Ask The Sophist: Can I be a good job candidate?

Indignity Vol. 4, No. 204

Tom Scocca, JOE MACLEOD

20 Nov 2024 — 6 min read

ASK THE SOPHIST

Professional Class

Dear The Sophist, I have been a stay-at-home parent for about 15 years (give or take a few years doing part-time marginally paid or unpaid work of a sort that allowed me to indulge a passing interest or hobby [I originally typed "jobby" there! I think that could be a new word; think about it! but if you can't intuit the definition I have in mind, then nm]). I have now decided to jump in, face first, to look for full-time work, of the sort that pays a meager salary and maybe offers benefits. There are lots of questions to pose to THE SOPHIST at this juncture, but perhaps the most relevant one is: how do I find the right pitch that is a winning balance between desperation and motivation?

Signed,
Overeducated and Underemployed

P.S. Any other tips or words of wisdom? Send them my way.

Dear Trials of Job, Why do you want full-time employment? The Sophist is asking spiritually but also literally. Not because this is going to help you craft your job-seeking pitch in any direct way—the last thing anyone with hiring power cares about is what you want—but because you can't be ruthless about your plans unless you know what those plans are.

If you've put in 15 years as a stay-at-home parent, two obvious possibilities are 1. you want to, shall we say, give your teen a little space for their growing independence or 2. you are two years away from needing a whole lot of money. Or maybe you're looking for a new kind of fulfillment and purpose? Fresh challenges to take on your blah blah, sorry, The Sophist is personally pretty bad at these exercises in vague self-cheerleading.

So what is it you're trying not to say? Your letter, brief though it is, manages to toss in plenty of gestures at diffidence: "a passing interest"..."meager salary"..."maybe offers benefits." And yet you're resolved to "jump in, face first." Which of these things, then, do you really not care about, and which of them are you pretending not to care about because you care about them very much? Is there a kind of work you particularly believe you should be doing, or some set of skills you're proud of and want to be professionally recognized for? Do you need (or want! Wanting is fine!) to earn real, substantial money? Are you worried that whatever benefits you've been getting by on till now are inadequate?

The hiring process is a collaborative work of fiction. You and the people doing the hiring are inventing a character who doesn't merely, vulgarly desire the job, but who is such a natural fit for the job that nobody on either side of the desk can imagine the job without that character in it. If it works, you can then play that character for 40 hours a week indefinitely.

Your "motivation," in this setup, has two levels. There's your character's motivation, the motivation you talk about, which is that you want to make sure the would-be employer doesn't miss out on how useful you would be to the company. Then there's your own motivation—professional ambition, financial security, whatever it may be—that gives you the conviction, as you play the character, that you truly do want this to happen, that this future you're provisionally inhabiting, as you describe in 300 words what innovations you would propose, might as well be your real future.

This is not the same thing as "desperation." Employers hate desperation, or more precisely, employers love desperation, but they want to perceive it as commitment. (Somewhere, to The Sophist's horror, The Sophist once read about people who reject LinkedIn profiles if the user has used LinkedIn's option to mark themself as "Looking for work.") Companies don't want to sense that they're your last resort. You've spent 15 years without them; you're only coming around now because you have something to offer.

That's your pitch. Now you just have to get past the black-box AI system that's automatically rejecting your resume before the interview stage, because it doesn't match some secret constellation of keywords. Tell your friends you're looking for a job. Tell the other parents you've been chaperoning museum trips and producing the middle-school yearbook with. Check in with your old sort-of-colleagues from your old sort-of-jobs. Shake the trees! A paycheck just might fall out of one.

Or tell the teen to get a job instead.

Enjoy the commute,
The Sophist

Got something you need to justify to yourself, or to the world at large? Other columnists are here to judge you, but The Sophist is here to tell you why you’re right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.

WEATHER REVIEWS

New York City, November 19, 2024

★★★ Sunlit cornices were reflected, recurved, in the hood of the black IROC-Z at the curb. A stiff leaf crunched underfoot in the shadows of the balcony. Here and there a tree still burst out in glory. From the crosswalk on Central Park West, the pin oaks along the Park became more and more of a wall of color with each approaching perpendicular step, the thinning individual foliage gathering into an overlapping collective as the viewing angle shifted. A translucent sheet of cloud in the south made things dim, even as blue shone overhead. A boomerang and a tennis ball lay lost near a still-brilliant sugar maple on the newly fenced-off crown of the Great Hill. The branches of a bare, spreading elm, thrust out toward the cinder track, were thickly in bud.

EASY LISTENING DEP'T.

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SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.

WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from Entertainment Cook Book: Recipes by Students of Central College for Women, Lexington, Missouri, compiled by Lexington Central College Club, Mo. Central College for Women, published in 1919 and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.

CHEESE AND PIMENTO SANDWICHES
1 pound cheese.
1 small can pimentoes.

Grind together through a meat grinder. Mix with enough salad dressing to spread well. Cut a sandwich loaf of bread very thin. Spread your paste on the slices, and build until you have your sandwich six or eight layers deep. Remove crust, and cut crosswise very thin. — Florence E. Dunklin, Independence, Kans.

If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.