As a millennial, though it is true that I am no longer a part of the youngest generation that is in the workforce, I can admit that at least 40% of the jobs I have received in the last decade or so have all been a product of knowing someone or having some kind of pre-existing relationship with my employer. Being black, there have been entire stretches of my career that have largely required me to know someone to even be given a shot at a good opportunity. Hell, even the jobs that are paying me now are entirely the result of some form of workplace nepotism.
And to be clear, I have never felt like I wasn’t qualified for a job that I received, nor have I ever been accused of doing bad work while in that job—which is to say that in most cases, to do work that I am qualified to do, I have had to rely upon a pre-existing relationship to help grease the wheels.
Frankly, I hate it. But not for the reasons that most people do.
Recently, Fortune Magazine published an article on its website discussing a study on the rise in workplace nepotism. In short, the article said that despite the recent coverage surrounding the topic of Hollywood nepotism, this is a trend that younger generations are relying on writ large in order to score gainful employment—and this trend is benefitting men more than women.
Compared to most, I have many legs up: after-school programs that taught me graphic design, computer camps that taught me CSS and HTML, independent schooling credentials, a degree from an elite public university, and an early career start that I began while enrolled in college, and has lead to over 15 years of experience.
Those are great things, and in most cases, the least of my worries is being edged out by someone that knows the boss, graduated from the employer’s alma mater, or some other method of pre-selection. Frankly, there are plenty of times when I have been that guy. The reason why I hate it, however, is because it is something that I have to rely on more times than not to even get matched with work that I am qualified for.
Do I want to rely on nepotism to get the bulk of my opportunities? Hell no: nepotism leverages personal connections at the expense of those who do not have them, to gain positions of benefit or power—while making opportunities for upward mobility scarce or impossible for people who only have access to conventional means. Put another way, nepotism is remarkably unfair—and a tried and true vestige of a greater system that ensures the rich get richer while the poor get poorer. But until employers create better processes for hiring and onboarding talent, I don’t see it going anywhere.
Let’s be honest for a second: whose fault was it really going to be other than the employers? The employer makes the job ad. The employer filters the interview talent, and the employer ultimately decides who gets hired. At the same time, however, if an employer is relying heavily on personal relationships to fill talent positions, that is also because at some level they too believe that the process of hiring someone is inefficient. The problem, however, is that despite how mutually shitty placing talent can be for both job and talent seekers, it is the talent seeker who holds all of the power in determining how shitty this process is. Nobody is holding a gun to anyone’s head and telling them to keep a job open for hundreds of applications when they know 20 will suffice—or mandating things like tailor-made cover letters, 3-round interview processes, or utter bullshit like “practicums” and “creative assessments” when everybody knows that the portfolio they received will do just fine.
The truth of the matter is that over the last few decades, employers have gotten spoiled by having the ability to set the terms of employment—even if those terms included audacious interview processes, outrageous requirements for entry-level positions, proprietary job applications, unpaid “work samples,” and all for a fucking position that pays 20-30% less than market value.
I mean, if anyone has to sift through that kind of bullshit, it is not really a surprise that they would want to evaluate potential shortcuts in the process. These shortcuts necessitate themselves to exist because people have bills to pay, so the amount of time that one can spend without work—and stuck in some extended interview process—is highly limited. At the same time, massive applicant pools for individual job listings make it necessary to spread your application out to as many people as possible in as short of a period of time as is allowed. Doing things like having to fill out a proprietary application on a job listing with over 200 applicants on it is the definition of a time sink. Most importantly: It’s fucking dumb!
Ultimately, in a process that is begging for shortcuts, nepotism is a shortcut among many. Considerably, it is maybe one of the least harmful shortcuts that an organization can employ—and this is me also considering the effects that nepotism has on people without personal connections.
The reality is that from a business standpoint, it is possible to be nepotistic while still having access to star talent—and it can be a way of shining a light on star talent that is already known and maybe did not have a direct pathway into the organization before. However, nepotism is a profoundly harmful thing to those who do not have pre-existing connections, and should in an ideal circumstance, be used sparingly or not at all.
And for any employer that thinks what I’m saying is nothing but a load of crazy talk, that is fine too. But it would be fantastical to assume that having a poorly managed interview process isn’t something that doesn’t come at a potential cost to the employer. As job seeking for qualified work becomes once again increasingly difficult, people are turning to—and advocating in favor of—embellishing or outright lying about their resume experience in order to be given an opportunity at a job.
Now, to be completely fair, there are plenty of individuals who can recount times when they—or someone they know—have lied on their resume and still achieved outstanding results for the company that hired them. But as one would suspect, this is seriously playing with fire. Obviously, on the end of the employee, this can result in anything from being summarily fired, to even being the subject of legal action depending on the work. On the end of the employer, this can result in operational ineptitude and cascading failures that lead to legitimate—or downright damaging—business losses.
Regardless of the potentiality of business gain, however, the reality is that if people see lying on their resume as a legitimate way of getting the job that they want, then that means the system of job seeking has failed. Of course, the system of job seeking has failed because the system of verifying credentials—and by extension, credentialization, has failed too. After all, if the process of seeking jobs is so onerous and so fundamentally crowded, that meeting the preferred credentials for a job no longer helps applicants stand out, then the only solution is to game the entire system of credentials from square one.
In the end, while I am still in the camp that is advocating against lying on your resume, employers—and the job marketplaces that they rely on—are ultimately getting what they deserve. If you find people by wasting their time, then in the end people are going to waste your time in kind.
It might be a crappy trade, but you can’t say it isn’t a fair one.
And what I am saying isn’t a bunch of “socialist mumbo jumbo” either. This is the game theory that undergirds most types of governance systems—be they actual governments, marketplaces, incentive structures, or any other kind of system that is designed to provide services to people within a set of prescribed rules. The truth of the matter is that bad actors of all strokes exist within a system because of that system’s overall inefficiency in being able to render services that the bad actor may need. Thus, if the process of job seeking is rendered inefficient, then the propensity of bad actors occurring within that process will steadily increase over time since the incentives surrounding being a bad actor vastly outweigh the incentives of doing things the way they are supposed to be done.
At the same time, however, if the process of job seeking is rendered hyper-efficient, where both job seekers and employers are able to get access to the work they need without wasting anyone’s time, then the process can be healed. There would be no need to rely on trumped-up credentials, or personal connections to get a job–since the best jobs would go to those that are the most qualified for them. The problem, however, is that in order for this to happen, one would effectively have to rely on the actions of people who are already holding all of the cards, and their arbitrary desire to want to do better—well, that, or an entirely new type of job marketplace to begin with. In the end, one can only hope.
But I wouldn’t hold my breath for it.
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