Employment Cognitive Dissonance

 A week or so ago, an agency phoned me out of the blue. The recruiter was very young sounding. She told me that she’d found my CV and had a role that I fitted perfectly. I thought: Ok you are crafting and writing but if a job comes up you should at least be open to the path of least resistance, and deal with writing in the evenings and weekends.

 In recent years, on a fairly relaxed trajectory after years working in the City of London, I’ve been doing Order Processing and Estimating. It is quite complex; it involves breaking down often complex data and or information to single items you can make; and then putting those bits together to make something else. You need to be logical, pragmatic, to be able to spot errors, potential crashes between `made things’ once assembled, and take account of fire and building regulations. At the high end of order processing, you need to be a graduate with an engineering degree. Fundamentally, it is a technical role with a lot of responsibility, a high attention to detail, technical drawing, and the pulling together of many strings, while simultaneously breaking those things down to single components … while not losing sight of the whole ... or the expected delivery date. Aside from the above, you also need to cost and purchase materials to do the jobs, produce assembly information, manage production operative and assembly operative expectations, produce certification, and manage your own administration and filing blah blah blah.

 Back to the plot. Young lady calls, full of enthusiasm and buzzwords. The Order-Processing job she has, is basically taking orders over the phone for domestic `built’ products (too secret to elaborate over the phone to a potential candidate). It is almost a forty-five-minute drive away across country, and it’s only paying £19500 per annum.

Very gently I explained the form of Order-Processing I do, and my level of technicality given my IT background and other experience. I had to draw her attention to my CV several times, proving that she hadn’t even read it (not even the summary). I was starting at this point to seethe, but I thought once I’ve explained things she will have a better understanding of me and what I’d be interested in if something else comes up. And clearly by filling in a few blanks for her, maybe she will be able to extrapolate later, and be able to find better candidates without wasting time talking to all and sundry. I explained that forty-five minutes away across country (country lanes) is hard to justify for the money offered, the hours expected, the start and finish times and the expectation that you would be required to do ad-hoc overtime with little or no warning. I also explained my salary expectations, based on a combination of age, skills and experience and that I would have to decline any further contemplation of the role (I didn’t say contemplation … but you get what I mean).

Her response verbatim was `but you have everything they need’. There was an awkward silence from me as realised I was literally talking to a brick wall, she said `Oh Ok’ and then she hung up.

 For some reason, those words: `but you have everything they need’, keep coming back to mind. This child has been given privileged access to peoples working history, their futures, their now’s, but seems to be totally blind to anything other than what she/the-client wants; and equated my skill set as a perfect match and an easy win for her (I’m assuming based on a job title), without any consideration for any of the variables on my side of the employment equation. And genuinely didn’t seem to understand why it was a `no’ from me.

 I wonder as we come out of the shadow of the pandemic and ride the subsequent economic recovery; how much it will be forestalled by this absence of empathy, understanding, experience, humanity, common sense and the ability to articulate and investigate. Recruitment gets a bad rap, often deservedly so, and yet it is a fundamental interface layer between many employers and many employees.

 I think my question is: Does recruitment understand its role in Other-peoples lives?

 From poorly worded moon-on-a-stick job descriptions to the homogonous buzzword bingo job descriptions that tell you nothing. Job descriptions that dissuade you from applying just because you genuinely don’t have a clue from the information presented what you will be doing, other than what seems to everything for very little.

 I appreciate that is a useful tool to reduce chaff in the sift process. However, when you see the same roles constantly being re-advertised, you have to ask: Who is applying? Is anyone applying? Is the job description so opaque people aren’t applying? Or so open to interpretation that the wrong people are applying? And or is there a huge amount of churn, because you are constantly recruiting the wrong fit for the reasons above?

 My gut instinct says it’s a combination of all these things (Iced with a resurgent post-recession minimum wage culture). And yet, there are millions out of work, the economy is in growth and opening up.

 I’ll append a Wikipedia link to the definition of Cognitive Dissonance below. It’s interesting, because I seem to be suffering from it, from an immediate observational perspective. However, if I step back and look from distance, the dissonance is in systems. And if that is correct, that’s probably a lot worse.

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance