The “You may be jobless but you are not worthless” fairy dust

Another “motivational quote” on LinkedIn which, although positive and true in essence, ignores the brutal reality of the job market’s nurtured failures

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Quotes like these are numerous on LinkedIn or other social media platforms. Many look true even if sounding a bit like discovering that the water is wet. In fact, one will hardly witness these quotes in practice – the reality is far from ideal, actually very different.

These quotes are like fairy dust, that exist for the time people read and enjoy them, but get immediately forgotten like these dreams after waking up in the morning.

“Do as I say, not as I do”, teaches us the hypocrite.

Actually, there is more to it than hypocrisy: a deepening gap between talking and doing.

A deepening gap between talking and doing

I wrote this blog to share with the reader just one real-life example I witnessed among other rhetorical fallacies impacting the quality of business activities and their recruitments.

Some time ago I was talking to a Head of who kept on lamenting how a person they approached for a role was capricious about benefits before accepting the job offer.

I asked him why wasting his and the business’s time given the urgency of the recruitment, as there are so many people available and skilled on the job market to choose from.

He replied with gravitas and a most patronising tone ending with a note of pity, that unemployed people are “rubbish” because otherwise they would be employed.

Obviously, how one can dare not know this!?

I heard such high-flying judgments from many ‘hiring experts’, actually, and more precisely from mindsets often finding themselves out of nowhere elevated to positions where they will decide about others’ lives and future.

It is even more baffling to hear such logic when applied by people who have never really worked in their lives but got established as able to say everything about anybody’s ability to fit any position.

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Unemployed people are “rubbish” because otherwise they would be employed, a hiring manager.

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A logic not found in the priorities of Equality and Inclusiveness agendas

Such dangerous reasoning doesn’t seem to be really of concern to the inclusion, equality and non-discrimination ambient rhetoric, though.

However, it is being pushed on many applicants by rejecting their applications, which contributes to creating an ’employment gap’ that some recruiters and employers, quite sadistically or by stupidity I would prefer to believe, ask people to justify. In a similar observation, the job market doesn’t seem to valorise CPD or volunteering ‘coz it’s not commercial experience’.

The UK succeeded in 2012 with astonishing Olympic Games delivery thanks to 70,000 volunteers. According to NCVO, in 2018-2019, more than 19.4 million people volunteered through a group, club or organisation. The recurrent silos of recruitment arrogance negating volunteers’ competencies and experiences are an insult and damage to the society and economy.

For one of many hiring dogmas looks like unless you drive a bike even when you sleep, should you stop at any time makes you lose your skill and triggers the demand to learn it all over. How handy (and brave) to demote people’s value as a starting point of salary negotiations?

It may look indeed easier to pressurise the weak in need and lackeying the strong and wealthy.

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While there is still no vaccine against stupidity, both candidates and businesses lose a lot with wrong recruitment logic.

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The outcome of such job market inefficiencies is that certain mediocrity in employment tends to be better valued than willing and ready-to-work, and up-to-speed people.

While there is no vaccine against stupidity, both candidates and businesses lose a lot with wrong logic.

And by reproducing itself over and over, this logic leads businesses and the quality of their recruitments to degenerate towards what the philosopher Alain Deneault coined ‘mediocracy’, where people’s value is rather only worth something if it ticks the box of the “politics of the extreme centre.”. A stimulating reading we highly recommend.

At reason, when looking to work with people or recruiting them for clients, we only focus on experience, qualifications, and (transferable) skills. A breath of fresh air, we believe, in the so opinionated and all-knowing better recruitment/hiring industry.

Businesses deserve the right people and proper rules to achieve their market strategies

These wannabe motivational/inspirational quotes are taken by many people for mantras, magic spells thrown at the face of the world. It is comparable to the lost people on a deserted island throwing bottles with messages in the sea, believing and hoping that someone will find and read these and help – adhere to the mantra and give them a hand, or reflect upon their everyday actions and shift a bit towards more of ‘doing better’.

They get answers, i.e. ‘digital help’: Likes, sometimes even comments. 

Businesses deserve the right help and support, people and the right recruitment rules to achieve their market strategies: all types of snake oil solutions and black magic mindsets should be prevented from interfering between them and candidates.

This is not such a high price to pay (actually, to save) to shift business performance, isn’t it? 

In the end, agendas may be the good-looking talks for now and the short term, but in the long term, the right knowledge and actions, your Praxis, are what will bring justice and a healthy business culture (including Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability).

Reason will design the right Praxis, with you and for you, towards more business excellence. 

Get in touch.

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