“Off the Radar” spotlights interesting culture bytes outside of the SMU campus. It appears every Thursday in “The Mix.”
Everyone has a story to tell when it comes to horrific job interviews, but you’d be hard pressed to beat the story of 18-year-old Fatima Rueda and 20-year-old Nadia Bravo of Argentina who were both competing for the same job as a sales clerk at a bakery in a suburb of Buenos Aires earlier this month.
The two women, neither of whom have been able to find work since graduating from high school, were put through a grueling preinterview process and chosen as the two finalists from a pool of dozens of applicants.
The interview itself included quizzes, confessional interviews where they were asked about the most intimate details of their personal lives, as well as an unpaid trial run at the job where difficult situations were thrown at them to test their ability to handle the stresses of the job.
This might all seem a bit much for a blue-collar job, but did I mention that the whole process was videotaped and shown before a live studio audience?
Human Resources, an Argentinian game show, has become a huge success in a country whose economy seems to grow worse by the week. Five days a week, the show’s host, Nestor Ibarra steps around the question “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” in favor of something seemingly a bit more ordinary – “Who Wants to Be Employed?”
Its critics have accused the show of being everything from unemployment as soap opera to the Real World meets the Great Depression and even reality television at its rock bottom, but in a country where unemployment has reached 23 percent and half of Argentina’s 34 million people have fallen into poverty the stakes on this game show are very real.
“We can’t solve the problem,” Ibarra told The New York Times. “But we can help establish the dignity of work, and remind people that the unemployed are not just statistics, but also people with faces, names and lives.”
Every episode, a job is announced and from dozens of initial applicants, 20 are selected to come to the studios for a pre-interview process. Two are eventually selected from that group to appear on the game show where they answer questions, they spend a day on the job, and relatives and friends plead on their behalf.
While most of the jobs are blue-collar ranging from work in a garage to a theme park, the chance at winning a one-year work contract with full benefits attracts even the highly educated in a country where any promise of medical insurance is a rare luxury.
At the end of each episode, Argentina’s equivalent to Vanna White invites the television audience to call in and vote for who will be offered the job. Usually the job is offered to the contestant with the best sob story.
In the case of the two young women vying for the job at the bakery, Rueda, the single mother, received 52 percent of the vote. But as has happened many times on the show, the company offered both women a job.
However, as people from all over the country tune in to watch their fellow men and woman degrade themselves for some small measure of job security, it appears that reality television and the free market make a perfect match – they both thrive on blatant self promotion
And as Argentina’s situation seems to be getting even worse, what better way to affirm the spirit of capitalism is still alive in this imploding economy?
