The Rigged Job Search

Millions of hungry jobseekers, desperately looking to work, annually drop out of the labor force and stop scouring for employment because of the unfair, time-consuming, and overbearing nature of the “Employment Search Complex”. Families lose out on the lost income of potential breadwinners, municipalities lose tax dollars from a smaller workforce to draw revenue from, families have less disposable income to support local businesses, and society at large loses out as one more person's dream dies an untimely death.

 

In many cases, such discouraged jobseekers are forced to live via public assistance and utilize assorted safety net programs, rendering them a cost to the system. Even if such discouraged jobseekers are not utilizing public resources to subsidize their living expenses, they are living off the fruit of others. Moreover, society loses out on whatever unique skills, services, or goods these discouraged jobseeker talents could have offered or produced in their calling, professional field, or the marketplace.

 

How did this happen? Why? A conflation of factors emerged in our present-day work environment to tilt the game markedly in favor of employers. While many unfair corporate hiring practices are presently legal, they shouldn’t be. Other selection practices are legal but still are unscrupulous or immoral. Many job seekers are oblivious that many nefarious recruiting practices are quickly becoming "industry standard”. Others blithely dismiss the plight of jobseekers and snidely suggest to the frustrated to merely apply elsewhere, as if the job search hustle isn't largely skewed towards employers everywhere!

 

The “Employment Industrial Complex” is rigged against the rank-and-file jobseeker through the rise of Internet buffers, an exploding population that exponentially increases the competition amongst applicants, the decline of private unions, the acceptance of the libertarian philosophy that allows free market companies to behave with little oversight, and the lack of awareness of how universal such predatory hiring practices are proliferating through every industry.

 

Companies know that you need them more than they need you in particular. Sure, companies need somebody to fill a role, but it doesn’t have to be you.

 

Companies have money, powerful political allies, and large communication platforms. All we have is each other, so let’s organize and take our power back!
 

The time of consumerist, passive sheep who are too indulgent to stand up for his or her own rights is over. The power is in us – to use our power to organize effectively – to finally be heard by the sheep-like corporate HR gatekeepers and their useful idiot influencers – that prop up this biased, unjust, and ineffective talent selection process, akin to "careerist carpetbaggers".

 

Reimaging Recruiting

Champion U Consulting seeks to “Reimagine Recruiting” to fight against corporate tyranny in the job selection process. We seek to empower job seekers and employees through our 3 pillars of advice, advocacy, and accountability. Furthermore, we seek to start a new chapter in the American Workers' Rights Movement to expand commonsense protections for jobseekers, eradicate presently “accepted” abuses in the selection process, and ensure a fairer overall application, selection, and negotiation process.

 

In short, we demand transparency, fairness, and justice for jobseekers…and we seek to organize jobseekers to mobilize sweeping changes to the “Employment Industrial Complex.”

 

Why should jobseekers…

•    Endure seemingly endless application questions that require they submit very personal information about their personal and professional histories to unknown, unaccountable entities – who won’t even post the contact number to a live, HR person to clarify basic questions about the posted position? 

•    Be compelled to complete unpaid lengthy skills tests projects and assessments – where your ideas can be stolen – without you being hired?

•    Relinquish their negotiating positions for companies, who won’t post the salary range for their own advertised position – and often avoid directly answering salary specifics without requiring you to jump through hurdles first.

 

I. Advice

We aim to provide job seekers with counterintuitive advice and heterodox analysis to debunk and reevaluate longstanding, established job-seeking tropes and myths.

 

Our fresh perspective is supported by insider wisdom from veteran talent, who have worked on the other side of the recruiting funnel and can explain why the system operates the way it does. The same, passé conventional wisdom that touts practices that are beyond obsolete and gives jobseekers a false sense of security. Meanwhile, as jobseekers hopelessly waste hour upon hour sending resumes and cover letters to virtual black holes – which are mere mirages of imagined opportunity – their motivation wanes a little more with each passing day.

 

The old rules of job hunting no longer apply. As such, you should start thinking of yourself as an independent contractor, not a wage serf or a wage slave – dependent on one employer for your financial needs – any longer.

 

•    Champion U Consulting will provide unbiased journalism, erudite analytical opinions, heterodox strategies, and overall business advice on dealing with today’s one-sided Employment Industrial Complex.

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II. Advocacy

Jobseekers are currently at the whims of Corporate America. Whatever mandates each company demands from its applicants, the jobseeker has no recourse – except not to apply. However, it’s become standard across a plethora of industries for employers to demand candidates to take onerous, tedious, and time-consuming skills tests; require unpaid lengthy consultation projects where your ideas can be stolen; invade your social media privacy; deprive you of your negotiating power; and obfuscate the position salary structure.

Workers advocacy organizations need to start regaining lost ground for today’s job seekers, as many of these unfair selection practices are quickly becoming universal practices and even standardized for mid-career positions. Soon, many rank-and-file job seekers will accept these intrusions as the “cost of doing business”, to their detriment.

 

•    Champion U Consulting will advocate for expanding the rights and protections of today’s job seekers through collaborating with strategic alliance partners, building public support by illuminating unfair hiring practices, and initiating political action if necessary. 

 

III. Accountability

It's long past time for accountability for America's Corporate Overlords.
 

Calling out companies for their unfair and/or unfriendly selection processes via social media pressure, online petitions, direct consumer advocate campaigns to corporations and their sponsors, and even through political action.

For example, why is your legal name, address, date of graduation, or any other personally identifiable information (PII) required to be submitted in the early stages of the hiring process?

Why can’t your recruiting team answer each inquiry?

Why doesn’t your company state in the job advertisement that a “working interview” that will take up 3 hours of your free time – is compulsory up front?

 

Worse, such a company, which demands your PII data up front, often hides its own HR or Recruiting contact information – all while pretending to be a socially conscious organization. These companies incessantly tout their charitable contributions to marginalized people. They shamelessly promote their “virtuous” community service, advocate for DEI, or champion the latest social cause fad with unbridled faux magnanimous. Yet, many of those same “caring” companies treat applicants with very little respect by disguising their job salaries, invading your privacy, and foisting a one-sided, burdensome selection process on their interested candidates.

 

We have to understand the game as it stands, and benefits employers. Few Corporate Overlord's mission statements are little more than aspirational pieces of creative writing.

Thus:

•    Companies are apathetic to the reality that by asking jobseekers to provide excessive personally identifiable information (PII) in their applications, jobseekers' very own PII – can be used against them as an unwitting tool in decoding their age, race, socioeconomic class, and religion and could easily open up a candidate to one form potential discrimination or another.

•    Recruiting teams opt to hide behind cyber buffers to protect their workflow bubble from interruptions from candidates, while others have lost the art of dealing with actual live people on an authentic basis.

•    Companies know their precious passive candidate “pipelines” would suffer because a significant number of jobseekers would not invest in such an arduous application process that is lengthy, tedious, and requires hours of unpaid work assignments, as only 2% of applicants typically stand a chance of landing an offer.

 

We have to organize to challenge the prevailing winds.

 

•    Champion U Consulting will organize cyber “accountability” campaigns to showcase and disrupt unfair corporate hiring practices and challenge the prevailing winds that overwhelmingly favor employers in the job selection process.