Answer A Difficult Question

Is conformity OK?

Pretty difficult right? Well I genuinely want to know if it’s OK to conform to what others want you to be, especially since I’ve always been told that it’s important to be yourself. Though haven’t we all? It’s one of the key messages in every childrens cartoon on the planet, be yourself and try not to chase that road runner.

Of course nowadays being yourself isn’t helpful when looking for a job. No nowadays you have to be a potential employee, being yourself just doesn’t cut it. You can’t walk into an interview dressed how you want to dress, you have to dress for the employer. You can’t talk how you talk, you have to use positive action words to make sure they hire you. You have to answer how they want you to answer in order to get the job. Something about this seems wrong to me.

I always believed that employers wanted to hire YOU, but how are they supposed to know who you are if you spend the entire interview being someone else? If you’re not going to go in and be yourself how are they going to know you’re the best person for the job? And what if some people aren’t that good at faking, those people are well and truly screwed.

Interviews in general piss me off, mostly because now that we have Job Network places the interview has become pointless. There are actually classes you can take to teach you how to ace the interview, which to me is comparable to cheating. It teaches you how to be a yes man, and I’m sorry but any job that requires a yes man is a job not worth doing. Nothing good ever came from yes men, Hitler had yes men and look how that turned out.

Sadly though the system is designed this way and there’s nothing I can do, but employers can. Any employer worth his salt would have to see people who are telling them what they wanna hear, it’s a basic skill a lot of people possess... it also helps us detect pure bullshit when we hear it. If you think someone is just telling you what you wanna hear then don’t hire them, they’re not the kind of person you’d want to work with.

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“Getting fired is nature’s way of telling you that you had the wrong job in the first place” ~

Hal Lancaster