You don't have to show up with exaggerated, faked interested in the company or industry. In fact, it can come off as very fake if a candidate shows up and pretends they're supernaturally excited to work in our industry that they just learned about 2 days prior.
However, you can't expect to show up to a job interview and ooze disinterest and boredom and still be considered for the job.
Don't think of it as getting excited to work for a company. Think about it as getting to know your potential future coworkers. If you need to become emotionally invested in a company before applying, I'd strongly recommend that you work on breaking that habit before it makes your job search artificially difficult.
Often the interview process is based on an expectation that, for example, you will exaggerate your previous achievements. Every past project you describe has to sound amazing, your cv has to seem like a carefully thought out career path that will culminate in the final fulfillment of some great life goal.
You can't just say that you took some job for the money or just to be in the same town as your girlfriend etc., you have to pretend it was some significant step on a path. Otherwise you sound like you're unmotivated, not serious about your career etc.
My resume is, if you just look at it, not a "great" one. But it's good enough to get in the door, and then it's not really relevant anymore because we're then having a conversation about how I can bring value to the organization.
I wouldn't rush to dismiss a company just because they let the HR person spruce up the job description with some boilerplate. You really need to talk to the team you'll be working with and the future manager you'll be working under.
Unfortunately, it's just not possible to tell what a job will be like by reading a job description. You have to talk to the teams.
> Unfortunately, it's just not possible to tell what a job will be like by reading a job description.
While I agree completely, isn't this wrong though? Shouldn't a job description be well written? Isn't "sprucing up" just code for false advertising?
I for one have seen countless job descriptions that were a ridiculous exaggeration of the kind of work that you would actually have done. It's important to note that it always want one way: making the job sound a lot more interesting than it was and demanding a lot more skill than was actually needed. Nobody went overboard with downplaying things.
I've sat on both sides of the table, and know that isn't accurate. If it was accurate, everybody would be working for minimum wage.
BTW, if you're unemployed because of the pandemic, the best use of your time is to level up your skills so you'll be in a stronger position once it's over.
A lot of people actually are working for (close to) minimum wage.
> BTW, if you're unemployed because of the pandemic, the best use of your time is to level up your skills
I am not, but your recommendation only highlights the inequality I was referring to. In your conception the entire burden is placed on individuals. Companies seem to have no responsibility to train people at all, that's smth you have to do on your own time for free.
2.1% of workers work for minimum wage.
> Companies seem to have no responsibility to train people at all,
They don't. Neither do people owe them fealty.
> that's smth you have to do on your own time for free.
Consider a company that decides to train you for 4 years while paying you. Then, you decide to leave and take a better offer elsewhere. A company cannot make you stay. Taking that on would be very risky and very expensive for any company.
"Companies" that do this tend to force you to work for them so many years afterwards, like the military.
I'm pretty sure that's the federal minimum wage. Many states have a higher bar [1]. Many people working for 10 bucks an hour will still be earning minimum wage in their respective state.
If you take a look at the nation-wide wage distribution, you'll see things don't look that good. At the 50'th percentile the income for a family with 2.56 people is 57k, before tax etc.
> They don't.
Maybe they should. In the end they're benefiting from all the education that you as an individual pay for (or that is state-supported) and from all of the extra training you're supposed to do on the side without remuneration.
> Neither do people owe them fealty.
On the other hand there's no reason why people should ever owe fealty to a corporation. Societies are (de jure and should be de facto) centered on human individuals, not on various legal fictions. Corporations have no natural rights and they are not people (despite what the US supreme court might say) - no need for a human being to owe them anything.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minimum_wage_in_the_United_Sta...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United...
So are you, as you get paid more for the extra value the education imparted to you.
> no need for a human being to owe them anything.
You don't owe corporations anything, unless you made a deal with them and owe them your side of the deal. And vice versa. That's how free markets work.
Why should work relations be based on the "free market"? Why should we consider the market the core institution of a society, the concept underlying any form of relationship?
"Free" markets the way libertarians tend to imagine them do not exist, and for very good reason - they would lead to a hasty collapse of society. You can't for example sell yourself into slavery, you can't be hired to work more than a certain number of hours per week, or if you're younger than a certain age etc. There are countless restrictions on what a contractual relationship can look like between a worker and a corporation - things are definitely not "free".
I don't know where your information is coming from, but it isn't libertarianism. Under libertarianism, your rights are inalienable, and supersede contractual rights. Hence, you cannot sell yourself into slavery, because your right to liberty supersedes any contract. You can agree to work more than X hours per week, but you cannot be forced to stick to that agreement. Libertarianism only applies to legally consenting adults. Others (like children) have additional legal rights, such as not being bound by contracts.
There are many different meanings of "free". Common misunderstandings of libertarianism come from conflating different meanings of "free". The free in free markets generally means free from force or fraud.
As for "hasty collapse", the US was a reasonable approximation to a free market in its first century, excluding the slave south, and went from subsistence farming to superpower. This also saw the greatest mass rise from poverty to wealth the world has ever seen.
As for other countries, the more they embraced free markets, the more they prospered.
This seems to be debated both in popular libertarian forums [1] and among academics [2]. I haven't read source [2] in detail, but at a quick glance I can offer the following quote (p. 41):
"At the extreme right would be the libertarian philosophy I shall defend which maintains that everything should be legally alienable or commodifiable."
Robert Nozick himself seems to support the idea of voluntary slavery [3]:
"Most controversially, and unlike Locke and Kant, Nozick argued that consistent application of self-ownership and non-aggression principle[10] would allow and regard as valid consensual or non-coercive enslavement contracts between adults. He rejected the notion of inalienable rights advanced by Locke and most contemporary capitalist-oriented libertarian academics, writing in Anarchy, State, and Utopia that the typical notion of a "free system" would allow adults to voluntarily enter into non-coercive slave contracts."
> Libertarianism only applies to legally consenting adults. Others (like children) have additional legal rights, such as not being bound by contracts.
Again, it seems that leading libertarian theorists would disagree. Take Murray Rothbard for one [4]:
"In Rothbard's view of parenthood, "the parent should not have a legal obligation to feed, clothe, or educate his children, since such obligations would entail positive acts coerced upon the parent and depriving the parent of his rights". Thus, Rothbard stated that parents should have the legal right to let any infant die by starvation and should be free to engage in other forms of child neglect. However, according to Rothbard, "the purely free society will have a flourishing free market in children". In a fully libertarian society, he wrote, "the existence of a free baby market will bring such 'neglect' down to a minimum"."
> the US was a reasonable approximation to a free market in its first century [...] This also saw the greatest mass rise from poverty to wealth the world has ever seen.
I'm sure the American indians, the original inhabitants of the continent, would not exactly agree that the outcomes of that century were so great. Also, to my knowledge, the award for greatest rise from poverty would go to the China of recent decades (not a particularly nice place).
> excluding the slave south
You really shouldn't.
> and went from subsistence farming to superpower
Not in its first century. That happened a bit later, once the US was a far more centralized entity with a far stronger federal government (again, I don't think becoming a superpower is a good thing or a good argument for free markets).
> As for other countries, the more they embraced free markets, the more they prospered.
Do you have any arguments or examples for this?
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskLibertarians/comments/7u7r2m/am_...
[2] https://cdn.mises.org/17_2_3.pdf
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Nozick#Political_philos...
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murray_Rothbard#Children's_rig...
I'm very lucky in that my current job hits on most of my skills as well as many of my non-work interests, and that's not a job I'd have to fake anything for, but it's not as if every startup coming down the pike is the greatest thing since sliced bread. This is a skill, and it is one that you can learn to be good at.
That enthusiasm is just the polite enthusiasm of a sales call. It may require a few minutes of reading and thinking (because tbh I also see a lot of folks who have no idea what a company does when they go in to interview), but it is almost always either a baseline "do they get what we do here?" check (which is what you can learn and practice for) or it is a cult you should avoid.
The problem here is that as an applicant you're usually expected to show commitment, enthusiasm, passion for the work etc.
It's very hard to work yourself up about a job without actually caring about it. The underlying enormous asymetry of power between you and the employer means that what is strictly a numbers game for them will always have at least some emotional significance for you.