On top of the protected class bypass a required video provides, we all know where that fucked up question is going in our American corpo language.
“I just see a lifetime of adversity as an opportunity to work even harder for my economic betters, herp derp!”
Upload something where the first 5 seconds is someone apparently doing that, then instantly cut into hardcore porn with extra loud noise
NoBoDy WaNtS tO wOrK aNyMoRe
This is to keep people from actually applying, right?
It’s a “how desperate are you” application question.
Ahh that makes sense too
What’s the data retention policy? How will this be used, and by whom? What is their data retention policy? Will this be used to train AI? Etc etc etc.
Regardless of the answers provided Hard Pass.
Normalize Saying No
Unless this is for some kind of public speaking position, I would instantly drop the application and not apply to the company again
I saw something similar on a customer service job
I hate this so much.
If you want to do a video interview, sure. But I’m not going to willingly give you a recording of myself without clear use terms.
How long are these files retained? Is this video subject to data privacy laws? Since they’re requesting it be uploaded elsewhere, how many 3rd parties am I involving myself with by the end of this interview process?
Not to mention, we live in the era of deepfakes for voice and video. Do I have any gaurentee that this won’t be used to train some AI model somewhere?
This level of hoop-jumping pre-employment should be made illegal on par with hazing laws. Not everyone can afford to be picky about potential employment.
It’s not just about what they can use the video for. This also lets them screen for a lot of protected classes without actually asking about them. Your name and resume don’t convey your skin color, your accent doesn’t come out in your work history, nobody can make guesses about your sexuality based on your work email address, but these all become much more easy to discriminate against with a video. All under the pretext of “We didn’t like their answer to the question.”
And you don’t even get the context of an interview to defend yourself.
All excellent points.
Your name and resume don’t convey your skin color
Your name is (usually) a pretty big giveaway for your ethnicity, and in most countries it’s the norm to have a picture of yourself on your resume
In the US, it certainly isn’t. It’s viewed as a red flag for a US company to ask for a photo unless the job is something where appearance is an important quality like actor or model. I think the US grapples with this kind of discrimination more than many of the countries where it’s the norm.
There’s a very good way of gauging how much of a dystopian shithole our world has become, and that’s by simply watching quiz shows on daytime TV.
Compare Who Wants To Be A Millionaire to The Chase. In its original run, WWTBAM had two milestones for answering 5 (£1,000) and 10 (£32,000) questions correct respectively. This meant that failing after one of these checkpoints guaranteed you that prize. The Chase on the other hand is a series of quick-fire pub quiz rounds with some notoriously difficult questions where you’re up against a professional quizzer and have to survive multiple rounds, before all the remaining contestants have to beat the ‘Chaser’ in a two-minute quick-fire round of pub quiz questions. Fail at any point? “You get nothing! You lose! Good day sir!”
The Chase is legitimately a much harder show where it is exponentially harder to actually win a cash prize as a contestant and that is one of the main reasons I fucking hate that show.
Where am I going with this? With the way the economy, automation, AI, scarcity, human population growth, etc is going, we are one day going to reach a point where we’ll have to compete in game shows just to get a fucking job! If recruiters are making you record 2 to 5 minute video responses on a fucking job application, then we’re already part-way there.
There was a game show in Russia in 2000s where high schoolers had to answer ridiculously hard questions about Ancient Greece in order to enroll into MGIMO, a prestigious state university of foreign affairs, which was near-impossible to enroll in any other way (e.g. entrance exams) if you weren’t a child of a top-level government official.
The contestants had to sit as the audience first and answer some pop-up questions before even having a chance to actually participate in the game show, and then win in a series of games (like quarter-finals, semifinals, finals…)
It really does look like modern job application process where you have to participate in a series of never-ending interviews and test tasks
It sounds like something out of a YA novel. If that theme continues, the nepo babies that got in through enrollment have a derogatory term for the kids who got in through the game show.
Come to think of it, yeah, sounds also like a Korean drama about bullying or social inequality :)
On a more serious note, there is only one public person I could think of who has enrolled into MGIMO through the game show, that’s Alexey Navalny’s aide Kira Yarmysh (there is even an episode of the game with her on YouTube; she lost that year and won a year later). I don’t remember her mentioning any animosity towards her because of her participation.
Incredible find, thanks for sharing
