Slush Pile Essays: Slush Pile Essays, #1

By Bruce Anthony

The Slush Pile is Bruce Anthony’s repository of short reads. The fertile mind of an author is always sprouting opinions, viewpoints, observations, and sometimes simply thoughts of wonderment that are shown to friends who continually ask, “So, what have you written lately?” They are offered here for public interest, contrary opinion, and dispute. They are intended as engaging and informative short articles.

The Essays  contain an eclectic cocktail of opinions, thoughts, extrapolation, and perhaps even prophesy, gathered from a lifetime of learning, experience and practice. It is a compendium of lessons learned, observation of life, and expectation contrasted with actuality. It is sage advice intended for young adults venturing into independent existence in the World. It encompasses articles about Employment, People, and examines the actions of a powerful neighbour: the United States of America. Subjects examine the road through life and include:

Volume 1
Employment      Getting Hired            Career Networking
Malfeasance       Retirement                Humans
Population          Independence            Money
Obesity               Children                    Corruption
Maturity              Furry People             Home
The USA            Security & Spying     Discovered Truths

• Language: English
• Publisher: Katie Books Canada
• Release date: May 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9780993729843

Book preview

Cover image for e-book.Title/Copyright page.

Volume One

Cover

Title Page

Your Time Will Come

Employment:

Start Reading,

Fundamentals,

Getting Hired,

Networking,

Malfeasance,

Retirement.

People:

Humans,

Make Room,

Independence,

Money,

Obesity,

Children,

Corruption,

Maturity,

Furry People,

Home.

Neighbours:

Looking South,

Bully Boy,

Nosey Neighbours,

Truths,

Afterword.

Title/Copyright page.

Employment

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The Road Through Life

Life is haphazard and things happen. Decisions are made as opportunities come and go; few people seek or receive guidance; ignorance is glossed over by formal education; future consequence of trivial choice is never considered; and perspicacity is abandoned as everyone awaits their fate. Only much later does hindsight reveal what might have been.

When children start school they have no understanding of what awaits them in life. No one ever explains how important it is to prepare for the lifetime of work which may lie scarcely a decade ahead. No one explains the restrictions and consequences work imposes. Everyone expects formal education will provide the ways and means necessary to earn a living; a delusion that is often revealed after decades of effort and expense. Here are a few very basic concepts everyone should understand before starting an independent path through life.

Basic Needs

Fundamentals of life.

Fundamentals

The fundamentals of life consist of food, shelter, clothing, transportation, energy, and intellectual stimulus.

Food provides the fuel to keep our bodies functioning. Shelter and clothing protect us from the elements, other life forms, and each other. Transportation allows us to find and distribute the fundamentals of life. Energy allows us to provide and modify the other fundamentals of life. Intellectual stimulus makes life worth living.

All people are involved in providing the fundamentals of life for themselves and their dependents. Few humans can provide all the fundamentals of life by themselves. Most people are involved in providing only a single facet of one of the fundamentals of life. This means people must exchange what they can provide for the services or goods other people provide in order to have the fundamentals of life they need. This is called earning a living.

The concept of earning consists of providing or creating goods and services that can be exchanged for other goods or services. Earning means a person must occupy their time, energy and creativity, to produce goods or services that are desired or needed by other people. This occupation, may consist of one or more jobs. A job defines the provision of goods or services by a person. A job provides compensation that can be exchanged for other goods or services. All occupations and jobs are connected to the provision of the fundamentals of life.

Occupations can be envisioned as a series of sub-divided, concentric circles surrounding the six core fundamentals. Each larger circle shows a subordinate group of activities, and each sub-division shows a different occupation. Progressing from the centre, each circle represents more specialized components of the core fundamental, and each sub-division of a component represents a more specialized occupation. The more specialized an occupation is, the less important it is to the provision of a core fundamental.

As occupations become specialized, fewer jobs are required to deliver specific goods or services. Fewer jobs means fewer people are needed to fill those jobs. Demand, and availability of people for specific jobs, determines compensation. In our society, compensation determines the ability to acquire the fundamentals of life. Being selected for a job means having the qualifications required to do the true job and meeting the selection criteria.

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Fundamental Truths.

The most important thing to remember is that it's not up to anyone to give you a job; it's up to you to get hired. An employer hires someone for only one reason—to make a profit. Profits are valued by money. Here are ten fundamental truths that should be understood by everyone seeking employment.

If there is no employer profit there is no employee job.

Profit equals the value of employee work minus employee cost.

A job always involves doing something. An employee is hired to do something that is profitable for an employer. Employees are hired because of what they can do, not because of what they know. Only police informers are paid for what they know. If you can make money for an employer, you may be employable.

Every employee represents hard, fixed costs to an employer. Salary, benefits, safety, fixtures, training are all liabilities borne by the employer. Employee liabilities must be less from the outset, than real profits produced by the employee.

Communication skills are the most important employee skill to display to any employer.

Communication skills consist of reading, writing, listening and speaking. Employee communication skills can be linked directly to employer profits. The more proficient an employee is when communicating with superiors, peers, clients, suppliers and others, the more productive an employee will be.

Employee skills are more important than employee knowledge.

Doing anything requires skill. Skill is a combination of training, experience and ability. Just understanding, and being able to state how something is done, has no value to an employer. To an employer, more skill equals more profit.

Job experience is more important than job knowledge.

Experience reduces employee cost and increases employer profit. Experience equates to skill. Training equates to knowledge. If an employee has experience, it will be easier and take less time to ensure the employee does a job properly and makes a profit.

Only pertinent skills and experience are important.

The more closely job experience and skills match a job, the more valuable they are to an employer. Related experience and skills may still allow the job to be accomplished, but productivity will be lower and training may be required.

Previous employee accomplishments are more important than future potential.

An employee who can demonstrate past experience has more value to an employer than an employee who can only demonstrate that future ability may be acquired.

The value of previous employee skill and experience decreases by 25% to 35% each year.

Regardless of past accomplishments, skills and ability decrease over time. Present and current abilities are more valuable than those practiced in the past. This is especially true of formal education and training.

Employers will not hire employees they do not like.

The hiring process is very subjective. Employers do not want to associate with people they do not like. They will not hire disagreeable people unless there is an overwhelming need, and disliked people will become redundant at the first opportunity.

Fame is more important than fact.

Very often reputation is given more, or less, value than actual ability deserves. References from employer associates carry more weight than proven personal accomplishment. Employees must be well regarded in order to be hired. Any disparaging comment is given much more importance than any favourable comment.

Personal contacts are the easiest way to get a job.

A recommendation from someone close to an employer can shorten the hiring process considerably and save the employer a considerable amount of time and money. An employer will trust and act on an insider's suggestion rather than become involved in a formal hiring process.

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Getting Hired

Find a Job image.

Jobs

The process of hiring someone is not a straight forward search for the best person for the job. Anyone who doesn't understand that, will have a hard time finding work.

Most people think managers carefully look through all applications, sifting the qualifications and experience of every applicant, weighing their total knowledge and potential, and finally selecting the one, best person for each and every job. Most people think hiring is fair and honest—what foolishness.

Hundreds of people apply for every job. Managers view hiring as a process of finding any reason at all to weed out and trash every application possible in order to reduce the number of candidates to the few they have time to interview. Managers know there are many trained, experienced, and otherwise fully qualified people for every job. They're not afraid of missing a good candidate.

All organizations use filters to eliminate or reduce the number of candidates applying for a job. The filters may be stated or unstated, legal or illegal, acknowledged or hidden. The filters commonly include: education, experience, appearance, language, communications ability, specialized training, team experience, readiness to follow directions, age, gender, race, ethnic and social background, religion, height, weight, style of dress, willingness to travel or relocate, shift work, level of subservience, willingness to work unpaid hours, wage level, working conditions, bra size, and virtually anything else the organizations or managers feel like imposing as a filter. Filters never have anything to do with the work that is performed. They are used simply to eliminate people from the hiring process.

Hiring is not a selection process, it's an elimination process.

Once you understand this, you can look for the filters in use and determine a way to slip through. Finding the stated, legal, and acknowledged filters will be easy. Discovering the unstated, illegal, and hidden filters may be very difficult indeed. But, you can be sure they are firmly embedded in the selection process.

The easiest way of slipping through filters, or skipping them altogether is by the use of a relationship with someone in the hiring process, or someone who can influence the hiring process. This is commonly referred to as networking. Knowing or getting to an insider can get you over many hurdles. The more business status your contact has, the easier it is to jump over intervening filters and get to the head of the pack. A personal mention by someone of high business status, even if it is only a casual reference, may be enough to get you hired. Any mention of you will reflect the holder's status upon you. Status sunshine will definitely brighten your chances of getting a job.

Who you know is more important than being qualified.

Once you realize this fact, you can prepare to evade filter entanglement by using existing or new relationships to ease your passage through the hiring process. It doesn't matter whether your network is formed of close acquaintances or not. Network relationships are always self-serving. Don't be afraid to seek out people who can help you now or in the future, but don't be so naive as to think anyone will help you out of the goodness of their heart. Anyone who helps you will have their own reasons for doing so.

Nothing works better in establishing a relationship with someone of higher status than flattery. Being subservient, obsequious, agreeable, malleable and eager, even if your motives are transparent, will result