The Job-Search Paradox

Like many fellow recent college graduates, I have begun the long and arduous search to find a job.  Some seek out professions that will lead to a career while others are looking for part-time gigs just to have a little cash to spend.  I fall into both categories at the moment, though more of my focus is on the latter right now.  My feelings about the process can be summed up thusly: I hate many things in this world (bros, politicians, the New York Yankees to name some), but there are very few things I hate more than the job searching process.  Not only is it tedious, but, more importantly, it is also relentlessly humiliating.  I understand that rejection is a natural part of life, but walking into a potential employer knowing that will be the last time I ever see them is borderline unbearable.

One would think that bars couldn’t hire enough bartenders right now.  The country may be in a recession, but the bar business is taking advantage and making a profit off of everyone’s misery.  Whenever I walk into a bar or a nightclub at peak hours, customers are barreling over each other just to get to the bar to order rounds for their buddies and the bartenders look they wish they could grow two extra arms to serve everybody.  So one would think that the demand would be very high for someone who wanted to work as a bartender like myself, especially in the summer, when college students don’t have homework to worry about and they can instead go out drinking every night without having to suffer the consequences the next morning (obviously, many people do this during the school year anyway, but discussing the behavior of college students isn’t worth the skin on my fingers).  However, over the last month since I graduated from bartending school, I have probably applied to about a dozen places, only one of which I would venture to describe as “high-end,” and not one of them ever called me back for an interview or a job offer.  Of course, one might think I am just bitter about nobody wanting me to work for them, but in reality, the problem is much bigger.  The entire process is inherently flawed due to a paradox in the job-searching process.

I have looked at countless Craigslist ads searching for bartenders and about 75 percent of them ask that applicants must have a certain amount of experience before considering sending in an application.  This is quite problematic because due to the lack of jobs in this economy, it is remarkably difficult to find work. So the question becomes: how can a company seeking bartenders ask for significant experience when they aren’t willing to hire anyone and give them experience in the first place?  I feel that there are a couple of reasons that this paradox exists.  The primary reason is laziness on the part of the employer.  The less work the boss has to do, the better his or her job is.  They don’t want to hire someone who is passionate but green because that means that they would actually have to train their employees how to do their jobs better and make their business more efficient (in other words, make more money).  What potential employers fail to realize is that the “experienced” people that they hire had to start somewhere.  They were given the opportunity to gain experience so that when they wanted to move on to another job in the same field, people would be more willing to hire them.  Unfortunately, businesses like bars are unwilling to take a chance on someone who is a quick and eager learner who might have more potential to excel in that position, which leads to the other key issue for potential employers.  They do not want to hire someone who could take their job down the road.  Nothing scares employers more than ambition because they do not want to be passed over by someone younger and smarter than them.  Bartenders may have bubbly personalities, but there are very few bartenders who have much intellectual substance to them, and therefore, they do not pose a threat to the management team.  They just stand behind the counter and pour drinks for \people with money to burn looking to wind down after a long day, no questions asked.

Of course, this entire diatribe could be seen by some as coming from the perspective of someone who thinks too highly of himself and is just resentful that nobody else feels that way, and I understand that.  I am angry at the process and cannot understand why getting a job as a bartender should be so difficult.  I am bitter that I may have wasted a large amount of money on bartending school for no reason at all.  But this issue is way bigger than me.  People all over the country feel the exact same way that I do about the process, yet we keep on attacking it until someone finds room in his or her heart to hire someone who is actually capable and willing to learn on the job.  While I understand why some jobs would require a certain level of experience in a particular area of study (i.e. medicine), the vast majority of jobs are not intellectually taxing enough to pass over people who lack experience in that field.  The worst thing that can happen to an employer who hires someone inexperienced and trains him or her to do the job correctly is that the boss can fire the employee if they do not meet the basic requirements of a functional worker.  The business will not suffer in the long-term, and that should be the most important concern: long-term profits are the chief reason that businesses of all sizes stay open for many years.  Whatever happened to giving someone a chance?  These shortsighted employers seem to forget that they were once in the same position as the people walking through the door asking for a job (unless they were beneficiaries of nepotism).  Unfortunately, employers only look at the piece of paper that lists your job history and make their decision solely off of that instead of analyzing the potential employees as human beings.  Then again, that would be too much work.