Recruitment, your impitoya-a-ble universe! To land a job, a solid CV is no longer enough. You now have to go through sadistic or wacky face-to-face meetings with employers or very imaginative headhunters.

Georges feels his hands getting clammy, his stalked-beast look wavering. Alone, in front of a jury of four people who bombard him, he is summoned to make his self-criticism. It's like a Soviet courtroom, yet it's only a job interview. "Are you stressed, Georges? Are you impressed to be here?" "Do you always take a long time to figure things out?" "What do you use to compensate for this slowness?" "Where are your shortcomings, Georges?" An hour and a half of humiliation to hope to get a job as a salesman at GAN paid at the minimum wage: this is what Didier Cros films in his documentary entitled La Gueule de l'emploi (The Mouth of Employment).

For the sociologist Vincent de Gaulejac (1), there is no doubt that the "struggle of the squares" has now replaced the class struggle, and this is not particularly good news: "There is such a discrepancy between the number of jobs available and the number of working people of working age to fill them that it inevitably leads to violence...". On the one hand, there are candidates in the galley, ready to do anything to get an often vital job: "We're here to beat each other up, no mercy!" says one of them - flunked in the first round. On the other side of the table, employers convinced that they are in their rightful place: it's that you have to sort it out! Even if it means entrusting the recruitment to a headhunting firm with sadistic methods.

The sociologist calls it the "innocent violence" No one is malicious, yet the result is worthy of Milgram's experience (2). A strategic issue par excellence, recruitment today crystallises all the tensions that undermine the labour market. Hundreds of CVs carried by the crisis are piling up on company directors' desks. Outdated, some prefer to delegate the selection of profiles to third parties, on whom they can conveniently blame in the event of a casting error. Because the hiring process is long, costly and risky: "If you realise that it doesn't fit at the end of the trial period, you have to start all over again from the beginning... It's a considerable waste of time and money.

"If you find out after the trial period, it's obviously even worse!" explains the boss of a new technology company. "Recruiting a healthy person is the hardest thing to do!" says Jean-Claude Delgènes, director of Technologia, a firm specialising in the prevention of work-related risks. If employers are to be believed, the 10 million unemployed French people are mostly cannonballs, and good profiles are a rare commodity! As a result, all means are good to reassure oneself by trying to make recruitment an exact science, objectified by tests, validated by learned schemes.

"Selection has become a sensitive issue, organisations have invented devices to rationalise and objectify things," confirms Vincent de Gaulejac. Between headhunters and selection agencies, recruitment is now a real market". And so much the worse if the methods of rationalisation are sometimes limited. And if the interviews often flirt with, at best, rudeness, at worst, illegality. "After three successful interviews at Total, the HR manager finally admitted to me that in reality the position had already been filled internally," recalls 32-year-old Patricia. They had only brought me in to give the appearance of recruiting several candidates, but the game had been played from the start. I found it bloated." No one is no longer embarrassed to have someone move two, three, ten times...

Even for an internship at 400 euros or a fixed-term contract. "I had four interviews for a four-month fixed-term contract," reports Marine, a communications officer in the health sector. In the end, they explained to me that I was too qualified for the job." For her part, Célia, 27, a graduate of a business school, has rather bad memories of her interviews in an agricultural union: "No one had warned me that the interviews were going to last all day. I was on the job, and I had to call in sick at work... Second surprise: it was a group interview. Employers do this to save time, but they pretend to forget that it completely locks up individual claims. You don't negotiate your salary when there are six of you in a room."

Rather than increasing the number of tests and simulations, some companies choose to delegate responsibility for recruitment... to their employees! "Personally, I am very much in favour of cooptation," says Jean-Claude Delgènes. If you have a good element in your team, you have an excellent chance that it will bring you another good element, it helps to limit the risks". A sign of the times, the "cooptation" - translate: the plunger - is today accepted and claimed by all. At Google, it is even encouraged by a bonus: e4,000 is paid to any employee who has recommended a candidate who has been recruited. The in-house sport therefore consists of training your foal so that he doesn't let himself be destabilised by the twisted questions that have made the company's reputation: how many golf balls can a truck hold?

How many times a day do the hands of a clock overlap? "The aim is to assess the person's reasoning abilities," explains Sarah, a Google employee. I had been asked how many hairs a dachshund has! I had estimated that the dachshund was a cylinder with a surface area of 50 cm2, that it had 400 hairs per square centimetre of skin, and then I had added 30% for the head, the legs, the tail...". The good news is that applicants can now get their hands on the book Are you smart enough to work at Google? (3), which provides tips and tricks for answering nonsensical questions with panache. But to be hired at the company that graduates prefer, being smart is not enough: the candidate must also be unanimously approved by his future colleagues. Even someone below him or her in the hierarchy can veto the application and get the applicant out of the way. It is therefore better to be compatible with the "Google spirit" in order to hope to be part of the family.

"In a world where it is no longer skills that prevail, but human, relational qualities, we select on what you are, and on your degree of acceptance of the system's norms".notes Vincent de Gaulejac. In other words, in 2013, the model employee must be adaptable, mobile, handsome (but not too handsome either, or risk being suspected of incompetence), have a firm handshake and confident gait, be devoid of accent and belly... and have work as his only horizon.

"The companies try to find 'pattern 1s', that is to say over-invested people who love the work," explains Jean-Claude Delgènes. There are psychological tests that can detect them". The Internet is full of tests that probe the souls of potential recruits, unmask the shirkers and perhaps get their hands on the Holy Grail: the "pattern 1s", the workaholics, those who will stay until 11 pm without even begging for a sandwich. As a result, the recruitment "market" is above all a huge fool's game. Job applicants become competition animals, train themselves to foil the traps and inflate their CVs, sometimes with the help of a coach; and recruiters go further and further in their investigative techniques. Even if it means delving into the private lives of applicants.

"The traditional "Miss or Miss?"For example, is advantageously replaced by a little tour on Facebook, as Laure tells us: "At the ninth interview at Microsoft, they tell me it's OK, I send my photocopies of my identity card, my Vitale card. I am informed of a last interview with the marketing and sales director for France which will be a "pure formality". The famous director says to me "Here, I'll go to your Facebook profile!". Seeing my photo in my wedding dress, he says to me: "Ah, you're married." I answer: "Yes, but I don't intend to have children in the next two years, if that's what you're worried about." On that note, the tone of the interview changes completely to become very cold. A few days later, the HR manager called me back to tell me that my application had not been selected because I was "not adaptable enough"."

When the detective Derrick style investigation doesn't yield anything, there's still magic. Jean-François Amadieu, author of DRH, the black book (4), reviews the most crazy techniques used by recruiters, from morphopsychology (evaluation of personality according to facial features) to the "intuitive method", a sophisticated name for a practice known as "clairvoyance". Catherine Bidan, a coach from HEC, explains without joking that "intuition is the highest of the seven levels of intelligence": "I receive images, words, scenarios that respond to the sensations. I can feel a person's pain. Unfortunately, I can see the scenario of a news item before the television announces it".

Among other clients, the Ministry of Economy and Finance, Chanel or PSA have already trusted Catherine Bidan and her donations. Jean-François Amadieu also reveals that "France has the rare privilege of being the country in the world where graphology is practised the most". Scientifically, it has been proven that the analysis of personality through writing is not worth a single nail. But it doesn't matter: in 2007, graphology was practised by 70% of recruitment agencies. "In my company, we regularly call on a graphologist to decide which candidates we are interested in," says Marie, who works in a consultancy firm. But, in the end, we don't use her advice very much, because we've noticed that her analyses are always rave reviews!".

In the same vein, astrology is a hit with many employers. "I was recruited for an internship in a major national daily because I was a Capricorn! says one journalist. The director had received so many CVs that he decided to take only Capricorns." A classic: Raymond Domenech never hid the fact that astrology played a fundamental role in the selection of players for his football teams. For his part, the mayor of Issy-les-Moulineaux, André Santini, claims to be wary of Pisces, and maintains that "Aquarians often lack determination".

When will telepathic recruitment begin? Reading the CV in the entrails of a chicken or in the shape of clouds? The sacrifice of young virgins to make sure you hire the right candidate? The charlatans that abound in recruitment agencies still have a bright future ahead of them. Too bad for human resources managers who try to do their job honestly. Too bad, above all, for the candidates who were hoping to promote a quality that is now obsolete: competence.


(1) Author of Travail, les raisons de la colère, Seuil, coll "Economie humaine", 2011.

(2) An experiment carried out in psychology in the 1960s to study submission to authority: on command, participants had to send electric shocks to others. On arrival, a torture session.