The recent introduction of online employment auctions is bad for both recruiters and job seekers. Two sites, Monster.com and USAJobAuction.com, established these bidding battlegrounds. The Monster.com site focuses on contract employment (independent contractors, consultants and free-lancers), while USAJobAuctions.com covers full-time as well as temporary positions.
For recruiters, there are several important downsides to employment auctions. First, the direct competition they establish between employers is inherently unhealthy and inflationary. A telling analog is the free-agent market in professional sports. As that process illustrates, any time organizations bid on the talents of individuals, the price of that talent inevitably goes up. Consider the numerous instances of journeymen outfielders and third-string relief pitchers who exploited the free-agent market and acquired multimillion-dollar employment packages.
Second, employment auctions don't support smart "buying" decisions. At a traditional and online auctions, you are always accorded a period of time to review your purchase. You also have the right to withdraw your bid, if in your opinion or that of an outside expert, the product does not measure up to its purported value. Even with that safeguard in place, auction fraud on the Internet has is a significant problem, according to the National Consumers League.
Moreover, if accurate product evaluations are difficult to perform in the artificially compressed environment of an auction, assessments of people are infinitely more challenging. Indeed, it's virtually impossible to conduct the rigorous analysis required to make sound candidate selection and staffing decisions in an auction format. And that reality will lead to numerous cases of "buyer's remorse."
Third, the auction format may well appeal to those with strong egos and great self-confidence, but for some significant portion of the work force, it has the potential to be a huge psychological and emotional deflator. Imagine the scene in which you have put yourself up for auction, and no one -- absolutely no one -- casts a bid. Or, even worse, bids are made for your talent and experience, but they are so ludicrously out of line with your expectations that your self esteem plummets. When such situations occur (and they will occur), employers are likely to get stuck with the tab. You will eventually find work, but the auction experience will have mutated you into "damaged goods," and it's your new employer who will pay (with increased health insurance claims and absenteeism) to repair the damage.
A very real case-in-point occurred in the public eye recently. It involved 11 engineers in Silicon Valley who put themselves up for auction on eBay. Their seemingly self-confident act caught the eye of the media and stimulated speculation about the impact of auctions on the world of work. What's less well known, however, is that not a single serious bid was received for those engineers during the 24-hour period they were up for auction on eBay. Undoubtedly, they suffered both a blow to their individual and collective egos and a substantial decline in their market value as a result. And their current employer will probably have to pay the bill to redress the situation.
Similarly, from the job seeker's perspective, there is perhaps no more demeaning process for a person to go through than the experience of transforming themselves into a "capital good." Not only do they lose all of the intangibles that cannot be conveyed in the auction format -- their personality, savvy, commitment and hustle -- but they must endure a process in which employers make business judgments about their worth and bid those assessments in a public market. It is a dehumanizing and hurtful experience.
Further, there is always the danger that your skills will be undervalued in the market, simply because of your career field. While it is perhaps possible to evaluate a person's potential contribution to an organization when that person works in a field involving discrete skills and knowledge (e.g., information technology, dental hygiene), it is much more difficult to assess a person with soft or general skills (e.g., sales, management). As a result, the auction format -- which not only requires such judgments, but demands that they be performed in the heat of a competitive process a few days -- cannot establish an accurate valuation for a broad segment of the work force and will diminish their current and future career prospects.
And finally, there is the residue of a person's auction experience. If, for whatever reason, today's auction yields an unfairly low appraisal of a person's skills, that appraisal will become a permanent part of their employment record. It will shackle them as harshly as any steel collar and forever depress their market value.
