The age of the BS’er
Boris Johnson is a symptom and a caricature of our age, a prime minister we truly deserve. A cynical opportunist whose whole life is an act, who is lazy yet prospers by ‘winging it’. His ascendancy is not an accident, but the natural continuation of a societal trend — to value salesmanship and interpersonal skills as much as, if not more, than the actual skills relevant to the job. The rot has now reached the very top.
Applying for a job at a store used to be straightforward. You turned up, had a brief chat with the manager, demonstrated yourself capable and got hired. But not anymore. The interview process for Asda or Odeon now takes many hours and requires the candidate to demonstrate their personality. I quote: ‘according to Clare Kemsley, director of recruitment firm Hays Retail, employers “choose to turn the usual interview process on its head, by asking candidates to be creative when demonstrating their selling skills or presenting, in order to spot who stands out from the crowd”. ‘
Let me repeat that. To stack shelves at Asda, you now have to have fantastic interpersonal skills. First question is: do the customers care? I do not think I am the only person who dreads the idea of a sales assistant snapping at my heels and demanding if they can help. Secondly, are these the best people for the job? Say there’s a fire at the local Odeon: I want the staff to be those most competent at getting me out safe rather than natural salesmen.
One can understand the retailers. They, on one hand, face increasing competition from online outlets and on the other discover more and more desperate job applicants. HR companies (whose denizens Douglas Adams famously consigned to the Golgafrinchan arc B) whisper sweetly in their ears, promising solutions guaranteed to optimise customer satisfaction and boost flagging sales. Whilst personal qualities always mattered, there wasn’t a whole industry churning out online tests and group exercises around this. People who in the past would have got a chance to to pick up sales skills on the job now struggle to get their foot in the door. Granted, not every retailer uses this way to recruit, but, it seems, with time more and more will.
A process that looks for confident extroverts clearly advantages people from better social backgrounds. This is not least because, because the HR personnel who devise the tests are themselves typically middle-class, their idea of what the right kind of confident extrovert is would likewise be middle-class. It also tends to favour older and more experienced people, who might be familiar with the interview process and know how to beat it. No wonder youth unemployment is through the roof. At no point does it seem to prioritise dedication and hard work, to allow somebody who might not have the right skills to make up for it in other ways.
But, perhaps, once you get your foot on the job ladder, things become better? Not so: research identified a culture of ‘self-promoters’ in the workplace who ‘do nothing, but get ahead at work’ through their ability to put a good spin onto themselves.
Businesses, of course, need to put a good spin onto themselves and their products to compete. The most egregious example I can think of is in the pharmaceutical sector — the big pharma companies spending three times as much on marketing as on R&D. Once again, the actually useful parts of the job — in this case saving lives — are secondary to being able to persuade other people — in this case patients, doctors, regulatory bodies, politicians — that you are doing a good job.
Intellectual property law facilitates this. Imagine a company produces a piece of data analysis software, say an algorithm to determine the performance of teachers in a school district. Its ‘inner workings’ are intellectual property and will not be disclosed to the client. There are therefore no real ways to compare it with similar such products and no real way to evaluate its efficacy until many years have passed. (Not that the prospective buyers would understand such a comparison.) So, companies will spend disproportionate resources on promoting their product at the expense of developing it. The less you are allowed to know about the product you are buying, the more you will rely on the spin.
Gone are the times of pride in a job well-done. Worth is evaluated purely by the demand, through the market, by the gain in money or status you got as a result. It is increasingly about appearances and not true quality. Likewise, in the political sphere, principles and policies are receding in importance, secondary to the performance, to the act, to the entertainment, to the sales pitch. People claim this is a result of populism, but populism is only the final stage of a long process of degradation. Just like there is no supposedly objective quality, only market price, there is supposedly no objective fact, just different opinions.
Interpersonal skills, the ability to deceive, to create the ‘right’ feeling, to win someone’s trust have increasingly become the only ones that matter. Like any other skill, people possess it in very different measure. In the ideal world, people with different skill sets would all have their own paths in life, allowing them to use them optimally: it is a problem that a single skill set has come to dominate most others. Jobs that require certain skill sets are instead filled by people with the ‘dominant’ skill set. This country’s next prime minister is merely a particularly illustrative example.
PS: Often, to even get to an interview one often has to pass an online test — like the one at Tesco. These are highly opaque, and offer the candidate no indication regarding the personal qualities Tesco might looking for, or what they need to improve to meet Tesco’s criteria. Being able to negotiate them sounds like a proof you can game the system and nothing else.