By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ As I bask in the luxurious serenity of profitable self-employment in the late autumn of my life, I have no reason to worry about succeeding at job interviews. But I am often asked how best to prepare for one. Now why would anyone ask me, you might wonder? Well, maybe they shouldn’t, but the reason they do is because as an American-born, thus native speaker, of English who teaches foreign ESL students both the ‘King’s English’ and that of the common thoroughfares, I seem to them like a good bet.
And indeed the internet is full of tips and videos and the like, including the most frequently asked questions. (1) Why did you leave (are you planning to leave) your last job?; (2) Why have you applied to our company, what can you bring to the table and can you ‘start the ground running’?; (3) Are you motivated, proactive, a self-starter etc.?; (4) Are you a Team Player?; (5) How do you resolve stress, manage disagreements with colleagues, and handle reprimands from hard bosses, etc? – and finally (6) What about ‘compensation’ (salary) requirements? (always the penultimate question, the last one being, “Do you have any questions?”) – and yes of course you do, but they are only to show you have done your homework. In fact you already know the answers.
If you are vetted in this game, you will be familiar with the buzzwords and phrases I have included. Most likely you have answered them yourself. I guess there are ultra-ultra cool companies that switch out and conduct interviews that leave orthodoxy in the sandbox, but mostly, I suspect, it’s been business as usual. The trick, I tell my career aspirants, is to bullshit without seeming to bullshit, which means to be sure and work in the self-starter-team-player blah blah without resorting to those exact numbing words. It’s a dead give away if you do. So work on the ‘concepts’ and spice up the language a bit. Try for fake spontaneity but don’t go off the deep end.
Well, you see, while without a doubt I am an individual committed not only to my own success but also – and perhaps foremost — to that of the Team, indeed the Company as a whole. I understand my role in the Group Dynamic (after all those Team Building weekends, how could I doubt it?) is to accept leadership responsibilities and seize the initiative in ways that lead us all both individually and as a progressive Unit, into the wider opportunities on the global stage.
Please excuse me while I choose between wanking and vomiting. But in the grey and rainy wonder world of phony self-promotion, why, really, can we blame the hapless, mendicant, imploring job-petitioners who see this for what it is: a deliberate abstraction? And if they lie and cheat, I mean, why should they be any more ethical than their Masters?. Truly they cannot, and in fairness how can we expect them to be? Their lies are the expected lies; their conclusions foretold, their proclamations the stuff of cabbage odors from the nearby market, and yet, it’s true, great armies arise from the patriotic fume of such odors.
O dear, people are so easily lied to and led. And so, bundles of weak mentality at hand, off we go to The Interview.
As for me, I always did extremely well at interviews. It was after I got the job that the wheels came off. But I interviewed well because I rather enjoyed being in front of a committee, working my magic. I was a master of eye contact, body language, the pregnant pause, the clever anecdote, and the practiced gravity of expression, the earnest countenance – all which augured great things, stacks of promised mail never, alas, delivered.
But my strength was that I knew how to handle other humans. Then along came automation.
Please don’t get me started. Technology is not my forte in the first place and, I suppose, because as a person whose problems have always been extraordinary, they call for abstruse solutions, or, to put it another way, for the presence of another human being to whom I can address my plight in hopes that they might unravel it, which they usually have done. The problem now is the disappearance of human beings.
Help. Support. Community. Speak to an online assistant. I have tried all that and for me none of it works. But it’s in place everywhere now, because it is ‘cost effective’, and of course the shareholders love that. It used to be that if you held on long enough through all the menus, recordings, and elevator music, you could eventually latch onto a real person. And when that happened – like the old-fashioned switchboards (“Good morning, Fawber’s Toilets, how can I help you?” “Uh, could I speak to Mr. Dung, extension 263 please?” “Certainly. I’m putting you through now.” “Good morning, this is Dick Dung, how may I help you?”
And within minutes the problem was solved. You can’t do that now. The problem with automation is that the brain spots behind the algorithm have figured out what the most generic, most asked questions are, and that is what goes on the menu. People like me who have complex issues can go fuck ourselves. It’s like the old woman who went to the airport to check in for her flight and found that there was no longer a reception desk, just a couple of computer terminals. The poor old dear, an octogenarian perhaps, couldn’t figure it out at all. When she finally snagged a personnel type in a blazer and asked what to do, he said (this is a true story), “We can’t help you. Find another airline if you can’t use our computers.”
If he had spoken to me like that, he’d have been nursing a pair of aching balls for quite a while, but the old blue-hair, cowed to the max, simply departed. Maybe she took a greyhound bus in the end.
But back to the job interview issue. My esteemed colleague Artem has made me aware of a new-fangled way of sifting through applicants in order to decide which peasants and seekers to wave forward and which to wave off. It is called Hireview. Naturally it is automated, so the hopeful interviewee is subjected to “Interrogation-by-Gadget. If you want to check it out, there are a multitude of videos to help you.
It’s similar to preparing for an IELTS or TOEFL exam. (The Speaking Part on those is now automated in some countries, so I hear.) So you are talking to a screen. As it happens, I have done videos for my company and by now I am used to speaking to a blank screen. It doesn’t matter that a real person isn’t there; I just mug for the camera and act like I’m wishing a long Happy Birthday and drinking a series of toasts to my best friend. (It actually feels like I imagine a psychopath does when he disposes of a body: cunning without caring.)
Without further ado, here is an excerpt from one of the sites describing ‘Hirevue’. Try it on for size:
The “competencies” that HireVue claims to measure through its assessments are not moored to the actual responsibilities and functions of specific jobs, and HireVue does not allow employers to incorporate more job-specific content into its assessments. All the examples of competencies that HireVue purports to assess – such as “empathy,” “influence,” “personality,” “attention,” “communication,” and “problem-solving” – are highly abstract qualities, not specific knowledge, skills, abilities, or other characteristics that are tailored to particular jobs. HireVue links these competencies to somewhat more specific “behaviors” – for example, an appendix showing the rating skill for the “Communication” competency includes “Shares Information” and “Engages Others” as key behaviors associated with that competency. But even these behaviors are highly generic, not accounting for the ways different behaviors and skills manifest themselves in different jobs, settings, or sectors.
How does that grab you? It makes me long for a low-paid agricultural position in a medieval fiefdom.
The idea, as I understand it, is that the AI apparatus is able to detect subliminal stuff like nervousness, dishonesty, fear, aggression, and a host of other things that probably are designed to disqualify you if you fall short. In other words, if you are sweating underneath your shirt, the AI will know. If you blink your eyes more than the standard allotment of ‘normal’ repetitions, the machine will know. If you really don’t know what you are talking about but are doing your best to answer the question, the AI Big Brother will suss it out. As Paul says in Corinthians: For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.
Yes, you will be known.
Is this right? Is this fair? I have long understood that, in an increasingly overcrowded and complex world, the process of selection begins with a general weeding out harvest. For example, TOEFL and IELTS have fuck all to do with a learner’s ability to think, reason, write and speak well in English, and everything to do with learning how to pass the exam. They make a lot of money selling stuff showing you how to do it. A mechanical, generic job interview in front of an abstract screen is obviously rigged up the same way. It pretends to award what is now popularly known as ‘competencies’, when in reality it is designed to catch you out, to spot discrepancies, to punish weakness.
It’s how the ‘developed’ world (yet another euphemism) is going and indeed how it is designed to go. The machines want to dissect your soul without rewarding your maybe-just-maybe creativity which might be expressed in some eccentric way that eludes the understanding of the apparatus. It gives the lie to all corporate bullshit about ‘lateral thinking’, ‘thinking outside the box’, etc. No, the real idea – and it must be the idea since AI technology still hasn’t completely wedged its way into our minds and stolen our thoughts – that the whole idea is to register oneself as acceptable, NOT exceptional. And that’s because being exceptional comes in all forms, some of them dangerous. Galileo was exceptional but he didn’t interview well with the Church.
There is already a pile of literature explaining how companies like to check Facebook and Instagram to see what you are posting. It’s none of their business but they make it their business, and if you post something they don’t like – no matter how long ago – they smile and nod and shitcan your application. So NO FETISHES OR STARTLING CONFESSIONS ON FB !! They know. Of course, Background Checks are routine if the idea is to find out if you are a 10 times convicted felon, and they make sense. But to me it is an infringement on your privacy if they insist on taking a strand of your hair to find out if you smoke. If found guilty, you receive the official escort of the campus. Which is where you planned to smoke anyway.
God only knows how this sort of thing will affect minorities. Will women be assessed differently from men? What about otherwise competent people with disabilities? Will a nervous stutter cost you your future as a CEO? Will trembling fingers be the death knell of all your aspirations? What will the Marks of Cain be in the future as the AI Priesthood refines itself to perfection?
Call me old-fashioned, but I would rather do business with the biggest human liar on earth than with a machine that always tells the ‘truth’. Ah, how well I now understand that I am not capable of ‘loving’ anything because ‘love’ does not exist; rather it is some kind of electronic molecular combustion that only makes it seem that way. My life is a meaningless ramble through a wildness of mechanized choreography, essentially nothing more than a video game. I am an animated zombie under a microscope. But if I want that goddamned job, I’d better shape up.
The beautiful old chestnut, “Work like you don’t need the money; dance like nobody’s watching; and love like you’ll never get hurt” – would seem to apply here to anyone wishing to hold onto his/her humanity. For me personally, it’s a joke – having to impress a machine – because I have passed the point where I need the approval of the boardroom or the masses. I am self-sufficient. When I open a link, I always accept All Cookies because, as long as I have enough presence of mind to assume that everybody is a potential scammer, I’ve nothing to fear. So examine me – how about a strip search under the harsh naked lightbulb of the Interrogation Room ceiling? OK, I confess. Guilty as charged. And?
I would be lying if I said I don’t care what people think, but I have learned to be myself even when being myself means being rejected. Of course, I could be broken by whips and thumbscrews and a lengthy season on the rack; I could be driven crazy by having to bear up to certain human atrocities and obscenities. I doubt if I could have survived a Nazi concentration camp.
But I have nothing to hide. If the machine extracts from the shadows of my soul its darkest, dirtiest goblins and trolls, you’ll still find me in the market place the next morning, nibbling on Eden’s apples.
I don’t care. But many of YOU do, and it is to YOU that I address my condolences. Your inner being is no longer your private property. And you soon won’t be able to check in at the corporate airport if you expect to find someone waiting at the reception counter. The pretty girls have all been dissolved into dead-looking screens. But the screens have eyes, little brother.
