American View: Why we must make job interviews disturbing for everyone involved

Future of Work24 Feb 2026

This promises to be a strange week for me. If you haven’t already read my column from 13th January, the executive summary is that my partner and I got laid off in a mundane corporate restructuring.

This promises to be a strange week for me. If you haven’t already read my column from 13th January, the executive summary is that my partner and I got laid off in a mundane corporate restructuring. Nothing unusual about that; it’s my fourth and — if I recall correctly — Chris’s third time going through this. It’s so normal an occurrence in American business that we both had prepared contingency plans on the off chance it happened again. It’s become like driving in snow; you always keep a shovel in the boot.

Anyway, the job market in 1st Quarter USA is complete crap. Companies’ revenues are getting hammered by illegal tariffs (per the most recent Supreme Court ruling). Foreign overseas investors are fleeing the American market like it was a plague zone … which it is, since the worm-riddled Head of Health and Human Services has declared that vaccines and medical care are communist. Also, we might or might not be invading Iran to distract everyone from the Epstein files. Everyone possessing room temperature IQ and above has come to realizes that our collective economic future lies somewhere between “Great Depression chic” and “the Mad Max future would be a vast improvement.”

We’ve been aware for some time that somewhere between a third and half of all online job postings are fake. In some cases, companies post wholly invented roles just to appear vibrant and growing to the markets (when they’re really one news cycle away from disaster). In other cases, the fake jobs are posted by fake companies or imposters pretending to be real companies to harvest sensitive data. None of that is helped by the fact that most organizations and hiring managers are undertrained in talent management (a topic I’ve been pounding the table about for years).

All that is to say, Chris and I were expecting a tough slog. It doesn’t help that ours is a niche specialization. Security Human Risk Management is relatively new compared to most other corpo security roles (e.g., sysadmin, database administrator, et al). We’re important to be sure, but we’re also fringe enough that many recruiters and hiring managers aren’t sure how to recognize a competitive candidate in our domain. We knew this going into the field; we both love what we do and wouldn’t change roles unless forced to.

Still, the challenge of finding a comparable post in another organization has been made a smidge more challenging than it should have been. I’ve invested a lot of time checking in on my peers and former colleagues, trying to get my virtual fingers on the pulse of the industry, and things aren’t looking great. With the USA becoming a pariah state, it’s become much harder to find roles outside the country. Meanwhile, with our billionaire class trying to achieve the ultimate cyberpunk win-state of devolving us into the Incorporated States of America, most companies are hunkering down and bracing for both the literal and the allegorical expected KA-BOOMs. Hence, even if you can find a real, advertised position, there’s no expectation you’ll get hired.

I reckon it was like finding the first gold nugget in the stream. You focus on the positives and forget all the dreary hours of failure.

So, not great odds. This compels us to throw our hats in the ring for gigs that we’re gloriously overqualified for and, as you’d expect, don’t pay enough. I lived this exact same scenario back when I retired from the military: the first corpo gig I got was capped at 35% under the salary I’d received from my government gig. The company’s more austere budget meant my family could meet most of our obligations for at or about nine months (best-case scenario) by supplementing pay with savings. After that, we’d be making some severe cuts. The gig lasted for eighteen months before — as per usual — my department was dissolved in a routine corporate restructuring.

I learned from that experience and strove to save even more for the next time … This is late-stage capitalism; there’s always a next time. Fortunately, we’re in a better position now to endure this sort of setback than we were a decade ago. Still, inflation is a [expletive deleted] so more savings in this decade doesn’t really mean greater fiscal endurance. Once again, we’ll be okay for a bit while I search for something new. We can pretend there’s no extraordinary pressure gnawing at us through our every waking moment. That’s unrealistic.

And yet, we’re socially compelled to press on as if nothing involving burning strip malls and homemade guillotines was pencilled in for next quarter’s national agenda. This refusal to confront our degenerating national reality means the usual pantomime of submitting PDF CVs to Applicant Management Systems and waiting for opportunities to Zoom with HR screeners seems farcical. What’s the point in salary negations when there’s now a thoroughly proven non-zero chance that you and everyone you know might be plucked off the street by armed thugs?

Job seekers were already stressed because everyone desperately needs pay and benefits to keep living, while corpo managers desperately need skilled workers to keep their function(s) running and their employer afloat. That was tough enough. Now, right outside in the public square, American workers are being beaten, murdered, and disappeared by bloodlust-y ICE-holes. That’s a ton more unproductive stress for everyone involved. It’s truly a wonder any progress is being made on office work at all.

The “American dream” seems to have been swapped out for the “Soviet nightmare” and yet we’re all supposed to pretend that it hasn’t. This desperate denial reminds me far too much of the morally bankrupt AIDS denialism chronicled in And the Band Played On. At the same time, there’s an inescapably plastic Vault 33-ness to the whole American corpo see-no-evil position. Which is why I’m so curious to lean what sort of questions I might be asked if and when I finally get to chat with a hiring authority later this year. More importantly, will answering those questions truthfully panic the hiring manager sitting across from me?

I/m confident there’s no risk of brand confusion, but still … Yikes!

For example, are we going to continue to stick to the “safe” questions like “where do you see yourself in five years?” and “what would you say is your greatest professional weakness?” I normally despise these vapid rote-memorization exercises since they provide zero practical information about a contender’s fitness for duty. Everyone mindlessly chants “exceeding my performance targets” and “I always work too hard” like Chatty Carhys that graduated business school. It’s a call-and-response drill straight out of your least-favourite church experience, e.g., “where do you see yourself in five years?” à “… and also with you.”

If we are compelled to endure the usual interview slop, will it be acceptable to answer truthfully, in light of the current situation? For example, in the five years question, a more practical answer today might be “I’m confident that I’ll still be among the living, as I’m thoroughly proficient with both military small arms and PowerPoint.” Similarly, for the greatest weakness question, a pragmatic self-assessment would be “I’m too old to brawl with rioters and looters anymore. I’ll need to defend our cubicle farm from a standoff position.”

I doubt anyone (other than me) would be chuffed with those answers, though. Sure, they’re honest and actionable, but they shatter the illusion of normalcy by addressing the Adderall-addicted fascist elephant in the room. Stating the obvious requires everyone in the interview to acknowledge what’s happening, especially that things are really bad right now and are only going to get worse in the near future. That’s a deeply troubling realisation that far too many Americans can’t or won’t acknowledge.

Unfortunately, we’re not going to escape this situation by pretending that it doesn’t exist. We must meet the moment and adapt. As such, I humbly suggest that 2Q26 corpo interviews should evolve and mature as follows:

“How many episodes of workplace violence have there been here in the past year and how were they resolved by management?”
“Has the organisation allowed any Homeland Security personnel entry into this facility?”
“How are delivery people, maintenance staff, and visitors screened for weapons before being allowed inside our workspaces?”
“Do you have secure lockers in this facility where I can safely store my concealed sidearm during working hours?”
“What sort of trauma supplies are available in the office for life-threatening emergencies?” and
“If ordered to by the government, will management turn you, me, or any of our colleagues over for extrajudicial deportation?”

“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.” – Hannah Arendt

Sure, those examples might be considered a tad macabre, but they address urgent, realistic, and vital issues that affect real workers’ lives today. Abstract business school “best practices” were always weak; today, they’re actively harmful. The classic screening questions were penned in a completely different world than the one burning down right outside out homes.

Everyone would like to simply go to work, bang out some slides, go home, and chill but that routine is slipping away from us. When workers need to plot routes to and from their workplace specifically to evade Stasi Jr. immigration checkpoints, our old “normal” work life model is well and truly gone.

It used to be that a “good job” was defined by its salary range, duties, and location. Nowadays, a “good job” is one where those in power are actively reducing the risk of their workers getting disappeared. Since anyone can be targeted by the Gestaposseurs, everyone must evaluate their relative risk profile and seek out the safest option available to them. That includes not just where they work, but who they work for, how they get to and from work, and how far their employer is prepared to go to protect them.

So … What are you and your organisation prepared to do to protect your workers How confident are you that your org’s leaders will live up to their claims when bullied by the executive branch? In the inevitable conflict between the corrupt state and the common man, what does your organisation value more: the state or the worker? Furthermore, when your leaders make claims about their positions and intentions, do you believe them?

Candidates need to know where you and your employer stand. Are you prepared to tell them? Because I plan to ask … and everyone else coming to interview with you should too.

Future of Work