Give Us Your Life

It's funny to hear employers tell you about how wonderful their companies really are. They like to tell you that they really want you to have a life outside of work. Really?!? I find the irony to be quite humorous.

If you are in management with a company, you might as well kiss your life as you know it goodbye. Your ass belongs to the company. You have to put in at the very least 50 hours and put in a 5 day work week. But they really want you to be closer to 60 hours. They really don't care about the days that you actually work, or the shifts that you work. They want you to leave work at 2AM and open the store at 6AM. And if things get tough for the company, you better plan on working 70 hours and put in 6 or 7 days a week. No extra money. No hope for extra consideration when it comes time for an evaluation. You just have to suck it up.

Now employers are making even more headway into our personal lives. When you apply for a job, they want you to give them your passwords to your personal websites. This is an outright invasion into your personal privacy. Yet if you don't give them this information, they just won't hire you. And don't worry, they will find somebody who will give them the information.

Then there are those employers who want you to be involved in community service, because it makes them look better. They want to know about all those extra things that promote their business inadvertantly. People go out of their way now to find a charity to be aligned with. And I don't want to go into anybody's self-motivations, but I would venture a guess that there are many people who could care less about the charity they support. That isn't to say that there are not those people who want to support charities, and do so admirably. But what if your charity doesn't measure up to your interviewers standards? What if you don't support breast cancer, but you support HIV awareness? Is there a stigma there? What if it was something that was controversial such as Free Tibet? Would your potential employer suddenly label you as a radical, or someone that cares about human rights? And really...who has time to do community work when you are working 50 - 70 hours a week?

So beware. When an employer wants you to have a life, that is the first thing they don't want you to have. It may sound good, but it certainly isn't what is going to happen.