Friday 30 September 2011

The Recruitment Paradox (and other unfortunate aspects of modern life)

Unless anyone hasn’t noticed, there’s a slight issue with money at the moment; some kind of recession, or something. What with so many of the countries around us in Europe either getting bailed out, or threatening that at some point soon they may require to be bailed out, I’m finding it hard to understand how Britain is staying afloat. After all, it’s widely known that thanks to Thatcher our manufacturing industry is about as active as an overweight Californian stoner with an addiction to donuts who has just noticed that there’s a TV programme about donuts on TV and that he has a number of donuts and a joint saved up to enjoy as an accompaniment to the donut show. Furthermore, anyone who’s had to call any sort of customer helpline is well familiar with being put through to “Roy” who sounds suspiciously more like a “Raj” and who, when posed with a question that requires a tighter grasp on the English language than is ordained to him by the autocue hat he is sitting in front of in Mumbai, starts repeating the same stock phrase over and over again like a robot built by Apple that someone has just commanded to run a Flash video.

What the above needlessly long-winded metaphor was subtly trying to highlight is that Britain seems to be losing jobs, and fast. Indeed, the unemployment rate in the UK is currently 7.8% of the labour force; and this, coupled with the £960 billion (and counting) of debt makes you wonder whether the boy wonder George Osbourne’s posh Casio scientific calculator is really up to the job of working out a solution for our country’s spiralling economic turmoil. We don’t grow anything, we don’t make anything and, increasingly, we’re not providing many services either. I’m sure everyone reading this has noticed how customer helplines are increasingly being outsourced and how cashiers, bank tellers, post office workers etc are slowly but surely being replaced by machines. So what jobs are actually available in this country at the moment?

I am currently living a distressingly cliché existence. Having completed a degree in a horribly over-subscribed job field, I panicked and clung desperately onto another year in the city where I went to university, and now I’m living at home with my parents and looking for a job. Job seeking at the moment can be best compared to preparing to defend yourself against a murder charge in court: there’s a lot of sitting on your arse on your own, thinking about what you’re going to say, making stuff up and occasionally banging your head against a wall wishing you’d done things a little differently. I have at least come across one phenomenon that, indeed, is the inspiration for writing this blog. Ladies and gentleman, I think that I have discovered how the British economy is keeping afloat: recruitment.

Any graduate job seeker at the moment cannot have failed to notice how pretty much every 3 out of 5 jobs going at the moment are in recruitment, or one of the other fancy euphemisms that mean recruitment such as “head hunter” or “research executive” or “You dun find the job persons job”. Now, I understand that recruiters are necessary in specialist fields, as they need to be trained to identify certain skills and have a decent knowledge of the specific field; however, when the said specialist field is, in fact, recruitment... things start to get a little bit silly. What you have – and I know this is happening because it’s already happened to me twice in the month that I have been looking for a job – is recruiters recruiting recruiters to recruit recruiters who, in turn, recruit recruiters to recruit recruiters. It is nothing short of a baffling ouroboros of recruitment that is so ripe for parody I have absolutely no idea how anyone in the business of recruitment can take themselves even remotely seriously. The thing is, these recruiter recruiters can earn an absolute mint from the get go if they’re good enough at luring people into their retarded web. Could it be that this industry is actually supporting our beloved Britain?

If you think about it, it’s not too difficult to rationalise, considering that our whole society is based on trading meaningless numbers with each other anyway. The problem is that, even if this paradoxical farce of an industry is providing a boost to our economy, there’s no way that it can hope to prop the nation up against the increasing prevalence of the beast that has been plaguing modern economies since their foundation: a phenomenon known as technological unemployment. Put simply, this is where human labour can be replaced by mechanical labour to an economic advantage. It happened to our primary industry way back at the dawn of the 20th century with the growing use of farm machinery; it happened to our secondary industry with the advent of the production line and now it’s happening to our tertiary industry with the ever-growing power of computers. Don’t think the quaternary (knowledge based) industry is invulnerable to this threat either: we’re already seeing a plethora of teaching aids appearing online and the idea of artificial intelligence is not so much science fiction any longer than science fact. Indeed, it is hypothesised that around 70% of jobs today could be carried out better and cheaper by machines. For example, there are already restaurants and bars that are fully automated, right down from the cooking and drinks prep to the service (http://tinyurl.com/ynqd4j). Just think how many thousands of people in this country are employed in the catering business and could so readily be replaced.

The only reason why this hasn’t been done yet is because employers know that the market just wouldn’t be able to handle the unemployment rates; hence why in supermarkets, for example, you have the current hybrid system of self-service checkouts and the old fashioned human setup. Nevertheless, I’m sure you’ve all noticed how those self-service machines seem to be slowly taking over, especially in smaller stores, leading me to believe that the amount of mechanisation is just going to be pushed further and further. For some reason though, this concept is not on the agenda for the Tories, nor the Democrats, nor any mainstream political party, it seems. I suppose the ‘powers that be’ are treating this, as they did pre 2008 with the problems evident in our financial system, as an issue that us mucky plebs are just not clever enough to understand. We shouldn’t worry our pretty little heads about it.... until that redundancy meeting gets called and you’re booted into line with the rest of the job seeking masses. (Hey, at least you could always go into recruitment!). The simple fact is that machines are cheaper and easier to run than a human workforce and, moreover, are undoubtedly more efficient at completing objective tasks than we are – precision and objectivity, after all, are what machines are designed for.  Whereas it takes almost a decade for someone to qualify as a surgeon it would take probably maybe only a year or so perhaps *massive guesstimate alert* to design a machine that can perform surgery better and cheaper than any human could. Joking aside, if you’re thinking about dismissing that statement as pure fantasy then here’s some perspective: machines have been automatically building cars for years; however sacred or intricate you think the human body is, think again, at the end of the day we’re just a sack full of parts. Modern surgery is already being complemented by machines.

It is unfortunate that it is inbuilt into our culture is to be scared of machines, specifically AI. The reality is that our technology is the only thing that we have to secure our survival and proliferation on this planet. We should be accepting these changes, not shunning them. I have touched on aspects like this before in this blog and, unfortunately, the current situation, as explained above, is just another example of how our current economic model - that being the monetary and market system - is a total hindrance on our progress as a species. The things that we can achieve with technology are staggering and go beyond most peoples’ imaginations. It is testament to the uselessness and antiquity of our current system that technological advances are actually suppressed rather than embraced. See this website for further details: http://www.thevenusproject.com