The Great Backlash & Candidate Abuse

"I am God of my employees." -Aaron the Arrogant

Not only is the job market a hot dumpster fire (like the broader US economy) - the hiring process itself is as broken and absurd as it was pre-Great Resignation, if not more so.

Links:

https://causeyconsultingllc.com/2022/04/04/when-the-pendulum-swings/

https://washington-mail.com/a-great-backlash/

Links where I can be found: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/2023/01/30/updates-housekeeping/

Need more? Email me: https://causeyconsultingllc.com/contact-causey/ 

Transcript

Welcome to the Causey Consulting Podcast. You can find us online anytime at CauseyConsultingLLC.com. And now, here's your host, Sara Causey.

Hello, Hello, and thanks for tuning in. In today's episode, I will be talking about the great backlash and candidate abuse. I wish I didn't have to, I would really love to not add another character to our Hall of villains, people like Mike the micromanager, Ned, the needy, Teddy, the tailgate, negotiator, et cetera at all. But wow, it's getting hairy out there. And weird. If you're on the job market, I don't have to tell you that. If you're involved in HR, staffing, recruiting anything that really touches the hiring process, I also don't have to tell that to you. You already know what time it is. But unfortunately, we live in an age of mass media that's just full of it. They are putting out whatever their corporate masters, tell them to put out whatever they're paid to put out. And it's just a load of bunk. 3.9% unemployment rate churning and burning, doing great. There might be a bit of a slowdown, there might be a little bit fewer jobs than normal. Hiring slowed a little teeny tiny pinch bit, but overall still doing great. robust economy, resilient labor market. Right. Sure. Okay. Okay, okay. Sure, right. Anybody that's actually in the trenches, that's going through it knows that's a load of crap. And I don't want anybody to feel alone. I don't want anybody to feel like, well, the media says everybody else is churning and burning, everything is fine. The consumer is resilient. The labor market is doing great. Is it just me? What's going on? No, first and foremost, it's not just you. It isn't. You don't have to believe the hot air the lies and the complete BS coming out of mainstream media. I had an encounter recently that inspired me to record this episode. As I said at the beginning, I wish that I didn't have to add another person to our Hall of villains, but unfortunately, here we are. I will call this individual Aaron the arrogant, not his real name, obviously, just a character for our whole along the lines of Nancy the nitpicker, Ned, the needy, Mike the micromanager, Billy, the backstabber, etc. Aaron, the arrogant. I'll have to be necessarily vague here. I recently had a conversation with someone and I thought, Oh my god. First and foremost, this is going to be cannon fodder for a podcast episode. But secondly, people need to understand they need to really be well informed, and they need to understand what's going on with these hiring managers, these company owners, these corporate executives, etc. And where their heads are at. Initially, Aaron had said that he was having an issue with employee retention. But as we got deeper into the conversation, his assertions change. In my opinion, I believe his assertions changed because he was just flat out lying to me. But he informed me that he and his team played along with the great resignation. But they got tired of it. They got tired of feeling like they had to justify themselves to applicants. They felt that job seekers were coming to them with an attitude of why should I work for you? What is your company going to do for me? And he didn't like that. Neither did anybody else on his team. According to Aaron, they tolerated the great resignation. And they went along with it because they said, they felt like all of their competitors were doing it. So they would be left out if they didn't, but they didn't pay it any real respect. They didn't value it. And they felt like it was a flash in the pan. At some point, the pendulum would swing back. I warned you going all the way back to April of 2022. When everybody else that does HR commentary was telling you great resignation is gonna last forever do break seal clap, seal clap, seal clap. I was out here going, huh? Huh? No, I knew this was coming. And I hope you listened. So Aaron's like, yeah, we tolerated it. We went along with it, but we didn't believe in it. And we really didn't want to deal with it. We We paid it lip service. But we thought it was ridiculous. We wanted control. We wanted the candidates to come and tell us, here's what I'm going to do for you. It's my honor to come to work for you. So they reached a point and Aaron's company of deciding the hell with the great resignation, we've had enough. We want the balance of power to go away from the job seekers and to come right back to us. So He said that they had ironed out a formula that he was quite sold on. It wasn't a surprise to me as we started walking through it, why he was having issues with employee retention, because, wow, just Aaron's whole attitude, the apparent attitude of the people on his team, their hiring process, it was all just awful, trying to think of a good adjective. But yeah, awful, pretty much sums it up. It's just hideous. He informed me that he does not want candidates to ask, what what's the selling point? Why, why would I want to work for you? What's your company going to do for me? He wants the candidates to sell themselves and to practically beg for a job. And he informed me on ironically, I'm just going to stop you right here because I know that some mansplain or undoubtedly will write in and say, well, perhaps he was joking. Maybe he was being crass and tacky. And he thought he was being funny. No, you were not there. I was there. He was not being ironic. He was not being funny. He told me this in complete seriousness, I am God of my employees. He also told me that because he is the one who writes the checks. He should make all the rules. The candidates are the one asking for a paycheck. They're the ones asking for a job. And since he has a job, and he has paychecks to issue, then he should get to make all of the rules. I was horrified. And I'm like, Okay, well, wait a minute. What happened to the idea of it being a two way street? So not just a matter of what is your company going to do for the employee or the job seeker? But also, what are you going to do for them? And what are they going to do for you? Like? Shouldn't it be a two way street? Why does it just have to be the one or the other? In thinking back to the great resignation? If the pendulum went too far in the other direction? There's no reason for us to bring it back to some other radical crazy place, why not put it in the middle? What are you going to do for them? And what can they do for you? Like, shouldn't it be a two way street? And he tells me, Oh, no, no, it's a one way street. It has to be a one way street. Because I'm the boss. I'm the one with the money. I'm the one issuing the paychecks. They're not paying me I'm paying them. So I tell them what to do. And I tell them how it's going to be period. And that's just that. Frankly, there's not much that you can say, or do after a person has sat there and told you, quote, I am God of my employees. I immediately thought of that scene in malice, where after Alec Baldwin has given his god complex speech, Nicole Kidman's character says, Why don't you ask God? How many shots of bourbon he had before he cut me open? And just thought, why don't we ask God, what his employees really think? It's not a wonder that they're having problems with retention. I imagine that as soon as somebody working for them gets even the hint, even the Vegas notion of a better opportunity. They're gone and out the door. They probably burn rubber out of the parking lot.

Wow. So then Aaron's story changes, and he says that, actually, they're not having a problem with retention. His pain point is that he just doesn't have time to go through the interview process. He also used a lot of annoying sports metaphors. And look, I'm a football fan. It's not that I mind somebody talking about football, when I find a noxious is somebody that clearly has a god complex using football metaphors and Super Bowl metaphors, which he continued to do like, he used the analogy of I want to hire Tom Brady and his prime. I don't want to lose. I just want winners who win every single time. I don't want losers that make excuses. I just want winners who win all the time. And I already have the coaching strategies down pat. I want to be Bill Belichick and I want to call the plays. And I already know that my plays work and I'm like Okay, but wait a minute, that doesn't make sense for what you initially told me. Because what you told me was that you're having employee engagement and employee retention problems. So your process is not working it some something is not quite gelling here. And he's like, No, the process works. I just think that we aren't hiring that Tom Brady and his prime, and that's what I want. And I'm like, Oh, my God, it's such a headache. Sometimes, just being around a person, whether you're there physically in person, and you're you're able to absorb their physical energy, the aura that's actually around them, or you're dealing with them virtually. It doesn't necessarily matter. Some people their vibe is just so grotesque. And they're so completely full of themselves. That, oh, you just listening to their drivel and being around their extra extra large ego gives you such a headache that you think I just, I just don't, I just want to get away, I want to go take a shower, when I go take a hot shower. And get away from this with a lot of soap on shower with a copious amounts of soap and just get away from this. Oh, so naturally mean, even though the economy is slow, even though let's all be honest here. There are not a lot of opportunities for HR and staffing related work those opportunities, because so few companies are genuinely legitimately hiring right now, those opportunities have slowed down. Even at that, I'm not going to compromise my standards by working on a project for somebody who is going to be abusive, abusive to me, abusive to people who would be hired. I don't want my name anywhere near a project like that. I just made my skin crawl. So a couple of things. I want to point out here a number one, I warned you about this in 2022. I told you the pendulum was going to swing. And brothers and sisters, it has swung, and we are in some bad, bad shape. When I had my interview with the Washington mail, June 6 of 2023, I warned you, there would be a great backlash. They asked me in your opinion, the great resignation is finished. To which I replied, Oh, yes. And it has been for quite some time now for white collar workers. Quite frankly, corporate America has not been shy in saying that it wants to hold the balance of power again, when you have collusion between corporate America, Central bankers and Capitol Hill, who do you think is going to ultimately prevail? John and Jane Q Public are the rich and powerful. They asked me, Is there a backlash against it? And I replied, I definitely believe so. I think we can say there was a great resignation. And now there's a great backlash against it. The economy has boom and bust cycle. Sure. But I think at this point, we see some CEOs really taking an impish, Glee and punishing employees with RTO mandates and conditioning jobseekers by putting them through the wringer during the interview process. It's terrible. They asked me What do you mean by conditioning job seekers? And I said, part of corporate America's stock and trade is the idea of will you go along to get along? Or will you be a problem? It's really about conformity. Will this candidate conform with our attitudes and expectations? or would this candidate be more of a maverick? Generally speaking, the maverick candidate is passed over in favor of the conformist and told you. I stand by every blessed word of that, Would that it were not so you know, we'd love to be able to get on the air and tell you, the tide is turning in a good way. The tide is rolling out new things are good. It's morning in America. Again, I would love to tell you that. But we're not there. And I don't know how long it will be before we are there. Again. I don't know. I mean, you have predictions that at some point this year, we'll have CBDCs. We don't know what's going to happen with the election. I avoid getting overly political here. I get into some of that stuff. more so on the conspiracy theories blog and on that podcast, but over here, I mean, I tried to stay neutral. But you already know I don't think it matters. Donkey elephant red, blue. senile old man, Orange Man. I don't think it matters. The fat cats at Davos have already said they believe that orange man is going back in and they're not worried about it. So for all of this political theater, in my opinion, fake persecution, show trials, et cetera. They're not worried. Of course they're not. When you look at that Oxfam report about how the top 1% profited mercilessly during The pandemic while other people were out of work, and worried about where their next meal was going to come from, they were making obscene amounts of money. By the way, the web is already predicted we're not that far away from having a trillionaire. Being a billionaire is going to be so passe. We need trillionaires. Now, where do you think they're gonna be getting their money from? The middle class has been shrinking for 50 plus years. Where Where do you think their cash is coming from? Gordon Gekko tried to tell you years ago, it's a zero sum game, somebody wins and somebody loses. And that's exactly how they look at it. I don't give you advice, and I don't tell you what to do. If we were at the pub having a pint I'd say, You know what, you got to be careful, because there are some employers that are downright abusive. They know they're not buying into the hot air hopium and nonsense. They know the economy is trash. They know the job market is a dumpster fire, and they feel like they can abuse candidates, and then what will happen when you're their employee? If they're abusive and crappy to you during the interview process? How bad will it be when you're actually working for them? You know, if you have somebody that's so bold as to say, I am God of my employees, that definitely does not tell me churn and burn and doing great 3.9% unemployment rate. It simply does not. Stay safe, stay sane, and I will see you in the next episode.

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