TatumIt’s as if our CVs suggest that we’re all bilingual, just not in the ‘ideal candidate’ sense. That is – we’re all individuals, yet what we write about ourselves in the modern day suggests otherwise. So how can that coined recruitment device – of ‘other applicants better suited to the role’ – find its way into the email inboxes of so many jobseekers? Just who are these eligible candidates, and are we really to believe that they have the full, ‘original’ package?
Clearly some foreign body is imparted to us all. At first, we learn repeatedly early on in school the importance of goals and we begin to understand our own desperations to attain them. At a later date, the inevitable presentation will take place. We’ve all made at least one. And the longer we stick out the education business the more we’re forced into making slideshow roadshows about topics that don’t excite us, nor remotely interest us. Our preparation is honed, contrived, and eventually turned into lies. Once students are allowed to mark one another’s’ ‘performance’, with the teacher relinquishing the power, an egotism of falseness starts to be indoctrinated.
In adult years, we become more conscious of the psychology in television. Indeed, it’s hard to find a redundant camera shot on X Factor. Every shot is ‘moody’, as every image devised goes a way to putting layers back on the onion, as it were – from the ‘showbiz’ make-up interludes, to god-worshipping the judges as if they’re Zeus’ council. The premise itself, of finding a superstar from the horde of ‘deluded’ masses, is as regulated as the Botox Fairy’s annual trip to the judges’ faces. It seems as if everyone has that subconscious desire to be the prom royalty, it’s just that with some the desire is more pungent than with others.
That ‘judge’ ideology has really hit the business sector in recent years, as recruitment has paved the way in helping – or forcing – the cleverest people to lie better. So-called ‘buzzwords’ are tallied by computer programmes, as traditional job requirements fall into obscurity to be replaced by pseudo-qualifications and fallacies that defy common sense – who needs a driver’s license to work in admin? Perhaps recruitment agencies are as much the result of a manmade problem as e-cigarettes; but either way, this newfound middle-management charges a price for your success. If you can’t beat them, join them. That’s if you don’t mind being recruited by them in the first place.