Some people, especially young people, notice others getting rich quick on some property speculation deal and assume they can get on the gravy train as well. Others watch television – or whatever people watch nowadays – and believe that one day they will be millionaires, like celebrities.
Others become enamoured of certain personalities and start to believe they should shape their identity, working life, way of talking and doing things to become like such personalities.
However, they will never become millionaires, they will never get rich quick and they will never become like the personalities they adore. Yet the army of wannabes seems to be growing, and is also starting to have an impact on the labour market. Employers are experiencing it.
This is becoming very evident in recruitment. One gets job applicants whose own CV shows the limitations of their knowledge and experience, and quote a starting salary of above €25,000. When one asks them for the basis on which they make such a claim, their answer is that this is what some companies are paying. So their expectation is to peg their income at that level.
Their thinking goes something like: “pay me now for what I believe I will deserve in a couple of years”.
It is also evident at the place of work. One gets employees who talk big, adopt an aggressive attitude and try to make everyone believe they know it all and look down on those colleagues of theirs, who do not talk with the same pomposity they do. Once one starts to scratch the surface one starts to recognise how superficial such people are, and how their way of talking was nothing more than trying to adopt the identity of someone else.
One fundamental rule is whether a job applicant is more keen to know about what one will get rather than what one will give
We seem to have created this army of entitled wannabes, which is starting to have a disruptive effect at the workplace. Luckily one can catch these at the recruitment stage. One fundamental rule is whether a job applicant is more keen to know about what one will get rather than what one will give.
If the candidate seems less interested in the company and the job and how it will further their career than they are in the salary package and the benefits, that says a great deal about the job applicant. If they haven’t bothered to look at the company’s website or checked out the company on social media or performed any form of due diligence prior to the interview, that continues to say a great deal about the job applicant.
If through some sort of mishap, they do get past the interview and get recruited, one will find that wannabes are very good talkers, and the more they talk, the more they stray from their real job. They would not be short of ideas – they come up with a dozen in the space of an hour. Yet when they come to put their own ideas into action, they fail miserably. They are not really passionate about anything except themselves, and there is no real alignment between their head, their heart and their talk.
When an economy such as ours is performing very well, we are bound to get these wannabes. They believe work is one big party and their objective is to grab as much as they can for themselves.
In the medium-term, the truth about their real capabilities will tend to come out and we are already seeing people who cannot seem to hang on to a job for more than four to six months.
In the longer term these could become the army of long-term unemployed, which is surely not what they wanted to be.
Lawrence Zammit is a founding partner of marketing and human resources consultancy firm MISCO.