The Unpalatable Inquisitiveness of the Human Resources Manager

I am independent, meaning I work for myself. This puts some obstacles in my way, like the strange and paradoxical view of banks everywhere that I am therefore a financial risk to them. Paradoxical because employees everywhere are apparently risk-free, yet they have placed all of their career eggs into one basket but if I lose a client, I pick up another one before the end of the week, so I always have my supply of work more or less guaranteed. This is their way of working, always making you unquestioningly open up your life to them so they can assess not just your finances, but get a pretty good idea of your behind-the-scenes life.

This is copied and enlarged by all types of people and organisations. But amongst the most staggeringly, breathtakingly intrusive groups of people lie the Human Resources Departments. They have ways that make it so easy for them to wheedle information from you without you knowing it. It lies in the type of answers to their questions that you give. This can be at the opening interviews, or at the yearly evaluation, both of which are, to some degree, the most degrading thing people have to suffer in the Western world. Here are some standard questions at interviews:

1. You will have experienced some changes in company policy in your career. How did you deal with them?
2. How do you avoid mistakes in your work?
3. Where do you want to be in five / ten years?
4. How do you prioritise when you have a heavy workload?
5. Have you ever done something different to usual because you thought it was more effective, even if it was not standard procedure?

Out of these questions above, the average HR professional can deduce a lot of things about you. Here are the keys to the above:

1. Your flexibility (what they really want to know is how malleable you are).
2. Your precision (in other words, your drudgery. They want to know how much of an automaton you are).
3. Your ambitions (here, they can deduce how you see yourself and whether you wish to work hard on your way up the ladder, or if you have dangerous ambitions to take over the department immediately).
4. Your logical thinking (or preparing you for the fact that this will happen, because the whole company is understaffed and they need you to understand that you will actually be doing 2 or maybe 3 people's jobs).
5. Your initiative (or your willingness to agree with your superiors, even if, as is often the case, they are less intelligent or less capable than you, and often want things done a specific way because they can't cope with some underling who may be more suitable for the position).

There are some things about the HR manager that are truly bewildering, such as their inexplicable ability to understand terminology and often whole documents that seem to have been written by the descendants of Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a European civil servant. They have a truly incomprehensible terminology of euphemisms that makes Newspeak seem perfectly rational. What do I mean? Well, take a look for yourself at some of the stuff they dream up:

1. Alternation Ranking Method: ranking employees on a particular trait or feature, e.g. flexibility or punctuality, from best to worst
2. Correlation Coefficients: a statistical procedure that compares an employee's job performance with his/her test score
3. Emotional Intelligence: the ability of an employee to be sensitive or understanding to the emotions of others, as well as his/her own impulses
4. Flexible Staffing: a policy to hire temporary or contractual employees on a short-term basis to fill vacancies usually occupied by permanent members of staff. This may help with this...
5. Attrition: not hiring new members of staff after permanent ones have died, resigned, been fired or joined another department.

These are just some of the words and phrases employed by HR departments everywhere, collecting information about you, comparing you to other colleagues, making notes about your suitability, your job longevity, your probability of being promoted, etc... Can you imagine what files those people must be keeping about you?

But here is the main point: a lot of this is just methodology and procedure thought up by a leading psychologist to give HR people everywhere something to follow, something to adhere to, in order to draw comparisons and conclusions using the same scales and statistics for all employees. These are of course flawed, for various reasons, as every human being is (still) different, in the same way that everyone's metabolism is different. Eating an salad every day for some is what they need to keep healthy, but for others it makes them constipated, or the opposite... And so HR methods are unwieldy, inaccurate and useless, but it makes them feel more in control of the situation, because little by little, people's characters, preferences, working habits and routines are slowly converging into the sheeple that those in control crave for. 

Take a look at people's daily routines:

Get up, wash/shower, quick breakfast, commute, arrive, badge in, work, lunch, work, badge out, travel home, eat, watch television, bed. Repeat five days a week, meet friends on Fridays, go shopping on Saturdays, do some housework on Sundays, and a hobby or two. That's how most people's lives go. At least those working in offices. People no longer have time to develop hobbies, see family and friends on a regular basis, cook proper food every evening, get involved in cultural activities, etc. Most people's ambition is having 2 weeks at the beach per year. And yet they have to regurgitate all the ridiculous New-agey stuff at their annual review, where the questions... oh you know the deal. But changing jobs brings out the most gibberish.

1. Why do you want this job?
2. Why do you want to leave the other job?
3. How many hours did you work?
4. What aims do you have for the future?
5. Where would you like to be in ... years?
6. Do you prefer to work independently or in a team?
7. If you know your superior is wrong, how do you handle it?

The list is endless. But quite frankly, the vast majority of people like me, who often require people for various roles, can tell in the first ten minutes if someone is right for the job or not, simply by having a basic chat. There is no need for such a lot of questions, because in the end, if you respect your employees, if you value their work, if you believe they have a right to privacy and to being their own person, you will simply ask for a certificate of good conduct from the police to make sure they're OK, and a few other documents for administration.

What you will not do is make a pseudo-psychological analysis and diagnose your potential employee with one or other potential category of performance. How dare you?

Finally, let me answer the seven questions above:

1. Why do you want this job? Because it pays the bills, but apart from that, why else would I want to shift paper from one pile to another day in-day out?
2. Why do you want to leave the other job? Because you pay more.
3. How many hours did you work? None of your business.
4. What aims do you have for the future? Ditto. But I can tell you it does include money.
5. Where would you like to be in ... years? See my previous answer. But ideally far away from here.
6. Do you prefer to work independently or in a team? Depends. Generally though, in a team my voice of logic and reason is drowned out by the dronings of the one with the loudest voice and the sharpest elbows. On my own, I find I get given targets that are unattainable and so I think I prefer to walk off from the interview now.
7. If you know your superior is wrong, how do you handle it? There are many ways, but one of my favourites is to shrug my shoulders, do it as he/she asks, then when the whole thing goes down the toilet, get fired for obeying instructions.

Quite frankly, I like being independent. I like being able to tell a client to go fly a kite when I get tired of the exaggerated demands. It's a lot like being a babysitter rather than a parent. At the end of the day, you can just hand the little brats back to their respective owners rather than having to take them home with you.

The hazards and misfortunes of being a language trainer

There are few things I find more frustrating, upsetting, enervating and infuriating than the English language training sector and the people involved. I shall elaborate, but this is really just a small part of the overall picture:

There is an awful paradox at the heart of it all that needs somehow to be killed off. If you look at people of other professions coming into contact with large groups of customers on a daily basis, like accountants, doctors, lawyers and the like, they keep themselves to themselves and don't reveal their secrets to the world so readily. They also provide a "need-to-have" service, rather than a  "nice-to-have" service, such as artists, restaurateurs and gardeners. For that reason they can charge a lot of money for their services. Artists, restaurateurs and gardeners too, but there are very few of the latter who actually can afford the kind of gated properties of the former. In fact, they are liable to be the clients of the latter. And far fewer in number, which is why most artists don't make a huge amount of sales.

Language training falls in a middle category. For some it is a "nice-to-have", for others a "need-to-have", where half are learning languages to better carry out their job, and the other half so they can hold conversations with strangers on hotel terraces; and herein lies the problem. The managers and owners of language schools are able to get the best of both worlds by charging clients in the "need-to-have" category a lot of money for the services of their trainers/teachers, yet pay their personnel the same kind of fees from the "nice-to-have" category. It is a trick of the trade, and a very prevalent one. Furthermore, a sizeable minority of the teachers are gap-year students, or freshly diploma'd twenty-somethings who can barely recognise the difference between a preposition and their elbow. The rest, who are trying to make a career out of it are terrorised by their employer by making competitors out of your colleagues (ever wondered why many are reluctant to share?) and making every day in the school seem like it's your last one. But the most despicable part of their little ruse is how many hoops they make you jump through for such a paltry salary. Take a look at some of the jobs on offer on the TEFL websites. Here's one I found today:

[Name removed] is a leader in the provision of educational travel programmes. Accredited by the British Council, we've been teaching English to international students for 20 years. Our aim is to provide students with a fun, friendly and safe environment in which to develop their communication skills in English.

We are looking for talented and committed EFL teachers to work on a non-residential basis at our centre based at [name removed].

This is a 1 week post, teaching up to 20 hours.


So far, so good.

Then:

Essential:
- CELTA, Trinity TESOL, PGCE in English or an MFL, or equivalent
-Bachelor Degree

Desirable:
- Experience of teaching students of university age
-An undergraduate degree

PLEASE NOTE THIS IS A NON RESIDENTIAL POSITION AND WE ARE UNABLE TO PROVIDE ACCOMMODATION.

So, you're thinking it's going to reward you for the fact you have a degree and you need to pay for your own accommodation? Wait for it...

From £12.50 per teaching hour.

I say, what?

From £12.50 per teaching hour.

I did read that right?

Yep, you definitely did.

That's virtually nothing. I got more per hour for mowing lawns, and that was back in the mid-nineties.

So, let's say you're doing the maximum 20 hours for the week. That works out at £250 for the week. Then let's add in your accommodation. You're in a well-to-do provincial city in the late summer. Kids are back at school but it's still warm. You're looking at £25-£40 per night, for a youth hostel or a cheap hotel. So that's between £170 and £280 for the week. In the youth hostel category, you come out with £80 profit, leaving you with just over £10 per day for food. In the cheap hotel category, you're £30 out of pocket even before you've bought a muesli bar for your evening meal. And you still have to factor in that you need to travel there. Oh yes, and UK tax. And that's not for preparing lessons, correcting and marking work and doing the admin. It says "From £12.50 per teaching hour".

This repeats itself over and over again in varying forms of ruthless cheapskatery and devious mind-trickery as to leave most people with the idea that you should be grateful for actually having something to bloody well do, and you're actually such an ungrateful little weasel for demanding a higher salary. You are supposed to understand that you are doing a humanitarian act, and asking for more money will lead to demands from the others, which in the end if all the teachers did it would lead the school to bankruptcy.

Utter rubbish.

Imagine you've got a class of 8 students. Their parents have paid a package of £500 to £900 for the week, including all meals and basic accommodation in the residence halls of the campus. That's about £4000 to £7200 per class. That means the people on the course are from families that are not poor. Indeed, they're likely to be the lawyers and doctors of the future. The school has overheads, so let's take away 60%. That still leaves £1600 to £2880 per group. And they can't pay proper salaries to their teachers?

There are many standard replies to that question, including the old cliché about profit margins and the like. But what I find most baffling is that these schools really do find the personnel for their courses. There really are people who wish to fill the gaps. And these are the pedagogical versions of interns, that new breed of modern crypto-slave that will do anything for the promise of a job in the future. Except in this business, there is no guarantee of success or riches beyond the current hourly rate afforded by language schools across the world.

I think it is really high time serious language trainers got together and separated themselves from the amateurish schools willing to employ bookish recent graduates looking for a jobby (job + hobby) from the more serious ones who look after their staff and treat them more like the career-minded human beings they are trying to become.

Career-wise, I live in a bubble of contentedness, and I am thankfully not in this predicament that the vast majority of my fellow language trainers find themselves in. But when I look through the job ads just to see what else I could be doing, I despair for the predicament of those wanting to join me in this noble yet poorly-rewarded of professions. It is a very well-oiled ladder, and that's how the schools like it.

Finally, a short note about the people who do my job. They are extraordinarily proud people, preferring to let someone else organise the lessons, set up the course locations, find the clients, level-test them, propose times and hours for their course, and ask them for post-course feedback. The teacher is only willing to involve him/herself in the bare minimum of extra activity, and you have to ask why. That is because it is not their job. They are paid to teach and give advice, mark work and guide students to their target. Correcting tests, preparing lessons and writing course records go largely unpaid. Many would say that out of every hour spent in the classroom, about 25 to 40 minutes is spent doing the accompanying admin. And in the class, the energy spent giving the lesson in comparison to the monetary rewards has a real effect on morale, psyche and sense of self-worth.

So next time you question the commitment and satisfaction of language teachers, remember there may be a hundred reasons behind it. Either the language schools need to stop their ludicrous race to the bottom with their course fees (a recent article in Swedish on public procurement of language services, this time translation and interpretation, found that low pricing had an adverse effect on overall quality and client satisfaction) or trainers need to refuse jobs that don't properly reward them for their efforts. I know already what is going to happen: all the time there are people willing to work simply for the work experience, who were legally minors less than 5 years before they do their dodgy TEFL qualifications, the rest will be exploited. And this particular formula is repeating itself in many other professional sectors.