Throughout your career and especially when you're job-hunting, it's important to keep in mind that there are two aspects to your working life. In the best case they fit together perfectly, but they are different from one another.
One aspect of your career is the Crank that you turn to make money. Most of us figure out the Crank part of our working life first. At some point we realize "Hey, now that I know how to make money doing things that I don't necessarily love to do, what if I figured out how to make money doing things I love to do?"
The things you love to do make up your Flame. Your Flame and Crank together make up your career. If all you do is turn a crank, you will first get bored and then disgusted with your work. You might forget that you ever had a Flame -- that you were ever passionate about a topic that you cared about.
If you know what you were born to do, then you have a good connection to your Flame. That's great, but you still have to pay the rent. You have to figure out how to make money doing what you like to do.
You could say that each of us has a career mission -- to figure out what we love to do and can make money doing and put Crank and Flame together. That's career nirvana!
There are professions that are very Crank-oriented, and contingency recruiting is one of them. Contingency recruiters don't get paid unless one of their candidates accepts a job offer. They get paid by the employer. They pitch resumes into employers and hope that the hiring manager likes some of their resumes.
At the end of the day, if a contingency recruiter has pitched the resumes of five candidates into a hiring manager's inbox and the hiring manager hires one of them, how can the recruiter be sad? He's going to be happy, because one of his candidates got hired.
He's going to commiserate with the other four candidates and perhaps he will genuinely feel sorry for them, but in any case he did his job. He turned the crank one more time.
It is very easy in a Crank-heavy job like contingency recruiting to lose track of the human beings whose careers and livelihoods depend on the transactions the recruiter conducts. When we think about bureaucracy, the first thing that often comes to mind is mechanization of interactions that should be strictly human.
We hate to get a bureaucrat on the phone when we have a question about our water bill or how to get a passport for a baby or something else. We want to slam the phone against the wall sometimes. We wonder "Why can't you give me a human answer, and attend to my question?" But at work in many jobs we train people not to be human, but to treat humans in a mechanical way.
That is one reason so many job-seekers complain about the contingency recruiters they work with. "I felt like I was a piece of meat to this woman," says a job-seeker, Melanie. "She called me at my desk and didn't waste any time with pleasantries.
I've never met or heard of this woman before, but her first question for me was 'What are you earning now?'"
You don't have to tell a recruiter your current salary. It is none of their business and it's also irrelevant to the decision whether or not to interview you. You do have to know your salary target, but it is perfectly reasonable to ask a recruiter "What does the job pay?" before giving up any number at all.
After all, the recruiter knows the hiring range for the position he or she is trying to fill. Why shouldn't they tell you what it is, and save everybody's time?
Some recruiters are incredible advocates for the candidates they work with. Other recruiters have only learned how to badger and belittle candidates.
Those people will tell you "If you don't give me your current or past salary, we're done" and in that case your best bet is to hang up the phone. People who live in Crank world and use fear as a weapon cannot help you. They will never be your advocates.
The world is changing fast. The Human Workplace is already here. Many people are eager to see it arriving but some people are not. They like to feel that they are in the driver's seat.
They don't want to come down (or up!) to a human level on the job. They want to bully and berate people and use the power of their position to get their way and turn the crank one more time.
Luckily you know the secret: only the people who get you, deserve you!
