To answer the title question, because that's the subjective experience of commodifying oneself for the market. It's specifically the cognitive dissonance resulting in the erroneous assumption that social relations are primarily not economic relations in an environment, more than almost any other, that is evidently the opposite. The sooner that one realizes that one's job search is primarily a performance in commodification of labor, the easier it is to get over it and move on.
Sure, do you ever feel like applying for a job is an impersonal and soul-crushing exercise that feels dehumanizing? If you've felt this way then congrats, there's a name for it: alienation.
Human's are complex social beings and each individual has a unique set of strengths and talents. However, this complexity is incompatible with how the labor market works. Specifically it's incompatible with how labor is commodified.
Let's use a tech parallel to explain how labor is treated as a commodity. Take Docker for instance. Docker commodifies applications by wrapping them in a uniform interface. The whole point is that packaging up the whole app into a standardized container makes it easier to work with. You don't have to care about the internal complexity of the application, you interact with all Docker containers the same way.
Commodification of goods goes hand in hand with the mass production of goods and the ability for markets to function. Think of commodity markets as an example. Oil is traded in barrels, a standardized container for oil, and at regulated grades. This makes buyers confident that they are getting what they're paying for when they buy oil. One barrel of sweet crude is just as good as any other barrel of sweet crude.
We trade commodities as a means to an end.
The problem happens when we do the same to people. The debasement we feel during the hiring process is due to how people are treated as a commodity. Take the resume as an example. The resume is an abstraction of you as a person. It helps HR and hiring managers sort through candidates because of the way it abstracts labor. But at the same time, it reduces a person to a list of bullet points on a page or two at most. There is a stark contrast between the whole person as a living breathing human being and a list of bullet points. Some people find being treated as a means to and end humiliating.
I think by now you can choose others parts of the hiring process and use this lens to see in which ways people are treated as commodities.
I expect to get reactions along the spectrum from "that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard. Of course that's how it works!" to "Huh, I never thought of it that way before." Both are fine. I've heard it all.
I’m not going to try to convince you in particular one way or another. I’ve just been reflecting about what you’ve said in general, because I think it’s insightful and it’s gotten me thinking.
While I think your analogy is more or less accurate, I think any reasonable economist/person could interpret whether hiring standardization is good or bad.
For instance, it’s very easy to interpret a standardization of practices as making the labor market more efficient as most people will know exactly what to expect, more or less, in the process. So they can study or prepare for a job and apply to a multitude of places. Someone could probably write a paper on how standardization of hiring processes has ultimately led to more people hired more, from a more diverse number of places and cultures, than it ever had in the past.
And of course another person could find issues in this for sure.
I end up feeling there are trade-offs with both and certainly processes can be improved. But I think that’s a more micro problem. Like most places don’t in actuality do the exact same hiring process so you can’t really paint with too broad a brush. At least in tech.
But standardization is actually a pretty amazing phenomenon and it can’t be understated how much it equalizes many areas of economies.
On the other hand, I’ll also point out it can disenfranchise those who wouldn’t do well in that standardized process. I’ve felt this in my own life with grad school entry processes. Unless you are the very very best on paper, the top schools ignore you. That’s been utterly dehumanizing and makes me very unhappy. So I really do feel it.
But again, pros and cons. Anyway, thanks for posting this.
By the way, only tangentially related, but my favorite book on standardization is Nature’s Metropolis by William Cronon. It’s inspired a lot of my interest in the intersection of economics, tech, and nature and how we impose standards upon the world.
