Job realities Trumped

I don’t watch TV much. Of course, I hear news of this TV series or that. “American Idol,” “The Bachelor/Bachelorette,” “Survivor” and all it has inspired. I hear about them. But basically they go their way and I go mine. I don’t criticize them; they don’t criticize me.

Then along comes a series that describes itself as the ultimate job hunt. And since that is the field in which I have plodded or danced for the past 30 years, the urge to say something has become irresistible.

Sure, I know “The Apprentice” is just entertainment. It’s Mark Burnett. It’s just “Survivor” in a new dress: two teams, 16 contestants, one team losing, one contestant eliminated at the end of each episode.

It’s also brilliant, of course, during an extensive job-market downturn, to find this particular format. At least 9 million people are out of a job right now: a ready-made audience for anything dealing with job hunting. Plus you have the basic “Survivor” demographics: millions of people with their nostrils still flaring, hungering for more elimination contests, grief and rejection.

“The Apprentice” has been wildly successful thus far. It was the most watched show on television the week that it launched. It has ratings that advertisers love. It’s so valuable to NBC that the network moved it to a new day when it looked like “The Apprentice” would get trounced by “American Idol.” Before the show was even launched it had 215,000 people applying to be one of the 16 “candidates”/contestants on the show.

Brilliant, as I said. Why not just regard it as entertainment and let it go? Maybe because some twentysomething might actually get a few job-hunting ideas from the show. Fantasy has a strange way of seeping into reality.

I don’t know what an ultimate job hunt looks like, but I do know what a really good job hunt looks like. So in the spirit of applying a little reality to reality TV, I’d like to point out a few of its distinguishing characteristics. Chances are you won’t see a single one on this series.

1 Always Have Alternatives Ready.

A really good job hunt is one where the job hunter, from the beginning, has alternative “targets” to choose between, in case the first one doesn’t pan out. In “The Apprentice,” the one and only target is a job with Donald Trump.

2 Know the Job You’re Going After.

A really good job hunt is one where job hunters have taken time to research the job they are seeking. In “The Apprentice” there is no evidence that this has ever happened. Three episodes into the series I’m still not sure these candidates know anything about the prospective job, except that it’s within Trump’s organization, it pays $250,000 and its shelf life is one year. More complex questions, such as “What are its duties,” “What kind of tasks need to be accomplished,” “What division is it within your organization that I’m supposed to head up,” and so on, remain cloudy. If this were truly the ultimate job hunt, the candidates would have had a chance to quiz Donald at length about the job. Or if not Donald, then one of his omnipresent assistants.

3 Don’t Think of Yourself as ‘A Job Beggar.’

A really good job hunt is one where the candidates think of themselves as “resource persons” rather than as “job beggars.” They approach an employer in order to offer themselves as a resource for the tasks that employer needs to have done, rather than as one who is desperate for just any old job there. Since the candidates on “The Apprentice” don’t know what the tasks will be, it’s impossible to act as anything but job beggar. True, on the basis of the first three episodes, the candidates might guess that the tasks will involve selling, advertising and negotiating/buying, but they can’t be sure. They are essentially shadowboxing in the dark.

4 Treat the Whole Job Hunt as a Research Project.

There are two questions to be answered in any really good job hunt. The first is obvious: Do they want me? But the second is equally important: Do I want them? As a pioneer in the job hunt, Dr. Nathan Azrin was the first to observe that hiring is more like the dating game than it is like buying a new car. In the hiring process, as in the dating game, both parties get to say whether this is something they want. Every new encounter with a prospective employer should therefore be another part of learning whether or not you want to work for them. But in “The Apprentice,” the possibility of one of the candidates suddenly saying, “Well, I just learned something about Donald Trump that made me decide I really don’t want to work here,” is as remote as one of the fired candidates getting hired as an executive with the Trump organization. It seems to be taken for granted that to work for Donald would be an unalloyed joy. Maybe it has something to do with the corporate jets, the luxurious meals and the dazzling display of wealth (that is, if you’re on the winning team that episode).

5 Don’t Conduct Your Job Hunt Alone.

It was discovered quite some time ago that the most successful job hunts are conducted by people who are working with other job hunters. The concept was invented by Dr. Azrin (again), and is called “The Job Club.” It has been widely copied ever since. The idea is that if you and others are job hunting, you could and should band together, tell each other what kind of job you are looking for (in detail), and enlist the ideas and contacts of those other job hunters (just as they enlist yours). It’s the old “one hand washes the other” theory of human relationships. It works, and it works well because all the job hunters are looking for quite dissimilar jobs.

What we have in “The Apprentice,” however, is a warped, fun-house-mirror version of this idea. These are not people trying to help one another find complementary jobs. These are 13 people -- eight on the women’s team, and five remaining on the men’s team at this writing, before Thursday’s elimination of the fourth contestant -- who all want the same job and with the same employer. Team members may be pretending to work together with each other toward each episode’s goal, but in the end they must do their best to eliminate each other. In the third episode, the men’s team set out deliberately to lose, in order to get rid of their team member Sam, whom they mostly dislike.

If you have no idea what I’m talking about, because you never watch, just remember the principle out there in real life: Job hunters or candidates work best as a team or job club. On such a team, you need others’ help; they need yours, if all are to emerge not only with a job but with their humanity intact. “The Apprentice” doesn’t even come close to understanding this. Then again, humanity isn’t exactly the show’s watchword.

But America will watch anyway. Watch the competition, watch the pretend friendships, and -- later -- the stupefying betrayal of former friends when one least expects it. After all, in today’s popular culture, to win a $250,000 job anything is justified. Even if that job is only going to last a year.

Incidentally, the thing about this series that I found most amusing was something Donald Trump said recently when he appeared on “The Tonight Show.” He was explaining to Jay Leno that the producers had told him “The Apprentice: The Ultimate Job Hunt” would only require three hours of his time each week. Instead, he complained, it was turning out to be more like 30 hours per week. I laughed out loud. Apparently, even bosses need to do more research before they agree to something.

Richard Bolles wrote the career manual “What Color Is Your Parachute? A Practical Manual for Job-Hunters and Career-Changers.”