How unemployment is becoming more and more like a job.
By: Olly Haynes
Tags: Recession, Precariat, Unemployment, Youth, Work

One of the major economic side effects of the pandemic and the lockdowns that were introduced to mitigate it, is a much higher unemployment rate and a much lower hiring rate leaving far more people than usual clamouring for a handful of jobs. The unemployment rate hit 4.8% in September meaning that about 1.6 million people who could be in work are not. This is predicted to rise again leaving an estimated 2.6 million people out of work by mid-2021. These trends are particularly pronounced among young people with 16–24 year olds facing an unemployment rate about 10% higher than the national average.

Job searching has always been a difficult experience, but these issues are magnified by the higher unemployment rate and the physical circumstances of the pandemic which adds to the hoops that job seekers are required to jump through in order to find work. Unemployment in 2020 can sometimes resemble a job in and of itself, as the amount of work required in order to be able to labour is not insignificant. During a period of job searching I applied to a British supermarket chain and had to write long pieces about my values and the compatibility with the company, answer a situational quiz, attend a video interview, attend an in person interview and then attend a ‘store manager experience’ after which I heard nothing for three weeks, before I was offered the job. This process spanned several weeks and took around six hours, however many of the people undergoing the same process would have done much the same without even getting the job at the end.

Connor, 22 is currently searching for work in Glasgow and explains that there are a few different types of tasks that application forms for retail or hospitality jobs make you undertake. “One of them is a personality quiz… it’ll look for your values like ‘are you ambitious?’ ‘do you like helping others?’ ‘do you like doing the same task over and over again or do you like doing lots of different tasks?’. They say there’s no right or wrong answers, but you think: if you’re asking them then there’s definitely answers you’re looking for. Obviously I don’t like doing the same thing over and over again, but if I say no, that probably isn’t going to work in my favour for a retail job where I probably am going to be doing the same kind of thing. Then there’s situational quizzes. Where they give you different situations that you might face in the workplace. Dealing with customers, dealing with co-workers. What if a co-worker does this? Do you tell the manager? Would you snitch on them? That’s one of the situations I got”.

These processes take hours and Connor says he has applied to so many that he’s lost track. Rosie, 22 who is looking for work in Milton Keynes agrees saying that “each application is probably an hour, by the time you’ve filled out the form and tweaked your CV and done their stupid little quizzes it just takes an age”. Something that they both identify, which chimed with my experience of unemployment is the fact that they put effort into all their applications, which take hours and hours of their time and they rarely, if ever, receive replies. Connor says “It’s frustrating because I’m not even getting emails back. At least if it’s a no then I can begin to understand where I’m standing as opposed to constantly being like ‘oh I wonder if I’ll hear back’. Most of the time it would seem not”. “It’s just a bit rubbish. I just want to do something” Rosie sighs. She’s sent out lots of applications for retail jobs over several weeks and hasn’t had a single reply.

For academic Guy Standing, the author of several books on precarity, basic income and other topics, these experiences of dealing with online tests and unpaid work in order to labour are part of being in a new class he calls the “precariat” which began to form in the seventies but which became much larger after the recession in 2008.

Standing is in high demand at the moment because his ideas are particularly relevant. He fits a zoom call with me in between two webinars. “If it’s any consolation” he says “it’s an international trend [for] big companies in particular, because there’s no cost to them in setting you up for a series of so-called interviews because it’s all done by algorithms. Then they can put you on to talk to someone who is probably under-employed so he’s got a lot of time on his hands, then you go and do an aptitude test and another test which has got absolutely nothing to do with what you would be doing if you got the bloody job. The average number of rounds of filtering in the US is six rounds before they get to the interview stage — the physical interview — and this was before the pandemic”.

A frustration at the seeming irrelevance of the application tasks is something that Connor and Rosie both attest to. Referring to personality quizzes asking questions like “are you driven to meet your goals?” Rosie says, “I just think why do you need to know? I’d just be stacking shelves” and about the mini essays on how you meet the values of the company she despairs “you have to bootlick to be even considered for a position”.

Both also comment on the amount of time it takes to trawl through fake or inaccurate job listings or to sign up for new job board accounts to apply to certain jobs. Rosie has had to make multiple accounts to apply for jobs and I had to create new accounts almost every day while I was job searching because lots of companies outsource their application process meaning jobseekers have to create an account with the company that they apply to as well as for the recruitment apps which often require filling out long profiles. According to Connor “I would say that’s another time suck. You sign up to those [email alerts from jobs boards] so you’re constantly checking emails thinking ‘what if that’s a pretty good one’ so you’re constantly looking at these job alerts, but almost 99% of them I think just turn out to be total crap. I’ve got a lot of adverts for jobs where it has earning potential because it’s some kind of marketing thing and it’s done on a self-employed basis so there’s no real guarantee”.

For Standing this situation has arisen because “your time is not valued at all” and he agrees with Rosie’s point about bootlicking, arguing that the economy now treats people as though they were “a supplicant. A supplicant is somebody who has to ask for favours. They have to say, please can you help? Please can I do this?”. Standing has a solution to some of these issues that more and more people will soon be facing, “I proposed basically that the first round, nobody pays anybody. They put out an advert saying that they’re looking for somebody to do X job. Then nobody is paying anybody for you applying to get that job. Then if they propose an aptitude test or something, they should take account of the time they ask you to spend and if there’s a second round they should pay you and if there’s a third round they should pay you more, according to how much time they’re asking you to use. Because, for them it’s free because their algorithm is doing it and they’re trying to gain more knowledge and therefore they should pay. I believe that if that were the case, if there was a law passed, they would very quickly stop this rubbish and make sure that everything was decided after two rounds”.

Unemployment is difficult and the impersonal processes of the job hunt don’t make it any easier. Guy Standing receives lots of letters and emails from people who have read his books telling him about their situation and how his work has helped them understand it. He refers to the situation of the precarious and unemployed as “indignity” and is very empathetic with the people he talks to. He recounts a Chinese saying that he thinks could be at least a small comfort to the unemployed in the precariat: “When you’re really being treated like dirt. You should bow so low that the emperor does not see you smile”.

Some names have been changed to protect the identities of those interviewed.