Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream

  Leaving aside the validity of “types,” the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator has zero predictive value even in its own terms. In one study, undertaken by proponents of Myers-Briggs, only 47 percent of people tested fell into the same category on a second administration of the test. Another study found 39 to 76 percent of those tested assigned to a different “type” upon retesting weeks or years later. Some people’s “types” have been found to vary according to the time of day. Paul concludes that “there is no evidence that [Briggs’s] sixteen distinct types have any more validity than the twelve signs of the zodiac.”5

  So why is the corporate world, which we think of as so fixated on empirical, in fact, quantifiable, measures of achievement like the “bottom line,” so attached to these meaningless personality tests? One attraction must be that the tests lend a superficial rationality to the matching of people with jobs. No one, after all, wants a sadistic personnel director or a morbidly shy publicist; and if you failed at one job, it is probably comforting to be told that it was simply not a good “fit” for your inner nature. As Paul writes:

  The administration of personality tests is frequently presented as a gesture of corporate goodwill, a generous acknowledgement of employees’ uniqueness. Under this banner of respect for individuality, organizations are able to shift responsibility for employee satisfaction onto that obligatory culprit, “fit.” There’s no bad worker and no bad workplace, only a bad fit between the two.6

  Of course, if the function of the tests is really ideological—to promote the peg-in-hole theory of employment—they do not have to be in any way accurate as predictors of performance or satisfaction. They serve more as underpinnings of corporate etiquette, allowing employers to rationalize rejection or dismissal in terms of an inadequate “fit.” We believe that there is a unique slot for each person, the tests announce—even though we may fail to find it in your particular case.

  My job, though, is to find a “fit,” however wobbly, in any institutional structure that will have me. And with this simple task in mind, the personality tests seem even more mysterious. If I am a public relations person by training and experience, what good will it do me to discover that my personality is better suited to a career as an embalmer? Presumably there are extroverted engineers and introverted realtors, who nevertheless manage to get the job done. The peculiar emphasis on “personality,” as opposed to experience and skills, looms like a red flag, but I have no way of knowing yet what the warning’s about.

  MY LONG-THREATENED one-hour makeup session with Kimberly finally arrives, and the reason for this ghastly intrusion into my time is that I blew off a prior scheduled session out of sheer sullenness and inability to simulate the cheerfulness that a successful Kimberly interaction requires. We start with the results of the Myers-Briggs test. “You’re an ENTJ,” she announces. “I was so excited when I saw it!”

  “Remember the two overlapping circles?” she quizzes me. I acknowledge that I do. One was the world, one was me.

  “Well,” she explains, “the personality is part of you”

  “As opposed to the world?”

  “Yes! Each letter signifies something, and together you get a kind of fruit salad! The E —that’s for extrovert. You know that word?”

  “Mmm.”

  “It means that you get your energy external to yourself.” She too is an E, and being E is “good news for the job search, because introverts have a lot of trouble getting out there.”

  I cannot think of how to respond, which seems to occasion a rare moment of self-doubt in Kimberly. “Do you agree about the E part?” she asks. “Do you feel drained by spending time with people? Or energized?”

  In this case, definitely drained, but I am loath to disown the good news of my E-ness. She proceeds through the letters, pausing in between to let me acknowledge the truth of them. “N is for intuitive, as opposed to S, which is a kind of detail person. The challenge, for an N, is that they are kind of disorganized.” Ah yes, that’s me. T is for “thinker as opposed to feeling,” which is very good although she herself tests on the feeling side, and J means I like “closure on things.” The danger there is that I might come to “premature closure,” and she can help me slow down a little. I suspect this is a veiled reference to my recent insistence on a time frame for our coaching process, or at least some estimate of when I would be released into the world as a viable candidate—a demand she had weaseled out of.

  “Now for the really good news,” she tells me. “ENTJ is also called the commandant. They usually rise to the highest level in organizations. You are a natural leader!”

  “So I should apply for CEO jobs?”

  “Well no, but you can tell people you have really strong leadership qualities. Would you be comfortable with that?”

  I tell her I’m not sure and, ever so tactfully, that I don’t really see the point of this. Never mind that the ENTJ version of me bears no resemblance to the emotional, artistic, melancholy, and envious neurotic revealed by Morton’s WEPSS test, which of course goes unmentioned here.

  “The point is,” she interjects, “that it gives you language!” She directs me to open the booklet that she had sent me along with the test, Introduction to Type in Organizations, second edition. After some scuffling with the detritus on my desk, I find it and turn to page 31, as instructed. There I find a list of the organizational qualities of ENTJs, including “take charge quickly,” “develop well-thought-out plans,” and “run as much of the organization as possible.” “So?” I ask.

  “You can say it in your résumé!” she responds, and I begin to detect just the slightest impatience with me.

  I tell her I can’t say I develop well-thought-out plans just because this test says I do, and we toss that one around for a few minutes, with her insisting it’s who I am. “Well, I don’t think I can walk into some new situation and announce that I can take charge or that I’m a natural leader.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because it sounds boastful.”

  And now she can no longer suppress the irritation, answering only with a mocking “Helloo-oo-oo?”

  Unless I can fake a bomb attack on my home, we have twenty-five minutes to go, which I would rather not spend being bullied into “owning,” as she puts it, my inner commandant. I have a question prepared. Over our several sessions so far, I have intuited that she wants me to be more like her—upbeat, cheery, “in the moment,” and excruciatingly overreactive. In my web searches, I have come across several enjoinders to, in fact, become more Kimberly-like if I intend to land a job. One such site, called Professionals in Transition, features an article on developing a “winning attitude,” which advises that

  your personal attitude will determine the ultimate success of your job campaign. If you are angry with your former employer, or have a negative attitude, it will show. Studies have shown that the hiring process is over 90% emotional. In other words, if I like you, I may hire you. If you are perceived as being hostile, negative or carrying significant emotional baggage, it will send a mixed message that can significantly hinder your job campaign efforts.

  The idea that hiring decisions are “90% emotional” is deeply discouraging. What happened to skills and achievements? But if a winning attitude is what I need, I am determined to develop one, so I ask Kimberly how to go about this.

  Maybe it’s hard for her to imagine not having one, because she immediately wants to know what stands in my way. “Like what are you worried about?”

  “My age, for one thing.”

  “So the trick is to make your age a nonissue. What age would you like to be?”

  I tell her I’m fine with my current age, but clearly it doesn’t meet her standards. She goes off into an explanation of the difference between “biological” and “chronological” age, and will not be budged by my insistence that I am happy to be who I am, thank you. “Wouldn’t you say you feel like thirty-seven?”

  Actually, I feel much better than I did at thirty-seven, but, w
hat the hell, I agree to go along with her idée fixe that thirty-seven is my “biological age.”

  “SO? Then you ARE thirty-seven!” she announces triumphantly.

  “But you can figure out my age from my résumé, which lists the year of my college graduation.”

  “Absolutely don’t put your graduation date on your résumé,” she advises, “and eliminate all the earlier jobs. It shouldn’t go back more than ten years, fifteen max.”

  This takes my breath away. She might as well have instructed me to amputate my legs at the knees. I mourn for Barbara Alexander, who had been fluffing up so nicely and now must be contracted into a thirty-seven-year-old midget. It has to be done, though; all references to a life prior to 1989 must be expunged from my résumé.

  Even more staggering is my other major “takeaway” from this session (I’m at least picking up some jargon): that I am not the only phony in the job-searching business. What I’ve been learning from Kimberly and to a certain extent also from the stolid Joanne is how to lie—how to plump up an undistinguished résumé, how to project a kind of confidence I neither feel nor deserve to feel. Deception is part of the game. Even getting along with Kimberly, which I admit I haven’t done very well—she once utilized the “dance” metaphor to tell me, “We’re dancing, but we’re stepping all over each other’s toes”—has been part of the training process. I can be what I want to be, is the message, so long as I act like I believe it. I am ready, or almost ready, to press on out into the world.

  two

  Stepping Out into the World of Networking

  All the website advice I have gleaned about job searching emphasizes the importance of “networking.” At first, in my innocence, I had envisioned this as a freewheeling exercise in human sociability, possibly involving white wine. Joanne and Kimberly, though, have impressed on me that networking takes hard work, discipline, and perseverance. When I informed Kimberly of my intention to launch the networking phase, she caught me up short with a demand to hear my “elevator speech.” This, it turns out, is a thirty- to forty-five-second self-advertisement, which in my case, Kimberly suggests, should begin with “Hi, I’m Barbara Alexander, and I’m a crackerjack PR person!” In one of our phone sessions, Joanne shared with me her own elevator speech—it turns out that she too is job searching—and when I ventured that it sounded a bit stiff, she confessed to not having fully memorized it yet.

  Hours of Internet searching have netted me a “networking event” only two and a half hours away at the Forty-Plus Club of Washington, D.C. Founded to help middle-aged executive job seekers during the Depression, the club attracted to its first advisory board such corporate and cultural luminaries as Tom Watson, the founder of IBM; James Cash Penney, of JC Penney; Arthur Godfrey, the TV personality; and Norman Vincent Peale, the author of The Power of Positive Thinking —whom I take to be the intellectual granddad of Kimberly. Despite their establishment origins, the nineteen Forty-Plus Clubs around the nation are the closest thing one can find to a grassroots organization of the white-collar unemployed. The clubs are run entirely by volunteers, conveniently drawn from the pool of unemployed, middle-aged, white-collar people.

  The event starts at 9:30 on a rainy January morning, at an impressive address near Dupont Circle, although the actual space turns out to be a dark, almost belligerently undecorated basement suite. Pamela, who’s about fifty and dressed in a long, close-fitting skirt that creates a definite mermaid effect, greets me in the corridor and directs me to a table where Ted, also about fifty, is presiding over the name tag distribution. He wears a wrinkled suit and tie, set off, intriguingly, by a black eye. No, he instructs, I am not to take a red name tag; as a “new person,” I am assigned to blue. Looking off to the side a little, perhaps to draw attention from his eye, he confides that the networking will proceed until 10:00, at which time we will be treated to a lecture on “New Year’s resolutions for job searchers.”

  Time is short, so I get right down to work, going up to my fellow job seekers, introducing myself, and asking what kinds of jobs they’re looking for. About fifteen people have drifted in so far and distributed themselves among the chairs arranged in semicircles around a podium. All are middle-aged white guys, and I manage to successfully connect with several of them before the seats fill up, hampering my efforts to circulate: Mike, who’s in finance; Jim, who is also in PR and, alarmingly enough, has been looking for seven months. A man who identifies himself as a media manager latches onto me next, relating that he is bitter—his word—because he gave eleven years to Time Warner and has just been laid off in some inexplicable corporate reorganization, leaving him with two teenagers to feed and educate. So these are my people, my new constituency—men, and now a few women, who will go home as I will to a desk off the dining room and an afternoon of lonely web searching.

  I had worried about not having an elevator speech prepared but none of the people I talk to offers one, much less asks to hear mine. What were Kimberly and Joanne thinking of? Most of the job searchers present wear expressions of passivity and mild expectation; clothing-wise, few have advanced much beyond the sweatpants level. Going by such superficials alone, I’d be surprised if there’s another ENTJ in the bunch. In fact, even as the place fills up with a total of about thirty people, all in the same white and over-the-hill demographic, I notice that I’m the only one systematically working the room. One of the later arrivals, Michael, barely responds to my smiling overtures, burying his head in the Washington Post. From him I move on to Frank, a rumpled-looking fellow of about sixty, who says he is a consultant in financial matters.

  “Do you know what’s wrong with Bush?” he asks me. “He’s never had to work; he’s had everything handed to him on a silver platter.”

  When I nod in agreement and say that I am also consulting —a term I’ve learned to substitute for freelancing —he observes that “that’s what they want us all to be—consultants.” Because then they can use us when they need us and get rid of us when they don’t—no benefits or other entanglements involved.

  At 10:00 the meeting is opened by Merle, who explains that the “core program” of the Forty-Plus Club is a three-week “boot camp” aimed at turning newbies like myself into mean, lean, job-searching machines. I find myself slavishly cathected to Merle; she is beautiful, for one thing, about my age or a little younger, and awesomely poised. I take her to be my female executive template—kindly in tone but brooking no deviations from the business at hand. She says she’s been job searching for nine months—which, given the setting, must be meant as a qualification for her leadership role—but the information is definitely disturbing. If such a paragon of executive virtue can go jobless for almost a year, what hope is there for someone in my situation?

  Merle introduces our guest speaker, Joe Loughran, a former “Wall Street Associate” who has a Harvard MBA and now runs his own business as a career coach, or “transition accelerant” as the brief biography on the Forty-Plus web site puts it. A large, mild-mannered fellow turned out preppily in khakis and red sweater, he begins with a bit of self-deprecation on the theme of giving up chocolate as a New Year’s resolution—he “would have trouble with that”—and then seems to have trouble relinquishing the chocolate theme, getting tangled up in how resolutions can have a “domino effect”: you don’t buy a new suit because you’re waiting to lose a few pounds from the chocolate deprivation, and then, because you don’t have a new suit, you don’t go for an important interview. The lesson would seem to be: don’t bother with resolutions; lecture over.

  But things pick up when he asks us what obstacles we face in our job searches. A half-dozen hands go up, offering such obstacles as fear, inertia, embarrassment, procrastination, money, “nonlinear career path,” and the mysterious challenge of “staying up.” I catch Ted, who is standing against the wall, nodding vigorously at each of the obstacles, suggesting that he knows each of them all too well. Joe is doing his best to keep up on a flip chart. I throw in that I get overwhelme
d by all the things there are to do, lack priorities. This is recorded as “scheduling.”

  At this point I am expecting some solutions from Joe, but Merle, who has never abdicated her position at the front of the room, steps forward to ask, “What have some people done to manage?” I want Joe’s job is what I am thinking, which seems to involve no more than note taking and serving, in his brilliant red sweater, as a human stoplight. But solutions to my problem of “scheduling” are pouring in as fast as I can write them down. “I make a daily schedule including Internet searches and exercise,” one woman contributes. “This forces me to be accountable even if I’m the only one in the room, managing myself.” Someone else adds, “I set the alarm for the same time I did when I was working. I get up, shave, dress, just as if I was going to work.” Another solution: enroll your spouse as a “supervisor,” to remind you “you said you were going to do such and such today.”

  This advice comes as a surprise: job searching is not joblessness; it is a job in itself and should be structured to resemble one, right down to the more regrettable features of employment, like having to follow orders—orders which are in this case self-generated. Something about this scenario carries a whiff of necrophilia. I think of the fabled resident of old Key West who somehow had his beloved’s corpse preserved in a condition congenial to continued physical intimacies for years after her death. So, too, we are not to accept joblessness but to hold on desperately to some faint simulacrum of employment.

  Everyone agrees on the necessity of managing oneself much as a real boss might, although this presents immediate conceptual problems: if “selling myself” had seemed like a tricky form of self-objectification, “managing myself” takes the process even farther, into the realm of mental cloning. I picture the Barbaras splitting off into worker-Barbara (the one who sits at the computer and searches for jobs), product-Barbara (the one who has to be “sold”), and now manager-Barbara (whose responsibility is to oversee the other two)—all contending for dominance in the same cramped office space. I recall that one of the mysterious “Core Competencies” in the scheme developed by Morton, my first coach, had indeed been “Managing Self.”