While I am on the subject of the strange and inscrutable nature of the job market and interviews these days, I have more to add. To me and judging from a lot of others I have heard from over the years, nothing makes sense anymore. At least, it doesn� t make sense on the superficial and traditional wisdom forms, but in the depths of the dark side of the job market what otherwise seems to have no logical purpose, but it actually does on a hidden and nefarious level. You just need to know what to recognize.
First let me delve into some of the double speak and terminology thrown our way. One which has become hackneyed is “Overqualified”. If that isn’t an oxymoron then there is no such thing. How do you become overqualified? Alright, I will grant one point on this to the extent that if you hold a Ph.D. in subatomic physics you would be overqualified for a job as toll clerk, washroom attendant, cashier, or some unskilled labor title as those, but for anything in education, research and development, science public policy, or anything along those lines would be appropriate. What they really mean when employers and management uses such terms, is that your education and/or experience level puts you in a bracket where they’d have to pay you more than they are willing to pay since they’d rather have a much younger and less experienced person because they can pay them much less. So let’s make no mistake about it, this is nothing more than double-speak for age discrimination.
It does remind me of a very sad incident I personally witnessed twenty years ago while listening to a radio call in program. A despondent man called in to say that he was parked overlooking a hill that led to e precipice above the Long Island Sound and he was going to drive over the cliff and commit suicide. The source of his depression was that he had been out of work for something like two years. As he elaborated on his plight, he said that he had decades of experience in producing commercials and even won national awards for some of his work. His specialty was in pet food. He went on to say that what hurt most was that he kept being told that he was overqualified or qualified in an area different from their product. For instance, he had won awards for commercials about canned dog food and they said he only had experience in commercials about dry dog food.
This is enough to drive anyone into despondency but I have to say that this brand of maliciousness today ever more commonly results in what we now know as “going postal”.
At that juncture I began to commiserate with him because I had similar experiences to draw from. It is almost to the ridiculous point that if you are applying for a job as a renologist, they will turn you down on the grounds that most of your experience is on right kidneys and they are looking for a left kidney specialist.
Whenever I hear stories such as those I always tell the person that this is not the real reason they hire someone else because such examples indicate that these are convenient and accepted excuses to cover up that they have an underlying agenda at work. These days I have found that it almost always falls into two categories: 1. They either want or have to hire a friend or relative of someone of influence and the interview process is just a formality and forgone conclusion. It is no more than a matter of going through the motions. 2. They are under orders to hire someone with qualifications that will keep their expenses down. Ergo, someone less qualified.
It is as simple as that. Another tactic I have seen is that companies have an unwritten policy to hire people with no intent to keep them beyond their contract renewal time or their probationary period because it would cost them more money to keep them on the payroll. And to justify this I have seen the most bizarre and malicious (not to mention thinly veiled) maneuvering to place you in a no win position. These are usually forcing the employee to do work outside of their title or duties which they know they can’t possibly perform. Examples would be like compelling a site manager to sweep the floors or cut the lawn even though they have laborers who do that. Or asking them to do dangerous tasks such as handling toxic chemicals or moving heavy objects without any help. I knew of a case when a small lady was required to move bags of cement from one side of the room to another and get it done within a short time frame. These are sure fire bets that they are looking for a reason to get rid of you. Their greatest hope is for you to lose your composure and become belligerent or at least insubordinate which also is their goal since you would be giving them the justification they need to terminate you.
On the point of highly educated people, I need to expand on how this actually limits people. Some years ago the Wall Street Journal ran an article about the unemployment rate of Ph.D.’s. It said that it stood at 50% and was due to the fact that there are just so many teaching jobs available and just so many jobs in research, and for everything else you are “overqualified”. I have known numerous people who were in this position and instead of being a homeless “doctor” they downplayed their education level and went for much lower functioning jobs. I have even know of doctoral level people who find themselves in their forties with no sign of a career tract job in their future and they give up and become bar tenders and even a garbage truck driver in one instance.
The last thing I want to explore today is the useless and most often totally incomprehensible “follow up interview”. This is when you have an interview, then they call you back and invite you back again for yet another interview. I have heard of cases of four and five follow up interviews. When it reaches this extreme I become speechless and can only mutter to myself, “What is the purpose of this”?
One has to ask what is there to ask in a second, third, or more interviews that they didn’t ask in the first, or second, or third for that matter? I again have to say that they have another purpose than to gain greater information from you to declare you as being qualified for the job. They are under some sort of pressure to reach a foregone conclusion but on the other hand, they have to be careful to cover their tracks so as to prevent grievances and lawsuits, so they have to grind away at you in the hopes that you will get worn down and decline the job or that you will divulge something that they can use against you so that they can remove you from the “short list”. This can be something as silly and intangible as taking to long to answer or that your attitude changed – which is totally understandable for you to become annoyed after you have invested so much time and effort into this and still see no sign that you will get the job. But you have just provided them with the ammunition they sought.
On the topic of follow up interviews I can’t end without sharing something nothing short of bizarre which I and others have experienced. This is the second interview who sole purpose was to tell you that you didn’t get the job. I will never forget the first time this happened to me and I was not only totally flummoxed by it, but angry because I had used two personal leave days to attend the interview in good faith only to find that I had wasted them because my “opponents” – and I use the term advisedly – had not acted in good faith. This was a total waste of not only my time but theirs too. So does that make any sense? Of course not and after so long of witnessing human idiocy why should I be surprised?