breakers, innovators, former or future members of the creative class, the incessantly polite, the well-bred and good-mannered, the sociable, the neurotic, rugs that hold the whole room together, natural accounts men, women of substance, the sharply dressed, the sloppy, level-182 wizards, level-6 thieves, bookworms, adrenaline junkies, snooty hipsters, supplicants, heroic entrepreneurs, pot-bellied boomers, the idiosyncratically tattooed, those who are so unobtrusive they might as well not exist from an employer’s perspective, peacemakers and gladiators. Some of these people are waiting to be shuffled into the right job by the invisible Sorting Hat of the market. They believe in the Great American Meritocracy even though this belief strikes against their self-worth.
Belief in meritocracy is part of our culture: it is fundamentally American – that fair, can-do antithesis to the ancien régime we tell ourselves exists in the rest of the world. Belief in meritocracy fosters the hope that we’ll get our just deserts: soon enough we’ll interview and be hired for that perfect job, and finally we’ll have something worthy towards which to direct our worldly efforts. But we think about it a bit, and soon we realize that we’re the ones who lost our jobs to begin with. If the meritocracy exists, we were rejected by it: the bottom 9.2 percent. And so the plight of the unemployed person collapses to either self-loathing or cynicism.
It would have been easy for me to choose cynicism. The self-loathing conundrum passed me over: it was an act of God that rendered me unemployed. Here in America, I am a pilgrim in purgatory, materializing in the middle of things and forced to conclude that luck is often the dominant factor in the success or failure of an individual. From what I’ve seen, there is little evidence to support the existence of a meritocracy. If the Great American Meritocracy ever existed, it’s long since collapsed under the weight of more than 14,000,000 unemployed Americans.
Contrary to their promise, globalization and information technologies have made coordinating qualified people and suitable jobs even more challenging: as soon as a job anywhere is posted, 1000 resumes from the U.S., 1000 resumes from the Philippines, and 1000 resumes from India are sent in electronically. Much of this is spam or its effective equivalent: generalized kluges of keywords that have little to do with the actual position they’re carpet bombing. These resumes come from the uber-cynics: people who have given up on or spurned the meritocratic procedures of judiciously writing cover letters and diligently customizing resumes to specific positions. They have no idea where the Predator is, so they’re just firing blindly into the jungle.
And so these two conundrums – existential and institutional – feed off each other: the existential foments the institutional, and the institutional in turn catalyzes the existential. It’s easy to get caught in the current of it all.
One of my real-life friends (as opposed to the fictitious friends of my last entry in this series) emailed me a couple months ago when my job search was in a different phase entirely:
Job applications are an exercise in humility and perseverance. Congrats on getting 17 apps done! It can certainly be depressing. You should set a goal of applying to 100-200 jobs in order to a) get an offer; b) like the offer; and c) get your mind off who happens to not be calling you for an interview. That sounds terrible, but I think it’s realistic these days. Quantity is the ticket. Not only do you have to compete with unemployed advanced degree holders but you also have to compete with annoying people who already have good jobs and spend a little time every Saturday applying to even better ones.
When 2008 happened, human resources was the first sector to get hit with massive layoffs. Once it’s apparent a recession is upon us and there will be no new hiring for some time, (perhaps ironically) people in charge of hiring are let go. HR doesn’t start expanding again until it’s clear the economy as a whole is expanding. So the labor market of 2011 has invented several shortcuts for one hiring manager and two junior assistants to sort through 10,000 resumes. The most common shortcut seems to be to organize resumes in a database by keyword. If the job calls for knowledge of WordPress, only resumes with the word “WordPress” on them will be looked at. The main problem with this strategy is that it tends to reward people who game the system (in all forms a pet peeve of mine). And WordPress can be learned by someone who’s reasonably bright otherwise in ten minutes.
The second way2 for two HR folks to get through 50,000 resumes is to establish some relevant or arbitrary requirement and put it in fine print in the job description (or not). If the requirement is not satisfied, this is indicative of sloppiness or unserious or poor attitude or psychopathy or some other trait that marks the applicant as unfit for employment at Company X. The main problem with this method is that there are lots of legitimate reasons why an applicant may not be aware of the requirement; this strategy also tends to elevate the requirement from mere shibboleth to universal end in itself. This may go a long way towards explaining some of the more ridiculous advice I’ve received:
“Make sure not to put two spaces after periods because all the leading style guides call for only one space, and anyone who sees that there are two spaces after each period will immediately throw out your resume.” / “Don’t use bullet points in your resume. That went out like four years ago. People will think you don’t pay attention to details and don’t care about what your peers are doing, which makes you unattractive.” / “You really need to use the term ‘leader’ three or four times in your resume and twice or more in your cover letter if you want to get a job.” / “Make sure you have a good head-shot of you smiling and keep it with you at all times to give to people you meet along with a copy of your resume.” / “Definitely put two spaces after periods because one space means you consider your manuscript to be fit for publication and this comes off as more than a bit presumptuous.” / “Employers do care about skills and experience, but ‘the culture’ is more important. In Asia, it’s all about maintaining a reputation for professionalism. In Germany they care more about results. In America, landing a job is all about ‘the culture’.”
It’s easy to dismiss such petty pedantry as nothing more than the full expression of the genuinely held beliefs of unwitting idolaters in widespread and perfidious cargo cults of the trivial. Yet, Americans tend to be absolutely certain about things we know nothing about, from driving directions to politics to advice for getting a job – to the point of self-contradiction. To admit to ignorance or fail to stake out a clear position is perhaps to call one’s own seriousness into question. Fear may be the real motivating factor behind the concretions of a long non-existent meritocracy vis-à-vis cover letters, resumes, formatting, formalisms, formalities, et al. which I abstracted in the preceding paragraph, yet some of it has actually turned out to be good advice, particularly the last bit (if I could only figure out what it means).
Despite clear institutional failures, I have no choice but to fight creeping cynicism: I remain convinced that some discernible pattern exists. Perhaps the whole point is that – like hordes of barbarians ravaging decadent Byzantium, Woodstock supplanting the waltz of the Hapsburg Court, the Internet’s meteoric strike against the dinosaurs of print journalism – there are “new”, outside-the-box, and boorish methods which one must employ to master the jobs market.
…
1 This quotation is often taken out of context. Here it is in its entirety:
“The whole world – nations and individuals – is demoralized. For a time this demoralization rather amuses people, and even causes a vague illusion. The lower ranks think that a weight has been lifted off them. Decalogues retain from the time they were written on stone or bronze their character of heaviness. The etymology of command conveys the notion of putting a load into someone’s hands. He who commands cannot help being a bore. Lower ranks the world over are tired of being ordered and commanded, and with holiday air take advantage of a period freed from burdensome imperatives. But the holiday does not last long. Without commandments, obliging us to live after a certain fashion, our existence is that of the “unemployed.” This is the terrible spiritual situation in which the best youth of the world finds itself today. By dint of feeling itself free, exempt from restrictions, it feels itself empty. An “unemployed” existence is a worse negation of life than death itself. Because to live means to have something definite to do – a mission to fulfill – and in the measure in which we avoid setting our life to something, we make it empty. Before long there will be heard throughout the planet a formidable cry, rising like the howling of innumerable dogs to the stars, asking for someone or something to take command, to impose an occupation, a duty. This for those people who, with the thoughtlessness of children, announce to us that Europe is no longer in command.”
2 If a hiring manager believes in meritocracy, the third way to cut down applications to a manageable number is to not consider the unemployed. There are other ways as well.
Terrifying post, and thus awsome.Report
Thanks, North.Report
I find the truth of “it only take one” both terrifying and reassuring. It’s a numbers game, but that means it is just a process. You could get “lucky” and get a job you like after only 20-30 applications; or it could take 200-300… If my eventual (I’m in grad school) job search turns into a war of attrition, then I’m just glad to be an excellent waiter. No shame in making money until you find a “real” job.Report
There’s certainly no shame in being a waiter.Report
I can’t believe I missed this post!
You sort of mentioned, but kind of stepped through one of the requirements that some articles have been written on recently, which is “we will only hire people that are currently employed.” It’s a requirement I find aggravating, but that I can’t argue the sense of. Sure, you’re going to overlook some great candidates, but there are enough of those to go around and you’ll also weed out more worthless ones. It’s a better method than most, but from a social productivity standpoint, very problematic. You pick off someone and suddenly the other company has to replace someone. They pick off someone and suddenly they need to replace someone. Meanwhile, there are a lot of people who are further and further out from having meaningful experience.
One of the results of all of this I think is that networks are more important now than ever. It seems that more jobs are going unposted. Or they’ll put something on their website and nowhere else.
Strangely enough, I visited my home city a few weeks ago and got to hear the other side of things. Over and over, I found myself talking to employers who couldn’t find people to staff their job openings. I was stunned. I’m not going to go into all of the conversations I had*, but four different companies in a couple of cities were either having trouble finding someone or were hemorrhaging people (who either found other jobs or felt confident enough in finding one that they would just up and quit due to a corporate culture clash).
I wrote a post on the bizarre experience (http://hitcoffee.net/index.php/file/2794). “Colosse” is the fictitious name I give the city. Notably, the first comment comes from someone in a different part of the country with similar problems at his employer. I guess it’s an IT thing, or maybe a “Colosse” one. And yet… it’s just antithetical to so much that I hear and read about (even involving IT).
Another thing I’ve noticed is how more and more employers are leaning on contracting jobs. My last “real” job was a contracting job and my current semi-job is a couple layers of contracting (contracted to one company who contracted to another). My contractor at my last job contracted their benefits to another company, who contracted COBRA to yet another. It seems to me that there’s a whole lot of “we want the job done, but don’t want to mess with any of the details” doing on, as well as a lot of “we don’t want to be on any sort of hook if things don’t work out.” In addition to not wanting to hire, I think there’s a particular aversion to commitment. Labor flexibility, writ gigantic.
Sorry for the long and meandering response. You touched on some issues that I have been pondering and thinking of posting about (or already did) for a while.Report
Thanks for the link. I enjoyed your post. That’s a good Megan McArdle piece as well that you linked to.
You’ve touched on a lot of the topics I plan on covering in detail later in this series – particularly the subcontracting phenomenon, and this comment definitely deserves a post-length response.
I was thinking of writing something about Richard Florida. In the past, I’ve run hot and cold on Florida, but I’ve never really questioned his underlying assumptions. I’ve been outside the U.S. for the last five years, and before that, I was at a collegiate enclave, so I’ve never really seen the “creative class” in action. Now that I’m here I don’t think the creative class exists.
I agree with you that not considering the unemployed is rational from an employer’s perspective, as much as it tends to foster the creation of a permanent underclass. Even if jobs and job-seekers coordinate on a non-meritocratic, totally random basis, there are so many applicants and only a limited amount of company resources to consider applications that employers can afford to just throw away broad classes of people arbitrarily. It seems a true reduction in the unemployment rate has to come from outside the system (i.e. government) or from the unemployed themselves (entrepreneurship).Report
I thought the McArdle’s piece was just fantastic. Especially about the psychological toll of being unemployed. It really resonated.
I’ve almost always disliked R. Florida’s thesis and his support for it. At base, it’s obvious (“white collar workers are good for a city”), but as he expands on it, the data doesn’t support his thesis (Portland does everything he says a city should do, and yet doesn’t meet his criteria for success). Oh, I can go on and on about this subject. So, moving along…
If enough companies were to start hiring enough people, I think that eventually it would reach down to the point that the unemployed would get their shot. But those unemployed for a while… that’s tougher. It would require a really tight job market. One we’re unlikely to see for some time. It’s not the most pressing concern, but it would be vexing even in the event of a jobs recovery.
I am typically mistrustful of targeted tax breaks, but I thought McArdle had what seems to be a decent suggestion to confront a real problem (http://bit.ly/nY4sfI). This seems to be a problem where the market clashes with social good. Any thoughts?Report
“I visited my home city a few weeks ago and got to hear the other side of things. Over and over, I found myself talking to employers who couldn’t find people to staff their job openings.”
If I lost my job here in (city), then I need to find another job here in (city). Because this is where my house is, and there’s no way I’m going to be able to sell this place. There might be umpteen zillions of jobs available in (anywhere else), but if I go to them then I’ll never own anything again that I don’t pay for in cash up front, because I’ll have defaulted on the loan for this house.
So that job better pay damn well. That better be the best job in the universe, and I better stay there forever, because there are people who’ll consider me a moral failure if I do what’s necessary to take it.Report
Duck, no doubt. A lot of people are tied down to where they live. Moving for a job is risky. I’d be hesitant to do it even if I didn’t have a mortgage (which I don’t) or a wife whose job won’t let her move (which I do). I might if I were desperate and didn’t have either of those things. But it would probably be a last resort, if I’d set down any kind of roots where I am.Report
But there are also people who consider you a moral failure if you don’t do what’s necessary to take it.Report
I’d suggest that you’d be hard-pressed to find a Democrat who genuinely considered it a moral weakness that someone couldn’t find a job near their home and went on welfare (unless, y’know, they live in a suburb or something like that.)
On the other hand, both sides will say that a person who defaulted on a home loan is a bastard.Report
CC:
I am really liking this series you started on unemployment. I know that it’s using your micro experience to examine macro issues, and so I’m pretty sure I am about to dive into places I have no need (or right) diving into, but just in case…
Regarding your own job hunt: This is the second post where you’ve talked about frustrations with the process surrounding documents (i.e.: job postings, resumes, applications, etc.)
Do mind if I ask if this is how you’ve been looking for work? If so, I’d like to be the 7 millionth person to offer some advice. Most of the companies I work with don’t do any actual hiring using these systems, even those that have “mandatory” systems on the books saying they do.
Have you considered trying either a networking or informational interviewing approach, or both? You might find it more productive than the numbers game resume & job app approach.
(Apologies if you have already gone down this road, or if I am sticking my nose in too far.)Report
Nope, not at all. I have tried those approaches, and I plan on covering that a bit later on in the series, but it’s taken me this long to realize that the cover letter > resume > interview > job model just doesn’t exist anymore no matter how much I may want it to or believe in it.
The problem is as described above – the existential-institutional tornado that creates too much noise for the old model to function. Will Truman described how companies are feeling similar frustration that they can’t find people. It’s largely because there’s so much noise separating jobs and job-seekers, and it’s just getting noisier.
I’m glad you brought up that most companies don’t hire based on the old system even if they pretend they do. I find this practice disgusting. I’ve heard through the grapevine (but have yet to formally research) that here in Massachusetts there is a LAW on the books that all positions must be advertised in a public forum and “remain open” to all applicants.
I could write an entire post on that law (if it exists) and all the negative effects it has on the jobs market and how it’s indicative of the kind of quixotic liberalism that ignores economic realities, etc.: how many of the 70+ resumes I’ve sent out went to jobs that were never even available? How much earlier could I have realized that nepotism is the only way to get a job? Two months ago? Three?
Also, I don’t really feel embarrassed or depressed because I’m unemployed since I can easily rationalize away any personal responsibility for this (minus “karma” or any other magical explanations). I’m lucky that I don’t have to be bitter about this whole thing. I’m more just observing an absurdly broken system and writing about it.
So anyways, please don’t feel like you’re sticking your nose in too far.Report
I’m glad you brought up that most companies don’t hire based on the old system even if they pretend they do. I find this practice disgusting. I’ve heard through the grapevine (but have yet to formally research) that here in Massachusetts there is a LAW on the books that all positions must be advertised in a public forum and “remain open” to all applicants.
I can’t speak for Massachusetts, but I know that it is common in government to put up public postings when everyone knows who the hiree is going to be. Maybe not for every job, but for a lot of them. My father’s replacement quit after a month and they had decided to hire the runner-up from the previous interview process. But they had to wait for 14 days after the initial job posting.
There is also my alma mater, a state university, that had to do a public job posting for Head Football Coach. This is a Division I-A school. They weren’t going to find their guy in a newspaper ad. Even if they’d found their guy the day after, they wouldn’t have been able to hire them for 10 days (I think).Report
This place is crazy.Report