-> Subordinate yourself to the desires of capital in all areas.
-> Suppress the self.
-> Become a true human resource. You are seeking to sell a large chunk of your life, and the buyers don't want scratched or dented goods. Desires of your own are flaws in the product you are selling.
This is, sadly, sound advice, but I think it's important to reflect on what this means about how incidental human flourishing is in our current political economy.
This seems pretty straightforward, but I guess people like OP are exposed to a lot of bad interviewees by nature of their job.
A lot of applicants do it. The skill of interviewing is to get a sense of what the true situation is underneath what the candidate is saying with their words. These candidates who show up and do the “subordinate yourself to the desires of capital in all areas” schtick are plentiful. It doesn’t fool an experienced interviewer, so they’re going to be evaluating whether or not you can do the job without becoming a problem based on whatever other signals they can get. The candidate’s words are almost a no-op, other than a slight signal that they have a tendency to blow smoke instead of having real conversations.
I'm trying to explain that it's easy to spot the fakers.
When you do a lot of interviews you see a lot of candidates who follow the advice above. Unless it's your first month of doing interviews, it's really easy to see right through.
The candidates never think they're coming off as fake, though.
Really skilled interviewers can bait these candidates into telling little half-truths and inconsistencies that reveal their game.
I’ve been part of a small number of hiring decisions where relocation was involved. There were a lot of failures exactly like this article talks about: Candidates who will say anything in the interview and even signal that they’ll accept any average salary as long as you’ll take care of their relocation were, in my experience, not interested in doing the work after they got here. Taking the job was a means to an end (getting to their destination) and once they arrived they were either looking for the next job or too busy traveling around their new location to do work.
We tried to mitigate this with clauses requiring them to pay back relocation expenses if they left within N months of arrival, but this didn’t work. They would resign the week after that timer expired or, worse, would start trying to get laid off through poor performance as a way to avoid that clause.
The best fits for relocation were opposite of what I would have thought: The people most hesitant to relocate were the most successful, both at the job and in establishing their new social life outside of work in the new location. They were relocating and taking jobs for the right reasons.
Always be marketing what you can/will/have done for the company to bring value, not what the company can do for you.
Most people want to have a job set up before they move to a new city.
I worked in multiple companies in my multi-decade career, including FAANG (or whatever acronym is used now). I was even an intervewer for one of those
The people that give the sanitized calculated responses are actually what employers are typically looking for. It shows the candidate is willing to do the job without causing problems by confirming as a good worker bee.
Your workplace is not somewhere for real conversations.
atoav•1h ago