Today’s beautiful weather is accompanied by squalls in the job market. I have a few recollections to bring to a discussion about that market and also a few observations. Before I had much of a job history, when I was ready to go to work to work my way through college, I had some things in my favor.

One of them was that entry level work would take any likely candidate. No one wanted you to say that you could already do the job as well as the guy that just left. Managers knew that they would have to train you. That was easy as long as you were willing and able to learn. New people have to reorganize their brains with new categories of tasks to accomplish in a new job. That was a given.

Since I knew someone who worked at a local convenience store company who would recommend me and since this company often tried to employ college kids, I went to talk to the manager of the store where I wanted to work. It was just a half mile from the university and I could rent a room another mile further away. The pay was very low but I didn’t have a huge set of demands to meet at that time. I needed rent money, food money and tuition money. All was cheaper then than they are now. I already had clothes and a bicycle and most household items that I really needed although little furniture. The manager was patient and she trained me well by explaining what I needed to do for her to make the store run safely, cleanly, and efficiently.

It turned out that I was a good employee. I kept the store safe, clean and rang up customer’s orders in a friendly way, keeping the coffee fresh and everything in good order. I didn’t steal merchandise and I didn’t let customers steal anything either.

After a while, I heard that another convenience store chain was hiring and paying a better wage. Instead of a local chain this was a national chain and I thought I would apply. But when I did apply, the manager administered a test. She deliberately made a lot of noise and chaos to try to distract me from doing the test well. She said that I would have to run the register in the presence of just such distractions. That wasn’t true though. If I had been the clerk on duty, I would have not allowed that much noise in the store. So even though I had already worked in a convenience store successfully while I was getting through school, it wasn’t a good fit for me in the other convenience store chain and I didn’t transfer over to that other store.

I see similar kinds of problems in today’s job market as I did in the past when I was trying to apply to a store that deliberately undermined its candidates with loud distractions. Don’t today’s potenial employers deliberately undermine their candidates?

They have an online application process that completely lacks human empathy or connection or even any encouragement. Many people never hear from the jobs they apply to and that makes it seem to me that applying online is a negative reinforcement to teach applicants that getting a job is a hopeless task. Some people have put in hundreds of applications without any success at landing an interview. Also applicants never find out why they aren’t suitable according to hiring criteria that is secret. And they don’t know what to do to get an in person interview much less a job.

I get no sense of a friendly welcoming job market these days. No one wants to train a new employee or even have a conversation with a job applicant. The social aspects of belonging to a workplace community seem to be lacking. There isn’t any esprit de corps. The sense of belonging to the wider community where the workplace resides is also missing. Potential employers seem afraid to interact with the public. That’s pretty strange compared to the past.

I think that using AI to screen applicants leaves so much to be desired that I don’t think it’s working well. I had hoped that new technologies that claim to know everything about everyone would be better at helping people into jobs where they would be an excellent contributer. But it’s the opposite. AI blocks good people from finding meaningful work. Universities aren’t doing their job either to successfully train people into the modern workforce and many people can’t find their way into a good job.

Another point I’d like to make is that AI can’t know whether the applicant is a person of good intentions. A personal interview would make finding that out possible but credentials aren’t enough to show that aspect of a candidate. It is people of good intention that makes the workplace a good place to be. Don’t you think that potential employers should try harder to find that quality in its job screening process? Doesn’t the employer also have a responsiblity to post true job openings and not fake ones in order to minimize the frustration of applicants? Afterall, a lot of job postings today are fake and that’s a bad first encounter with a potential employer.

The huge society that we live in is full of wonderful people who would like to work and contribute to their community’s success. They would like to belong to an effort that is larger than themselves. A workplace can be a wonderful opportunity to do that. These new screening technologies are screening out the bad with the good and standing in the way of better hiring practices. We can do better.

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