"Power" vs. Value in Hiring

Suzanne Lucas considers the job-hunting custom of job-seekers sending thank-you notes to hiring managers and finds it wanting:

Really, I don't care who sends a thank you note to whom. What I care about is flipping the current paradigm on its head. Recruiters and candidates shouldn't be enemies. Hiring managers and candidates should be trying to figure out if the position would be a good fit for all concern[ed]. It's a discussion of equals. [link in original, bold added]

If you're jumping through these, you're doing it wrong. (Image by Joel Fulgencio, via Unsplash, license.)

And, although Lucas starts out saying, Perhaps you should write the thank-you note to hiring managers, it is clear from this column (and the one linked above about recruiting) that Lucas might favor two-way thank-you's, were there to be a custom at all.

That makes more sense to me, anyway.

The fact that the existing custom is so one-sided strikes me as a symptom of the ridiculous idea that, because the employer pays money, he is somehow a "master" or has "power" in the relationship -- an idea I once saw Alison Green demolish with aplomb.

In that case, a manager whose employee did not "need" the pay wrongly thought he had no "leverage" over that employee. He was wrong, and anyone managing employees who has a similar notion should drop everything and read what she said.

In the situation Lucas analyzes, it is also apparent that there is a fixation only on the money in the potential transaction, and that this is packaged together with the quasi-feudal idea of power. Employers who fall for this error forget that their employees are human beings who want to be treated well and who have other options. Potential employees who do so risk putting themselves into situations that give the smear wage slavery whatever thin veneer of credibility it undeservedly has.

Trade, of which traditional employment is only one example, is a giving of value in exchange for value. The whole point of of any negotiation about a potential agreement to trade is to determine whether one is possible and, if so, desirable for all concerned. Each party in an employment interview process should guard against letting our culture's confusion of money with force cause them to lose sight of the purpose of conducting such a negotiation.

-- CAV