The Instrumentalization of Job Searches
In his book I and Thou, Martin Buber argues that there are two types of relations: I — It, where you relate to things (or people) as being instrumental, useful, functional; and I — You, where you relate to people with your whole being, with no other motive except what he calls the “pure relation.”
Then he says this, which made me think of job fairs, resume crafting, job searches, and the interview process:
“To be sure, he views the beings around him as so many machines capable of different achievements that have to be calculated and used for the cause. But that is also how he views himself…. He treats himself, too, as an It.”*
I think the reason job fairs and interviews can make us feel so icky is because we’re being reduced to a functional It, evaluated and measured by our capability to achieve certain tasks rather than being seen as a whole being. We are more than our job, salary, and degree, yet the pressure to earn (and earn a lot) convinces us that we’re only valuable as a functional, useful It. In fact, we craft our entire lives in order to enhance and prove our instrumental worth, forgetting that our value is innate, it was in us all along.
See also: Free Time and the Pressures of Employability and The Disease of Being Busy
*Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (1923; repr., New York, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1970), 118.
