Job-Application Handbook (their magnum opus).29
These books and brochures began to attribute an important role to the concept of the profile by the end of the 1990s. In their 1999 handbook Applications and Resumés for College Graduates, for instance, the authors stressed that “lacking a profile” was the most detrimental factor for applicants, and in a section called “The Rules of Persuasion” they advised job-seekers especially to “create an individual profile.”30 In these early publications, however, the concept did not yet serve as the keyword and foundation of their entire approach to applying for jobs. This changed around the turn of the millennium, when Püttjer and Schnierda trademarked their so-called “profile method” and began to include this term in the titles or subtitles of most of their books.31 According to Christian Püttjer, their focus on the profile was a response to a media-technical shift in the job market – namely the establishment, around the year 2000, of online job applications – which resulted in the implementation of stricter formal standards and limited the space allowed for narrative elements in covering letters.32 “The modern requirements for job applications,” or so begins The Definitive Job-Application Handbook, “can only be met by creating a profiled presentation of oneself.” Every stage of a job search is now organized according to this basic category: “Show your profile when making personal contact with potential employers, make sure that it occupies a clear place in your job-application portfolio, present it in phone calls with the businesses you would like to join, and seamlessly integrate it into your interviews.”33 Across the 550 pages of the book, the term recurs in numerous variations: “qualification profile,” “job profile,” “application profile,” “short profile,” and so on.
Yet how, in Püttjer and Schnierda's estimation, does an “individual profile brimming with informative keywords” have to look in order for job-seekers to “achieve their goal and find a desirable position?” The three “cornerstones” of the profile method, which the authors list at the beginning of every publication, seem rather ambivalent in certain respects. The third point – “trustworthiness” – contains the following exhortation: “Do not distort yourself; your personality is in demand!” And yet this injunction to represent yourself as authentically as possible contradicts the first point, which requires the “precise fit” of applicants and makes the following claim: “The more you cater to the stated job requirements in your application, the more likely you will be to succeed. Adopt the perspective of the HR department.”34 This dual challenge – the conflict between honest introspection and adapting oneself to suit the needs of others – is perhaps indicative of a fundamental characteristic of the self-made profile: it is a format that simultaneously allows for both the utmost individuality and the utmost conformity.
To the extent that the goal of self-description is to suit the prescribed requirements of an employer as closely as possible, today's independently created profiles approximate those created in the name of applied psychology and criminology. In job-application profiles, the external perspective of the psychologist or criminal investigator, which was directed toward pathological schoolchildren or unknown offenders, has simply been transferred to the authors themselves. They must be able to view themselves with the unerring eyes of the businesses where they might want to work. In this light, it makes sense that Püttjer and Schnierda offer the following advice to those creating profiles: “Become a detective on your own case and uncover your professional past!”35 Thus, the application specialists themselves imply that criminal investigation can serve as a fitting model for representing oneself on the job market. Today's profiles, though composed in a gesture of sovereign individuality, conform to a prescribed set of requisites, and it is presumably this very conflict that gave rise to the contradictory metaphors in Püttjer and Schnierda's guidebooks. As the authors repeatedly stress, profiles need to have “sharp contours,” and yet they also urge applicants to “round out their profiles.”36 The incoherence of this imagery demonstrates the paradoxical demands of the format. Representing a unique yet fully adaptable individual, the ideal profile has to be precisely and imprecisely delineated at the same time.
Constants of external control
Today, more than 20 years after the arrival of social media and the firm establishment of job-application guides, the profile is an unchallenged and omnipresent form of subjectivization. On the job market, networks such as LinkedIn or Xing, which have millions of members, have made it a structural necessity for professional self-representations to be created in the form of online profiles. In a milieu like the university, every academic homepage, every research proposal, and every project description now has to be accompanied by an impressive “researcher profile” or “applicant profile.” As discussed above, the creation and maintenance of personal profiles on social media have become indicators of sound mental health. The format thus appears in both professional and private spheres as a faithful and autonomously manageable representative of the self, and people can constantly be heard talking about their own profiles.
This success story, however, not only disguises the historical fact that the format was developed as a normalizing and disciplinary instrument. It also diverts attention away from the present reality that, in tandem with the triumph of self-made profiles, the format has become a more effective means of describing and controlling others than ever before. In digital culture, the novel effects of profiles in the formation of the subject are offset by the multifaceted tendency to treat individuals as the object of standardized and interconnected data acquisition. Concepts such as the “user profile,” “personality profile,” or “customer profile” involve not only the actively and voluntarily divulged data of the user but also information about the user that has been collected, largely without notice, by companies, authorities, and agencies. The latter practice – a technique from surveying and census-taking – is, of course, far older than the recent history of self-generated profiles.37
Over the past 15 years, a central stage for this method has been marketing. Before the establishment of social networks, the ability to address potential customers depended entirely on the crude and unilateral channels of mass media. Advertisements in newspapers, on the radio, or on television thus had the same form for all readers, listeners, or viewers, and the impact of a company's new slogan or campaign was tied to the hope that the creative genius of the advertising agency could capture the attention of the widest possible circle of consumers. Through the fragmentation of the media system in digital culture, in which every user is simultaneously a consumer and producer, the anonymous masses have transformed into a multitude of individually addressable people. Under these new technological conditions, “marketing” means defining smaller and smaller target groups and even, in the ideal case, addressing individual customers with customized information. In this communicative situation, the profile is the place where advertisers can gather and evaluate information about their addressees.
The relationship between businesses and targeted consumers resembles that between forensic psychology and criminals, and marketing specialists have themselves noticed this and even emphasized the point. Since 2003, for instance, the German business consultant Andreas Wenzlau has offered a service called KundenProfiling (“Customer Profiling”), which he derived from the somewhat older American concept of “consumer profiling.”38 The logo used on his website and on his self-published handbook is thus an enlarged fingerprint.
