What is the best shot?
And that is the question...The answer ranges from academical background, family connections, professional certifications, soft skills, speaking ability, looks, activities, hobbies, and many other things that you normally bring to the job-giver. But normally, people pick one of the most sought-after criterion out of those résumé-filling lists. They gave their reasoning, but they are so popular that most of the HR Department of any companies could second guess where do their candidates get their charming tips from.
Cheapest trick.
Is the academic background. People do everything to obtain one, thus forgery of such certificate becomes a business. Well, not to mention that the "real" certificate also costs a lot too, and time consuming as well. People aim specific career, thus they choose the most relevant study subject to their career of choice, hoping that it will buy the company people over.
The thing is, academic is just one factor, it shall come to nothing with regards to people's qualification. People with the best trick of the trade beats anyone who learned everything straight from the book. But if you seek for someone who would fulfill your demand for respect of that education, look for the alumni clusters, which usually overrun a good number of companies. Aim for prestigious education institution if you seek this.
In Indonesia, at least, people of my generation are confused bunch who look secondary education (university/college) as a safety net. They try to get some sense of security: security for their future career and security for their current state of life (being able to hang out with "those kind of people," acceptable to their parents, and looks safe). Thus they pick any subjects that won't put too much burden on them later on from a seemingly "safe" institution. Few willing to take risks to pursue their true passion and dig their talents further.
Blah...blah...blah...
Soft skills, speaking ability, social skills, connections, they all do help. But they are one of the most difficult traits to discover for every individuals. Some people might overrate their own skills, some might underrate it. Although this blog entry is written in less-than-serious manner, this is actually one important skills to consider when you are looking for jobs. These set of skills are mostly imprinted behavior or impacted by each individual's environment, but they can actually be changed, improved by simply reversing the causality. For example, if you never speak in front of the mirror before, now you should start doing it. If you never feel comfortable with your own voice, record yourself and try to listen it for hours, and many more. Joining a public speaking club will help a lot, since you will meet a lot of confident weirdos that are very willing to help each other.
In Indonesia and every other family-oriented countries, which are identifiable by how much family affair drama TV shows they produce (e.g. Indonesian sinetrons or Latin American, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese telenovelas), these skills are quite the primary.
The thing you love the most
At least for men, one cannot deny how our passion for a thing can't just fade away. It started from the childhood and it grew with us. They say, "boys never grow up, but their toys do, in size and price." That is somewhat true to real men. I drew cheesy planes, fly paper aircraft, and now playing high-fidelity flight simulator. This represents their real skills and their willingness to study a subject with some calling. This is what people call "talent," others call it a hobby or simply an interest.
In most developed countries, companies treat this thing seriously as it really fruitful for the company if they could find a good guy who would undertake painstakingly difficult effort in getting things done, just because they love doing it. In undeveloped countries like Indonesia and the rest of Asia and Africa, they only do this just to follow what those industrial nations do. And people normally cites "reading, swimming, browsing, listening to music" as their hobby, simple, neutral, but pointless, because they were never taught to pursue their passion with utmost calling. Back then, in my Catholic class, the teacher told us about Parable of the Talents, but most of the students just remember that to fill in the exam paper. Yes, during your career, many of you most probably are wasting your God-given gifts or talents in exchange for "realistic" thing such as monetary rewards or social status or parent's demand as in typical Asia.
Here we go...
Now this is the most important thing: LOOKS. In Indonesia at least.
You can't go wrong if you got good looks. It is an observable trend amongst the people nowadays. See these evidences:
No talents are required
Boybands and girlbands represents what is worse from industrialization of art from that is music. Originally, people with greatly tuned ear created some melody that is music. In the advent of technology, people began visualising musics, using videoclips, televised it to everybody so we can see what the original artists tried to interpret. But that doesn't sell enough, while the men still rule the world and their pride still high, the industry created boyband to fish out revenue from fangirls, because girls don't go to work. Now girls being the object, whose a common object to receive all the blame and it is socially acceptable to be silly.But since men's ego took over, then came girlbands, yet with poorer musical taste, more sexual exploitation, and lesser art form. Girlbands that are trendy recently are those of cute, oriental looking, with whiny animic voices. It completely transforms what was once an art form into purely industrial exploitation that is commonly referred as "entertainment industries." It is now, a mass-produced audio-visual entertainment from what was once an elitist consumption produced by select few like Mozart, Beethoven, Handel, Bach, Chopin, Tchaikovsky.
Girlband and boyband personnel are auditioned, carefully selected for the looks and (recently) attitude and characters in order to better suit its target audiences. For the "musical" side, they were intensively trained to sing and dance the best they could. It could be said that they are no better than you being a bus driver than them performing on stage, after all both of you will be intensively trained for the job anyway. They have a very short marginal utility, due to age constraints (audience preference factor) and from business point of view, should be exploited to the fullest while they still holds some value, thus you can normally see them starring in several heavily marketed mediocre movies and tie-in merchandises.
Now what?
Oh, it is "the more the better." The usual 3-5 singer format is now expanded to include 7-9 personnel, which typically sing a 4-5 minutes song. We never know who sings which part, but never mind, we never cared about their musical talents anyway.
Skill? Education background?
A friend of mine scored higher in his recruitment test, answer the interviewer questions' better (according to the interviewer's own testimony), have the interest most relevant to their business. His competition was this girl, scored slightly lower, but she won it. She simply "connects better when talking to me" bullshit was given as the excuse.I can't say that looks matter here, but sexual preference also sells. And in this race, female wins big time. Most of the decision making power are in the hands of a male, and to avoid sex-bias decision making/opinion, financial institution top analysts and opinion makers are gays or inclining to be so.
I think we are going to see the reverse trend soon when those girls advanced through the ranks and finally made it into the decision making position. Then we will have males becoming the preferred sex in the job market.
You don't even need to learn
I am slightly good looking, not to say handsome, but adequate enough to pass the common "ugliness stare test" during the first meeting. That is probably why I got a rather good standings in the business. It is unfair to my weirdo, awkward-looking friends, but that is life. Fock it!Now, doing the business, you require some basic knowledge about things you are going to do. But if you got the looks who the hell needs them?
This came from an annoying experience with some nice but quite incapable people. I got to work with some guys from other companies, usually with their IT department. I met with this one helpful and charming girl, she is nice and welcoming, but that is not what I was looking for. To make it short, she didn't know a thing about her IT environment, let alone some familiar IT terms like virtual servers, domain controller, anti virus update log report, etc. Gee thanks. We know she is in the IT department, but her main job is really to welcome guests and serves as the intermediary between us and their geeky technicians (who normally don't speak everyday languages, like I do).
It was a very pleasant view, but certainly not an enjoyable experience. I expect "IT people" to be more knowledgeable. There shouldn't be one guy sitting amongst the smarties just to look pretty and use his/her charm to work things around without actually making things right. Not even knowing a piece or two about computers, well, we should mourn for the jobless genius geeks out there. It is clearly another case of blatant sexual preference and looks.
When in Rome, you don't have to behave like Romans, if you are pretty
It came to me that amongst sexually-deprived society, you'll tolerate women more than you should. Especially, when they are slender, have a beauty features that are trendy, charming, and (look) nice. Even when you go around the most elite office towers along the main business districts of Jakarta, you can't miss those people. People who ogles, gawks, stares, at sexy (mostly) and beautiful (sometimes) ladies."That is normal,"
Of course, obviously, it is, but only to the point where you have to experience this: minor harassment. But I observed that some women actually exploit it for their own favour. That is a bold move I say. But when it comes to business, I cannot say anything besides that I usually commend more intelligible and honorable conduct to be carried out at any possibilities. Think of watching porns during working hour, then imagine how disgusting it is. That is what I think when people exploit their sexuality to gain something at work. However, that is only one way of doing it. The other way is to act innocent and play nice, despite knowing the dirty intentions. Slightly less than annoying, but it is still not comforting to know. People who can't be firm on their stance (especially regarding self-respect), can't even be called "professional," not even "maestro," the level which I aspire to be.
My experience varies between businesses. There is one girl who completely pursues a career out of her interest. She clings into her innocent thoughts that "people like her" should belong to that kind of position (e.g. sales and marketing). That's good, but please show us your real deal please, because business is helping other people to fulfill their needs for specific goods or service, not side-show entertainment. I know that sex sells, but it is a requirement to know what we are selling here. Sadly, they easily forgot that thing here.
And another one girl (again) acts like she is pretty innocent about how easy she got her job despite not knowing anything about the subject. So what the deuce is wrong here? I was talking to somebody who is quite smart actually, but her background couldn't speak any better than that: the family owns IT-related business, works in IT stuffs distributor, so the list goes on, building some amount of credibility in the IT field. But we all know about the common problem of every working people: you will never be happy with what you have. So it happens, she didn't gather some amount of knowledge regarding IT subjects, let alone the stuffs she is selling, like what processors do, why we should upgrade our memory, or how DDR3 differs from DDR2.
Opportunity knocks your door all the time!
It is difficult enough for normal, intelligent on average people to get a decent job at a decent place. But for pretty girls, or at least good-looking one, it takes much much much less effort than it normally does. One girl got an offer before she even graduated from her study! So how easy is that? With average intelligence, you can win a career opportunity, even if you have less interest in the subject than everybody else in the market.Again, it is because of the principle that sex sells. Apparently, marketing position is ripe for pretty good looking ladies in Indonesia out there. Well, never mind, it is the first requirement when you apply for stewardess/flight attendant jobs, explicitly. You don't have to be smart, you don't have to know shit about airplanes, you just do the walk in, pass the stare test with some small talks they refer as "interview," and voila. We'll never met better looking junior flight attendants than ever. You can see them got scared by minor turbulence, being late in preparing the in-flight meals, some poor attitude towards passengers, missing few safety checks, SOPs, uniform apparels, etc. Because it doesn't matter, but looks does! So welcome to Indonesian working environment!
To get a job
You have to take care for your looks, that's it. I mean, you can't present yourself to other people as you please, but at least put some effort into it. Take the advice in less satirical way, because here is the catch:
It is not nice to get yourself dirty and smelly, then flail around and let everybody get a taste of that odour. Surely that can't be right, that's why we wear fragrances or deodorants. It is actually a part of a collective effort to help other people feeling more comfortable socialising in public places.
So, it should be the same thing to the eyes, not just the noses. We present ourselves to look good in front of other people, and making their times around us more comfortable. So why not polishing our looks? And especially, getting over that...insecurity...*barf*
