Compensating job-seekers

I came across an article that suggested that job seekers should be compensated for time spent in, and preparing for, job interviews.  I sympathize with the idea, although I see several problems.

I have always been somewhat annoyed that the time, work, and expenses associated with job seeking, are not compensated in any way.  You can write off the costs of moving, on your taxes, if you have to move to take up a new job.  But you cannot write off the costs of printing, photocopying, postage, envelopes, and other costs associated with looking for a job.  (You can tell that I have been at this a long time, since envelopes, postage, and photocopying aren't usual in today's job searches.  You're much more likely to just post your resume on LinkeDin, and get busy posting stuff on social media so that you get noticed.)

I have, probably, more experience than most in terms of job seeking.  My career history is not one of those where you start with one company, right out of high school (or sometimes even before you finish high school), and then spend the next forty or fifty years with the same company.  No, my career history is not so much chequered, as plaid.  I have never had a long-term job (other than a bunch of the volunteer work that I've done).  I'm not sure that I have ever had a job longer than two years at a stretch.  (Well, OK, I worked at the same hospital for four years, but that was when I was putting myself through uni.  Even at that I was flipping from situation to situation.  And, yes, I did seminars for the same outfit for over a decade, but that was on a kind of contract basis, in competition with a number of others.)  No, I have had to apply for lots of jobs, and, for the past thirty years, an awful lot of my work has been on a contract basis.

So, I have searched for, written resumes and letters to, and interviewed for, a very, very large number of jobs.  Even while I have been a contractor and consultant, I have been submitting applications for regular full-time work.  An awful lot of my friends think that I'm really lucky to have been a consultant and a contractor, and want my advice on how to get into the field.  I keep on telling them, you don't want to do this.  I never wanted to do this.  I'm basically a nine to five mentality person.  I don't like not having a regular paycheque.  I don't like all the sales work, marketing and promoting yourself, that goes into being a consultant, or a contractor.  (Which does relate to this issue of being paid for looking for work.)

Yes, I know, full well, that looking for a job is an awful lot of work.  Looking for a job is just as much work as actually having a job.  In fact, I would say that looking for a job is even harder work than actually having a job.  There is no one to tell you when to stop.  There is no one to tell you when your day is over.  There is no one to say that it's time to take a break, or have lunch, or that you have done enough for the day.  So, an awful lot of the time, you just work until you are exhausted.  And then you work in an exhausted state, which is very ineffective and probably doesn't do you any good in terms of actually finding a job, and certainly just exhausts you so that you are low on resources, and unready, when a real opportunity does come along.  Yes, looking for a job is a lot of work, and very hard work indeed.

There are, of course, other factors involved.  There are the expenses related to job searching, that I mentioned earlier.  There is the fact that you are always looking for opportunities contacts, possibilities, and openings.  You are always pushing yourself, promoting yourself, selling yourself, marketing yourself, and always looking for opportunities for yourself.  It is a very selfish and self-centered style of activity.  It has to be, in order to work.  But it's not attractive.  Other people don't like it.  You always run the risk of offending people.  And you really can't tell in advance what is going to offend people.  I don't like doing it, but I have been forced to do it, many times over many years.  I have been pushed to do it, I have been told to do it, lots of people who are telling me how I should run my business are constantly agitating for me to do more of it.  But it's not an attractive activity or personality trait, and I really don't like doing it, and wish it wasn't always seen as so very necessary.

So, yes, I sympathize with the position that job seekers should be compensated in some way, for the activities that they have to undertake when searching for a job.  But, there are some problems.

The work involved in finding a job, when you are looking for one, varies tremendously.  And it is a huge gamble.  Lots of people will give you lots of advice about how to go about finding a job.  All of these people are wrong.  Yes, I said all.  I remember going to a resume specialist at one point in my career.  At the time I had at least four resumes that I was sending out to various jobs, and I took two of them, which I considered to be the best, for him to look at.  He thought they were good.  He told me that both of them were about 98% correct.  I asked him how I am could improve them to 100%.  He said you can't.  He said certain things that you do to improve the attractiveness of a resume in one area, will make the resume less attractive in other ways.  And he was right.  That is why everybody who gives you advice about looking for a job is wrong.

Because you are dealing with people.  People are inconsistent.  People are irrational.  People are emotional.  Not always and in all ways, but very often, and in ways that you cannot foresee.  Over the years I have come to learn the look on the interviewer's face that says that the interview is over.  The time may not be up, and the interviewer may continue on with additional questions, depending on the process that they are using for interviewing (and over the years I have been through an awful lot of different processes in an awful lot of different interviews), but the interview is over, because the interviewer has decided that you aren't getting the job.  I know that it is something that I have said.  Sometimes I even know that it's a single word that I have said.  You can see the look in the face.  You can see the change in the eyes, the change in the posture, a slight stiffness in the conversation from then on.  As noted, sometimes I know it's a single word, and I'll even know which word.  I don't know why that particular word has triggered a negative reaction in the interviewer, but I know that it has, and I know that that reaction is enough that the interview is over: I don't get the job.  As noted, people are irrational.  And, because these reactions are not necessarily rational, there is no way to predict them in advance.  There is no way to guard against them.

But that is only one aspect of the gamble that is a major part of job seeking.  It isn't even the most important one.  Probably the most important one is that, much of the time, there really isn't much difference between you and the other candidates.  At one point in my career I was going to an awful lot of job interviews.  And, when the dreaded phone call came, informing me that I didn't get the job, the person conducting the interviews generally told me that, if it was any comfort, I was the second favorite candidate.  It wasn't much comfort.  After all, the important fact was that I didn't get the job.  And I think that the comment, that I was the second favorite candidate, was not merely a pro forma exercise.  The way the person delivered it was always quite sincere, and delivered with some feelings that this person was attempting to provide some level of encouragement and comfort for me in my continued job searching.  I knew that I was an attractive candidate.  I had a lot of experience, a lot of background, and a lot of knowledge.  They had just decided to go with someone else.

And the thing is, even when you're not the number two candidate, they're probably isn't an awful lot of difference between candidates one and five.  If you can even rank them that specifically.  I know that, in a number of cases when I have been on the other side of the table, actually doing the hiring, that there have been certain standout situations where one candidate was head and shoulders above the rest.  But, as I say, these are standard situations.  (In one that was particularly outstanding in my memory, the person to whom we wanted to offer the position, by the time we had done the necessary paperwork to offer her the position, already had a job with somebody else.)  But in most cases, after going through the resumes, short listing for telephone interviews, and then further shortlisting for actual in-person interviews, by the time you've got to that point, you know that you could hire any of these people.  It may be that something comes up in the interview to eliminate the candidate, but most of the time the options are crowded pretty close together.  So which one you choose, is a difficult choice.  Once you've made the choice, confirmation bias steps in, and you tend to find increasing reasons why you made the right choice, and that this person is the right person for the job.  But that's after the fact.  In totally objective terms, probably all of these people are very equivalent in terms of qualifications, and the possibilities that they will succeed in the job.  So which one you choose is a bit of a crapshoot.  So, when you're on the other side, looking for a job, whether you get chosen is a bit of a crapshoot.

And, if you are in the game long enough, looking for work, you get to realize this.  It's difficult to keep going, when you know that your chance of being hired for any given job is only partly based on your ability to do the job.  It's an awful lot based on random chance, and whether the interviewer had enough cream in his or her coffee that morning.

As previously noted, I have been through an awful lot of different interview processes in my time.  I have been through the fads and fashions that have swept the human resources industry over the decades.  I have been through hostile interviews.  I have been through group interviews.  I have been through active interviews.  I have been through sequential interviews, with multiple parties, that took an entire day, and sometimes even multiple days.  Recently I applied for a job in my primary field.  It promised rather extraordinarily high pay, and, in the job description, indicated that the grunt work of this particular field was being farmed out to other parties.  As they say with regard to online frauds, when something seems to good to be true, it probably is.  As I submitted my application, and then started to receive responses from the company, it became clear that this was a recent type of, well I hesitate to call it interview technique, because it's much closer to a outright fraud.  This is a process whereby the company gets you, as a candidate, to produce a fair amount of work, and sometimes even go to a fair amount of expense to yourself, in order to submit something to the company which they will then consider, to determine whether you are a suitable candidate for the job.  I very much doubt that they actually hire anyone for these particular jobs.  They are just taking the work that is produced, which is submitted to them for their consideration, at no cost to them, and using the fruits of that work in their business.  Therefore, what they are really doing, is getting people, who are looking for work, to do their work for them, for free.

So, there are various situations that you, as a job seeker, may encounter in your job search, and some of them are a lot more work than others.  Some of them are positively nasty.  So, how much work you have to put in, and how much you have to put up with, in order to apply for a given job, can very tremendously.  Therefore, any idea of compensation for job seekers is going to be immediately flawed.  Is there going to be a flat fee paid for whichever job you apply for?  The flat fee is definitely going to overfeed pay for a half hour job interview.  But it's going to underpay for a huge interview process that takes an entire week.  Are you going to pay by the hour?  If you are interviewing with an affable and enjoyable manager that's going to be free money.  If you are being dumped in front of somebody who has just discovered the hostile interview technique, well, nobody can pay enough per hour for that type of abuse.

And then there is all of the additional work that goes into looking for a job.  There is searching job boards, job listings, job centers, buying newspapers, finding out which social media platforms actually result in real job interviews, as opposed to being mere advertising platforms for sex workers.  Then there's finding out which social media platforms are most appropriate for your particular field of endeavor.

Then there's the actual reading, and parsing, of the job ads.  Figuring out from the phrases used, the description of the work, the percentage of actual information to filler buzz phrases, and, if at all possible, the salary listing, to find out whether this job is actually one that a you can do be they are likely to be actually hiring for, and determine whether you have a chance of obtaining said job.

Then there is the research that you are supposed to do into the company.  Trying to penetrate, and parse through, the layers of marketing that they put up on their website, in order to find out what they actually do, and how they actually work, and what type of culture is involved in the company.  You not only go to their official website, but you go to various sites that post reviews of companies, or businesses, and see what people feel about that business.  You try to weed out the promotional material that the company itself has had posted on these review sites under the pretense of being an unbiased review from a customer.  You find out from friends, and friends of friends, anyone who has worked for this particular company, and how they feel about it.  You find out from friends whether they know of any jobs that are going.  (And then, after some time, you find out which friends actually have useful information in regard to jobs, and which friends just like to present themselves as having lots and lots of contacts and knowing everything about everybody.)

And, of course, all of these things about paying compensation to job seekers, who are looking for job full-time jobs, are grossly unfair to those of us who are working as consultants and contractors.  Because absolutely nobody is going to pay us, in any way shape or form, for all of the excessive work that we have to do and looking for contracts, and consulting gigs.  Indeed, it is difficult to get companies to pay for the necessary administrative work, that you as a consultant, have to perform, in order to actually do the consulting or contracting work.  I have had all kinds of contracts, I submitted itemized bills, and I have often had the client either query the amount of time put into administration, or ask me to modify or rename the time put into administration, or redirect it to other areas of the itemized bill, or, sometimes, flatly refused to pay for any of the administrative time.  It's every bit as annoying as all the work that you have to put into doing job searching, and it gets recompensed just as little.