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November 21, 2005

Elevator speeches

I've just started reading Bait and Switch by Barbara Ehrenreich, and I've already got mixed feelings about it. I'm on Chapter Two.

It's a very funny book--she should have written a novel spoofing the whole job-seeker culture and the psychobable-spouting parasites that bottom feed as personal/career coaches. Heck, since she didn't do it, I might do it. And it is troubling--something you intuit by seeing all of these ads about networking events and job coaches and articles by the same coaches is that there sure are a lot of people out there profiting from others' misery. And I have yet to find anyone who was actually helpful.

A lot of the stuff she points out is already known to those of us who haven't worked most of our lives as full-time writers or academics: enterence into the corporate world requires fakery that Satan himself would have trouble with. It's the weak resume puffing, constantly-networking, glad-handing optimism or die attitude that makes me twitch, but you have to fake it, you have to use the jargon in the industry in which you want to work, you have to adopt the stupid pseudo-spiritual and fake-philosophical platitudes (Sun Tzu and leadership! The Tao of the Career!), and you have to basically play the game. No matter how insipid it is. Some nightclubs don't let you in if you're not glam or hip enough, some corporations won't let you in if you're not blandly bubbly enough.

And her inexperience comes out in other ways: when one of her job coaches asks her to cite her three biggest fears, she lists "being too old to find a job" and "living in poverty" (she couldn't think of a third one). I smacked my hand against my forehead because you never say that. You just don't. You never, ever admit fear about things like jobs or life or money. Everyone in the shiny happy office has no financial woes and no worries about their employability. The things one worries about and speaks of are "being unchallenged by my job" or "spending too much time at home." Okay, maybe not the latter, but you get the picture. It's like talking about salary and being upfront about the fact that actually, you'd like more of it. Can you imagine!

It made me think of my two plus years in graduate school, where our professors tried to lead us into finding our ambition and dreams. I'm rolling my eyes even thinking about it now, since most of the students there were single parents looking for a leg up in cubicle world. Job flexibility, our profs would cry, money isn't everything! And we'd nod and smile very politely. Until the third or fourth time, when someone would point out that negotiating a raise for a pink collar job wasn't done, nor was telecommuting. You showed up and accepted your salary and shut up. And when you had a kid to feed and clothe, and skyrocketing rent to pay, money was pretty major, if not everything. Admitting that, though, was bad, bad, bad.

Ehrenreich went to a networking event at the exhoration of her coaches, and met a whole bunch of unemployed people. I remembered thinking, Well, what is hanging out with people with no connections to jobs for you going to do, besides waste your time? Her coaches told her the same thing when she reported that she went to the event, but they're the same people who told her to go. Maybe their mission is to make people chase their tails? It's possible.

She was also struck by the corporate mask that everyone must affect. I'm sure you all know what I'm talking about--the bland but cheerful, professional and calm, busy but engaged, schmoozy but focused personna that becomes Everydrone. You don't let your real thoughts or feelings be known. Everything is pleasant. Everydrones have their own language, with dialects specific to their industries and companies. Everydrones manage to promote themselves and be humble at the same time.

Still, I will not liken their plight to the working poor, who are often judged more harshly for making unwise choices. Ehrenreich mentioned letters she got from people who asked her when she'd talk about their plight, the plight of good hardworking people who did everything right, who didn't have babies young, who went to good schools and worked hard. This drove me crazy--the janitor who cleans your office and the barista who serves your latte both work pretty damn hard and may well have done everything right but got unlucky. It just reminded me of my irritation with our double-standards. We trash the working poor for being spendthrifts and having babies and making horrible choices, but weep over wealthy or middle-class people who haven't made the best or most prudent choices, either.

No matter. I know unemployment is a soul-killing monster. I've been there, and it is demoralizing, as is all of the advice you get. One guy at Ehrenreich's networking event was in tears. She didn't know why--she was tuning everyone out because they'd launched into a sales pitch for a boot camp for the white-collar unemployed. And that's something that hit me broadside when I was laid off in my early twenties--people see the unemployed as great customer prospects, as if we're dripping with money for resume consulting and job coaching and boot camps and whatnot. And the advice and rules just boggled the mind. Treat your job search like a full-time (or full-time plus) job. Schedule your time, get up early, and dress like you're at the office. Get your spouse to "supervise" you. Network! Meet friends for lunch. Schedule informational interviews. Call companies proactively. Write down your hopes and dreams and visualize your dream job. You will have it, with three easy payments of $99.95 each! Acknowledge your depression, but don't wallow in it. In fact, keep busy. Volunteer. Go to the gym and get needed excersize while networking with other people who don't have jobs and are therefore at the gym on a Tuesday afternoon. But treat your job search like a full-time job and then some. It overwhelmed me. Networking? What the heck was that? And how much follow-up did one do without getting pegged as a stalker? How can I afford to belong to a gym and meet people for lunch (to network, of course) when I'm not getting a bloody paycheck to pay for it? And how many informational interviews could you do before your head exploded in frustration?

Now we've got even more advice, and it's a doozy. You need an elevator speech. I'll be sure to write mine and post it at some point, though it will be for my job as President-for-Life, not what I really do for work. What if you're looking for work in the NSA? "Hi, my name is Sheelzebub, and I'm a crackerjack wiretapper!" Not an elevator speech you want to hear, y'know?

You need tons of psychobabble and stupid personality tests that mean abseloutely nothing. The joke being that corporate America loves them some personality tests, as if they could slot people into whatever job they think would work for you. What a load of crapola. These tests never peg anyone as a sociopath, or else I would have been found out ages ago and promoted to CEO of a huge multinational. But I digress.

So far, the book has reminded me of every encounter I've had in job searches/career counselling that tripped my cynicism wires. It's like we all pretend we drank the Kool Aid even though few of us even took a sip. You need something a little stronger than that to get through the knee-deep horse-puckey.

In that sense, I sympathize. I've been there, and it's beyond awful.

Posted by at November 21, 2005 10:23 PM