Unquiet

 <rant>

And here I thought the quiet part was that companies openly discriminate in their recruiting based on factors completely unrelated to job performance.

One can blame this on some sort of biological imperative to discount that which is more easily available (unless, it seems that money is involved; people always seemingly grab the easy bucks), but maybe what it's really about is feeling justified in one's prejudices, and the willingness of, well, many of us, to bow to that.

Being Black, I've been told to not have a profile picture on LinkedIn. Being a Gen Xer, I've been told to expunge my early work history from my profile and résumé. I know people who profiles photos are black-and-white so that they appear to be fair-haired, rather than gray. People use different names in in order to seem more employable. And now there's an endless line of people telling us that the green "Open to Work" banner is really an enormous red flag.

Not because these things are somehow disqualifying; none of them are supposed to matter once one makes it to an interview. But because the gatekeepers of the employment world are supposedly graded (by themselves or others) on how well they make the process of recruiting new employees into a status game.

Prospective employees are treated like Labubus, Stanley tumblers or the Power Nine. If they don't lend the company an air of exclusivity, or make it feel somehow special, the fact that they can do the work, and do it well, doesn't matter. But when was the last time you saw a company crowing about how awesome and unique their new Product Manager was? When was the last time anyone made a purchasing decision based on how much work the seller's Talent Acquisition people needed to do to hire a middle manager from another company?

This would make sense if it showed up in the bottom line, or in stock prices. But literally no-one cares if someone builds a team by hiring a dozen long-term unemployed people. There's absolutely zero riding on this.

But we play the game anyway. Well, I do, at least. There are jobs that I've done, and done well, but there are no traces of in my professional history, because I'm supposed to be pretending that I'm younger than I am until I get in front of someone who can afford not to care.

It's a strange game, because no-one receives anything for winning. It's a pretense that often simply adds work to the process for everyone involved, supposedly because the appearance of doing more work is the valuable part.

</rant>