Introduction
I engaged
in job hunting in Japan after completing the curriculum of a social
anthropology program (MSc) of a university in the UK. As I had worked as a
software engineer before studying anthropology, I looked for engineering jobs
while I tried to find opportunities to use anthropology in those positions. As
I could find a job, I would like to analyze the process of job search with an
anthropologist’s eye. Note that this post is based on my own experience so it
is not generalizable to job search in Japan.
I came
across a conversation of different practices of recruitment when I was in
London. I heard some aspects of the tactics of job seekers and employers. Job
seekers in London, I heard, boasts job offers from other companies to win
better conditions. A friend from Kyrgyz said such kind of conduct is
inconceivable in her country. I thought it will also be regarded as impolite in
Japan. It is only one expression of differences.
Settings
-Players
The
main players are job applicants, employers and recruitment agencies. The
employers are not monolithic especially if they are large in size but here I
will not delve deeper into that as I do not have enough information. Recruitment
agencies contact prospective applicants, often via career change web sites,
which are also important material settings, and mediate the relationship
between employers and applicants. Those agencies are mainly for experienced
workers in Japan. They get fees from employers when applicants accept offer
from them. They often get additional fees when applicants-turned-employees
continue to work in the company for some time, like one year. Usually
applicants themselves have to pay nothing for the agencies. I also relied on
those agencies in my job search.
-Application and screening process
Employers in Japan, as well as in other
countries, use several methods to screen job applicants: internship, exams,
interviews, and documents. The process depends on resources and policies of the
companies. Internship may be the best method if they want to check how the
applicants will work, but it is often too costly both for employers and
applicants. Even in internships both parties may behave to make themselves more
attractive than they actually are. Other methods use much more limited
information to judge each other. Almost all companies ask applicants to submit
CVs and hold interviews in the recruitment process. Exams are various. Some companies
use multiple-choice test to measure basic skills or aptitude for the job of
applicants. Other companies do not have exams. Some positions for software
engineering require programming tasks, which give employers information of the
applicants’ programming skills.
Signaling
Just
as Geertz (1973) defined culture as “a historically transmitted pattern of
meanings embodied in symbolic forms”, not only sentences but also nonverbal
expressions and how words are expressed matter as symbols of something else.
This particular culture of recruitment process is influenced by time
constraints as well as the logic of market economy and “Japanese culture” as a
whole. Because decision making depends on limited information and has to be
done in comparatively short time, both parties try to know what is relevant for
them from the communication. What is communicated during the application and
screening process works as sign of what they really want to know. For example, applicants
in Japan often wonder whether they should write CVs manually or using
computers. (It was taken for granted in the UK that applicants use word
processors.) Different employers may have different impressions depending on
how CVs are written. While handwriting is time-consuming, some employers prefer
it because they think it conveys personality of the applicants and regard it as
a sign of their willingness to work for the companies. If there is a gap on the
rules of communication, it is likely to lead to negative evaluation of each
other.
Signaling is also relevant in interviews.
Nervousness often gives negative impression since it may reflect lack of
confidence in what they say. A consultant of a career agency told me to talk
concisely even if it diminishes information. His advice was based on an assumption
that interviewers cannot remember everything and what matters is what they
remember after the interview. The situation may be different if interviews are
recorded but usually they cannot spend a lot of time for each applicant. He
also said logical consistency is usually irrelevant in job interviews. It was
somewhat surprising for me and a document from another agency says applicants
should be coherent. One possible explanation is that I was already conscious
about consistency and that is enough for interviews in which interviewers cannot
spend a lot of time in discerning consistency. I thought preparation for job
interview as resource allocation problem. Thus I focused on other aspects of
the interview.
While compensation and working hours are important factors for
applicants when they decide which company to work, it is usually seen as
inappropriate for applicants to ask questions about those matters. Those
questions may signal the employers that the applicant is mainly interested in
his or her personal benefit, which is regarded as undesirable even in market
economy. But both employers and agencies know that applicants are interested in
how they are treated. Instead, they have to wait interviewers mentioning them
or they may ask them through recruitment agencies. Even when I communicate with
agency consultants, I justified my mention to those conditions by referring to
more acceptable concerns like health and opportunity of challenging tasks. While
it is legally obligatory to disclose salary level at least when employers issue
offer letter, it is not about expected working hours so it is sometimes
difficult to obtain information about them. If employers and recruitment
agencies are reluctant to disclose information, applicants may expect hard
work. Thus applicants also make use of signals. Another consultant told me if
an employer or a career agency urges applicants to make decisions immediately,
it is not a good one.
The
applicants are expected to focus on contribution to the employers. So the
applicants try to explain what they can do with their present skills. It is
basically the same as other negotiations to win contracts. What is different is
that as employment is a long term relationship, the applicants also emphasize
what they want to do in the future. But it is easy to say what they want to do
or want to be. So interviewers try to discern whether the applicants have the
potential and the determination to be such persons by how they relate their
past experience with the future vision.
Relations
Anthropological
accounts are full of references to alienation in market economy. Ho (2009)
characterizes the relationship between Wall Street investment banks and their
employees as “two-way lack of obligation” while she did not ignore cultural
aspects of the workplace. Meanwhile, others point out that complete
disentanglement is impossible (Miller 2002; Holm 2007). Practices around recruitment
and job transfer in Japan is also a place where the logic of market transaction
and that of attachment coexists in particular manner.
Legally
speaking, corporations have the right to decide whom they employ or not. Applicants
also have the right to decide where they work. However, it does not mean that
both parties have special feeling toward each other. Indeed, I felt attached to
some companies and had to justify my decision (both to the companies and to
myself) to decline offers by reference to priorities I had set in advance. In
addition, I thank those companies and want to contribute to them by introducing
prospective applicants.
Consultants of recruitment agencies are in
special position in its relation with applicants (and maybe with corporations).
I felt blue several times after interviews in which I thought I did not do
well. I often talked about my failure – nervousness, clumsiness, inconsistency
of my reply, and so on – to them. Then they often encouraged me and urged me to
be confident. While I appreciate their encouragement and advice, I felt
somewhat perplexed although I could not explain my feeling at that time.
Now
I think they engaged in some kind of affective or “emotional labor” in that it
“calls for a coordination of mind and feeling” (Hochschild 2003[1983]: 7),
although it does not necessarily accompany facial expression in the original
definition. While evocation of certain mental state is presented as service, it
should not be represented as commodity purchased in markets. If customers (job
applicants) imagine so, it would be less effective. Once I was told that if I
deserve to be employed. I could neither take this remark at face value nor
dismiss as flattery. From the viewpoint of consultants, they face some kind of
“double bind” (Bateson 1972). If they say nothing, applicants’ mind would not
change. If they say something, it may be taken as remarks for business purpose.
And in most cases it is inappropriate to have lengthy explanation about the
dilemma they are facing. It is inevitable as we cannot eliminate the context of
business interest from our relationship. Although the relationship between
consultants and job applicants is less unequal than those between domestic
workers or sex workers and their clients, which the word emotional (or
affective) labor is often applied, the relationship is asymmetrical. They need
some kind of discipline, but it is different from the one needed in other
occupations. First, it is not calculative. In addition, unlike futures traders’
(Zaloom 2006), it is represented as something that is desirable outside
business.
As a job applicant, it is easy for me to separate business and
personal matters. While I felt obliged to do something for them in return for
their service, what I thought I can do is to introduce my friends to them,
which purely contributes to their business interest and does not satisfy their
emotional needs. While I thought it is possible to build personal relationship
with them, it is so even if I cannot benefit them in business. The only reason
that it is more or less difficult for me to handle those relationship is that I
am conscious or even over-conscious about the dilemma the consultants face.
Despite my education of anthropology, which is often critical about market
logic, I could not eliminate calculation from my thinking even when I think
about contribution to others.
Ontology
While job interviews are primarily the
opportunity for employers to assess applicants, it is also true that applicants
can use the setting to assess companies. The career agencies I had contacts
with emphasized both aspects, although with greater emphasis on the first. While
it may be true as long as job market exists, actual attitudes of applicants and
employers depend on how they think about possible alternatives. If unemployment
rate is high and the applicants does not have skills which are highly evaluated
by potential employers, they may make more efforts to be attractive to
employers even if it is not what they like to do. Thus the judgement by the job
market may be perceived as absolute and what they can only do, they think, is
to conform to the absolute law of the market like that of nature and discipline
themselves according to the “law”. During my job search in the UK I felt that
the result of the screening is something that I cannot control and I did not
think that I was choosing a company. But I neither have fatalistic view nor
thought I have to completely reshape myself to get a job partly because I had
another option to work in Japan. (It does not mean there is no room for agency
even in severe conditions. For example, applicants with philosophical or anthropological
education may remember Foucaultian argument of discipline and try to resist the
temptation to internalize the logic of “the system”.)
As
far as I am concerned, changes I was told by the consultants to undergo was merely
on superficial or technical level: how to express future prospects and
experience in my previous career or to eliminate anxiety. Even if I could not
pass the screening process, it was regarded as lack of chemistry between the
company and me (and basically not my fault). It is quite different from those
demanded for graduate job applicants, at least at discourse level. Job search
manuals in recent years in Japan ask those students to thoroughly examine self
and find out who they really are and they introduce various specific techniques
for that purpose (Makino 2011). Whereas those techniques are represented as
means to “discover” self, it requires particular attitude toward the self. But
there is the other side: there is screening process before the applicants are
registered to the agencies. Not all prospective applicants can get assistance
from the agencies. Some agencies are explicit on that. While it is a rite de
passage and almost compulsory for students to adopt certain kind of “technologies
of the self” (Foucault et al. 1988), lack of re-formation of self is a result for
those who have already acquired discipline in everyday working practice.
Conclusion
In
this short essay I outlined several aspects of job search and recruiting
process. There exists particular kind of codification of verbal and nonverbal
messages. Each party tries to obtain information on each other under the system
of meaning. While both applicants, corporations, and recruitment agencies
pursue their own purpose, they do not simply rely on calculation but they have
to deal with various emotions. Sometimes it is actively embraced and in other
cases it has to be eliminated from decision making process. People also have
particular idea about more abstract concept such as job market and the self.
Briefly comparing job search of experienced workers with that of students, I
extracted invisible presuppositions.
Relationship
between the system of meaning and perception is not clear here. While I treated
discourse system as independent of other aspects of the process, it is highly
conceivable that use of particular discourse and bodily practice has impact on
formation of self and how people think about relationship with others and the
world as a whole. It may depend both on psychological process and culture. This
aspect is left for future exploration.
Bibliography
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