Participant observation of job search

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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Foucault, M., Martin, L. H., Gutman, H., & Hutton, P. H. (1988). Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault. Univ of Massachusetts Press.

Geertz, C. (1973). The interpretation of cultures: Selected essays. Basic books.

Ho, K. (2009). Liquidated: an ethnography of Wall Street. Duke University Press.

Hochschild, A. R. (2003). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling, With a new afterword. Univ of California Press.

Holm, P. (2007). Which way is up on Callon. Do economists make markets, 225-243.

Makino, T. (2011). Jiko keihatsu no jidai [Self development]. Keiso Shobo.

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Zaloom, C. (2006). Out of the pits: Traders and technology from Chicago to London. University of Chicago Press.