Today, job hunting is a mutual business.
If one believes the recruiting people and commissions, then they subject the job applicants to an objective performance comparison, the criteria of which are adjusted to the interests and needs of the respective organization.
In the end, the position goes to the person who promises the richest consideration for the payment offered.
To do so is rational in an economic sense and selfish in a moral sense.
Since it is a matter of socially permissible self-interest, there is no object of possible accusations here, but of course it is also not a special merit to see in the other primarily his usefulness for one's own purposes.
That's why you can't seriously thank those who want to hire you.
Exchange partners don't give each other anything.
The letter of application that is customary today corresponds to this.
They consist of violations of the ban on self-praise, which are also permitted, but are mitigated by the praise of others in the testimonies with which the author offers himself to his addressees as a particularly suitable instrument of their intentions: You will miss something, so the message, if you don't take me.
The high exchange value of what the applicant is able to achieve and suffer is emphasized.
In a recently published study, the Giessen historian Timo Luks investigated the prehistory of this familiar form of written self-portrayal.
He evaluated older guidebooks for the authors of this type of text, but also the application texts preserved in the archives, in order to reconstruct the social change that the sought-after relationship with the employer has undergone since the end of the eighteenth century.
The form of job application that we are familiar with, which requires reasonably transparent labor markets with employment offices and regular job advertisements in daily newspapers, therefore only emerged in the course of the nineteenth century.
The older texts that Luks found show clear traces of a stratified society in which stratification not only shows unequal distribution,
On his knees to the employer
Luks shows this in the applications from ordinary people, who often asked for help in writing the letter.
Your job applications could not yet respond to published needs, but at most to rumors about the death or flight of the previous job holder.
So they had to take the initiative – and risk making themselves unpopular.
They also had to communicate across layers from bottom to top.
Instead of the politeness that still makes sense today, one finds nothing but symbols of recognition of an extreme difference in rank.
One's own request was presented on one's knees, so to speak.
Niklas Luhmann made a good observation about the distortion of social reciprocity through stratification structures.
In aristocratic societies, gifts that went from top to bottom were always considered more valuable than their respective counterparts, because this was the only way to maintain the difference in rank, even in the face of mutual dependence.
An extreme example of this are those application letters.
For its authors did not appeal to the interest of their addressee, but to his superior morality.
They didn't offer him an exchange, they appealed to his willingness to do good deeds.
Employment and subsistence were solicited as an undeserved gift.
the idea
Part of this appeal to the generosity of the recipient is how the sender characterizes himself as someone who, under the blows of fate, has become a kind of nursing case.
Instead of boasting about his virtues and merits, he paints his own plight.
The poverty in which he lives, the economic responsibility for his own family that overwhelms him, the unsuccessful search for a job so far – all of this is cited in favor of the applicant.
It is obvious that an appeal is being made here to the vague obligation of the senior to provide emergency aid.
Basically, the employer is wooed as a prospective lifesaver, and that also means that one would then be indebted to the employee, which can never be repaid in any way, not even through tireless effort.