Interviewed

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I have just had an… interesting… experience. I went for a job in a Bank, nothing special at all, just a regular customer contact/service type of position. So I sent in my CV and then was asked to come along to an interview. They were recruiting for a number of people, so there were a few of us there at the appointed time. They moved us all into a meeting room to give us the pep speech and tell us about what a great Bank it was and how they really valued their staff and wanted their workplace to be the best… And then expanded a bit on all that, particularly about what “the best” meant. They wanted you to come along and bring “your whole person”, not just “your work face”, they wanted not just 100% but 110%. They wanted commitment and drive to meet your targets. And it was all about team work and living the company credo…. Then they took us individually into interviews, and had two interviewers working off a script asking us all those good psychometric questions.

Does any of this stuff sound familiar to anyone?

Needless to say, I didn’t actually end up getting the job – Thanks, but no thanks, wish you luck in your future endeavours, etc etc etc.  Do you suppose they might have guessed how unimpressed I am about that sort of “teamwork”? We will work you like a dog, expect you to slave your guts out for us, burn you out and then throw you away when our sales targets/expectations have been incrementally increased beyond human capacity and you are no longer delivering. I am not being cynical am I? They aren’t actually just manipulative bastards are they???? A large corporation wouldn’t treat people like expendable production units, to be squeezed for the maximum output for the smallest possible cost – would they…?

The manager giving the presentation even went so far as to say that “at their Bank, values weren’t something that was just written down on a file that promptly got filed away and forgotten about. No, at this Bank we live our values”. He might have slipped up a bit there though, because what he next went on to talk about was how it was this departments ambition to be the best, and by the best he meant winning the industry awards for customer service, quickest response time, highest customer satisfaction etc. All truly laudable objectives I am sure, if only I wasn’t nagged by that sneaking suspicion that his bonus depended on getting all us ‘hamsters in the wheel’ to run faster and faster to stay ahead of that ever incrementally increasing KPI number. The real values measured being dollars and cents, not airy fairy values like job satisfaction or other humanistic considerations.

Now sure, a bank has got to make a buck or it is going to be out of business. Employees actually are a problem often times, with a slack work ethic, dishonest or just plain incompetent. There is also no point employing someone, training them up and then having them leave after a month or two. The employer needs to make sure they are a decent match for the job and the company culture, etc. Ohh dear, If only Employers weren’t just such complete arseholes so often as well. The employers treat employees like they are wankers and the employees threat the boss like he is a wanker in return, bit of a vicious circle really. Which comes first, the chicken or the egg. Have you ever wondered why union/company confrontations get so nasty and bitter? Its because they are almost definitely both right, the other side is fucking them about. The company gets all legal eagle on every last contract minutiae, and the workers eventually take their revenge by little acts of obstruction and shirking on the shop floor. You pretend to pay us and we pretend to work; we can raise your costs faster than you can cut our pay…

Interestingly enough, management is put there because it is supposed to be smarter than average and should be able to work with people to develop positive relationships. You know, all that management mantra stuff they spout that they are supposed to do with their customers but somehow fail to quite achieve within their own company with their own employees. You don’t suppose it has anything to do with the priorities being profits first, second and last do you? Meeting the quarterly numbers and the Key Performance Indictors is a full time job isn’t it. And anyway, no one gets paid a bonus for creating a happy feeling at work, that’s not measurable on the bottom line.

A commentator once noted that the psychology of a corporation was the psychology of a psychopath, it has no consideration for the feeling and wellbeing of anybody. Unfortunately that also tends to mean that the people that get promoted also tend to demonstrate those same fine qualities. What a charming thought, doesn’t that sound like just the sort of place you would want to work. I should probably count myself lucky I escaped that little purgatory. After all there are plenty of other jobs I can do instead aren’t there.  Except… actually… no, not so much! When the economy goes into recession, or even just spins completely out of control and into the toilet, the businesses that stop hiring first are the small, private and family owned ones. The big Corporates’ are the only ones left standing and hiring. Somehow we have managed to make our world over into a corporate nirvana. The big banks and companies pretty much own everything. More and more of the population is a wage slave – or is that a debt slave. We owe our souls to the company store, tra-la-laa. And you will dance to the company tune or you will get slung out on your ear.

Then you become an unemployed bum… you bum you… you good for nothing lazy arsed scum. Isn’t this a lovely dichotomy, you either are a company man, or woman – or you are scum, beneath notice or contempt. Mmmm, no, let me retract that, you are worthy of contempt because the righteous will always need someone they can feel superior to, and have contempt for. Anyway, hey, it was all your own fault in the first place anyway, because if you were genuinely worthy you would be a Company wo/man too… haha, so there!!!  We’ll ignore for the moment that there are a few structural issues in play here that have constructed the situation so that heads they win and tails you lose. That sort of thinking doesn’t help the agenda, the company credo, the mission statement and the bottom-line. We need good little minions who will take the costs onto themselves so that the Company doesn’t have to. And if we need to have psychometric questioning in the hiring phase for new minions, then so be it, we don’t want troublemakers and cynics becoming a fly in the ointment.

So apparently I am going to have to go away and be a fly in the ointment somewhere else. Apparently they can spot that I am just not going to be a good little apparatchik. Isn’t that sad… I just didn’t fit, my answers to their questions may have been honest but they didn’t display the right mindset apparently.  I did notice that I was they oldest person there by quite a long way. Apparently early twenty some-things are a lot more amenable to the company message. Ohh – and to being paid fuck all of course. So, for the privilege of having the company bend you over and rape you for 8 hours of living hell a day, they will give you a little (very little) of the folding green.  Except, not for me, no Soylent Green for me.

Or maybe I am just a bitter and cynical, out of touch, old man – and their corporations and wealth aren’t actually built on the crushed and processed lives of ordinary people.

Or maybe I should just be thankful for small mercies and thank god I don’t now work for them!

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