“Social sector” workers — described by Forbes as “nonprofit organizations and the social sector at-large” — have been losing jobs because of budget cuts and corruption cuts.
Many newly unemployed are unhappy about having to job-hunt. Some complain about having to take jobs from profit-making businesses. Others lament sparse communication from prospective employers.
“When asked about barriers to finding employment, 85% of respondents cited lack of employer response as their primary challenge,” Aparna Rae’s not-very-shocking-at-all Forbes article elaborates. “The irony is stark: a sector built on human dignity subjects job seekers to dehumanizing ‘digital hiring mazes’ where qualified candidates are ghosted after final-round interviews. The disconnect between mission and practice erodes the sector’s moral authority.”
Wow. Dehumanizing to have to … look for work (or customers)? Worse because your last job was all about dignity — unlike all those grubby profit-sector jobs or, for that matter, jobs with nonprofits that rely only on voluntary private donations?
“I want to be seen and recognized as a human,” explains one representative job seeker. “The lack of communication and impersonal nature of the hiring process is demoralizing and makes job seekers feel devalued.”
Job hunting can be tough. It’d be nicer if qualified candidates who have been considered but lose out to other qualified candidates were always notified. Sure. But how does failure to do so represent a “disconnect” between mission and practice, and how does it “erode the [nonprofits’] moral authority”?
Job seekers might feel less demoralized if they didn’t take the impersonal aspects of the search so personally.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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4 replies on “Looking for Work”
Less dehumanizing if the rejection wasn’t confirming the ubiquity of their “skillset”, and that their 4 years of degree work was just mental self-abuse.
Now they’ll find out what others went through in the last two decades. Cry me a river. Forgive my schadenfreude.
HR departments have for many decades adhered to leftist fashion; people of much the same sort as those in non-profits also took-over HR departments; they saw a gate and became gate-keepers. And thus that the reason that often these new job-seekers are indeed being treated inhumanely is that they’re being subjected to the treatment to which their kind subjected the rest of us.
The task of sorting through applicants is onerous, and regulations confound the whole business; but America’s firms need to wrestle power and responsibility away from HR departments.
Job hunters should emulate feral housecats: They hunt for fun, and, when they do catch something, they enjoy it. When the human seekers get interviews, I suggest they do what I did: I kept the emphasis on what work they needed me to do, and I never, never played for sympathy. If you want to get rejected, say how much you need the job. I never did anything like that; I emphasized what I could do for them. I bet the complainers do just the opposite of what I did.