15 November 2018
Selling CVs
A new industry.
By Young Chin
When chatting about his proposals for Sodom, the Lord promised to spare the city if Abraham could find ten good men in it. Unfortunately the locals failed the test, and as I suppose that the EU will fail it too it seems inevitable that we will bin them in March. Still, there is one chap I would keep, a Dutch “positivity trainer”, Mr Emile Ratelband, who is mounting a legal action to reduce his age from 69 to 49.
You can certainly see his point. His body is that of a forty-nine-year-old and he describes himself as “a young God”. Why should he be trapped by his birth-date and the requirements of bureaucratic record-keeping? Why should he be unfairly deprived of employment and dating opportunities appropriate to his true physical state? If that isn’t discrimination, nothing is. He is fighting for his rights against the prejudices of the past. What a man! Can we not lift him out of the Brexit chaos and make him one of ours?
If he succeeds, Mr Ratelband’s achievement will not just be lining himself up with more dating opportunities, important though that may be to the young ladies of Holland (“a young God”, remember! Queue up, young ladies! Queue up!) – he will have established the fundamental principle which the self-certifiers of the LGBT movement have been pursuing indirectly. Your identity is determined by how you should be regarded now, not what you were once upon a time. Born a man? So what? You can elect to be a woman. Born in the 1940s? So what? You can elect to be younger. History is not merely bunk, it is something that can be offered around like a bag of sweets so that people can select the back-stories which they believe to fit them best.
But the really exciting thing about Mr Ratelband’s principle is the way in which it can be used to abolish missed opportunities. Freed from the shackles of the past, you would have the chance to rewrite your own personal CV by reference to the things you would have done if you had had a bit more initiative. Expensive consultancies would offer remodelling packages, a sort of career facelift which would need no painful surgery because the things being nipped and tucked would have long gone by. The cheaper packages would begin with a telephone consultation:
“Knowledgeable, are you? Well up to the standard of those who have graduated from one of those top universities to which you would have gone had you smoked less weed? Replace “Revolutionary Studies from Billericay” by “Classics from Oxford”? Yes, that gives the reader of your CV a better impression of who you are now. We’ll be in touch with the universities to have their registers altered.”
“Now this bit about keeping the books. It doesn’t mention an accountancy qualification. Still, you say your job would normally be done by an accountant and that you are very good at it. Do you think a Chartered Accountancy or a Certified Accountancy tag would better sum up your strengths?”
“Yes, that abuse conviction is certainly blocking your opportunity to work with children. Still, you’ve changed now, haven’t you? Your CV should be about who you are now, not who you were then. Those convictions should come off the record. What did you do while you were in prison? Watched television and read porn? That must have broadened your mind. Perhaps we could say that you devoted five years to the study of contemporary literature.”
More expensive would be the bespoke package designed specifically to get you a particular job or role in the community. Suppose you wanted to be an MP; the consultant would work backwards from the qualities demanded by the main parties of their candidates and groom your CV accordingly. Dependability, for example. Perhaps a sacking or two for lack of initiative would reinforce your dependability score, even though you had never been dismissed from anywhere in your life.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting anything dishonest here. We are talking about respectable consultants, not estate agents. You would only be allowed to select a history which reflected the person you are. Suppose, for example, you were tone deaf. “Interested in music” would be fair but “A distinguished classical musician” would not. To prevent any cheating, the consultancy would have to present a “certificate of appropriateness” when any official records were to be updated. Of course, the information supporting that would have come from you, but self-certification has worked so well in other areas that it is a respected form of verification nowadays. Anyway, once the records had been amended no one would be able to tell, and you would actually become a person with a different history.
If Mr Corbyn comes to power, he will no doubt require that the consultancies are public sector owned. That would be a pity, as it would surrender the prospect of a major boost to the economy as the City pored resources into this new expansion of the services sector. Of course there would be one or two rogue outfits, consultancies where you can buy an inappropriate CV, rather as there are universities where you can buy a degree without attending the course. But those responsible for altering the records would be entitled to challenge the certificate and that, together with a bit of that light touch regulation for which London is so justly famed, should keep things under control.
Still, one group of people is not happy with all this. LGBT campaigners have condemned Ratelband’s initiative as “tasteless.” That is an odd word to apply to a legal action but in truth it isn’t the real objection at all. Actually, it is a question of green eyes. Until now, the LGBT people were the high priests of self-certification, and were justly proud of this contribution to the national culture. If Ratelband succeeds, he will have taken the idea and developed it beyond their wildest dreams. Who would not suffer a pang of jealousy under these circumstances? But they shouldn’t give up. Perhaps they will have some claim against the consultancies for the use of their intellectual property.
