Not humiliating enough just to send out resumés that don’t get replies or coming up short at job fairs? How about putting that desperation on display over television?
That’s what happens on CBS’s new reality competition “The Job” (CBS, 8 p.m.).
Unlike “The Apprentice,” which has long since gone to celebrities, “The Job” gets back to basics, with a different firm coming in to interview five candidates, quiz them and put a few of them to work each week.
If the chief of a company doesn’t move quickly enough on a prospect, three competitors are on hand that may make an offer.
Reality veteran Michael Davies, who created and is one of the executive producers on the show, says he was inspired by the disillusion of his college-age daughter at the current job market, mixed with his own work on cable’s “The Glee Project,” in which kids competed for a job on the Fox show.
Except for the singing, dancing or acting, it was essentially an extended job interview, Davies told reporters at the Television Critics Association Winter Press Tour last month in Pasadena.
With such shows as “Undercover Boss” and “Shark Tank” these days, he said, “there ‘s an environment for business shows that hasn’t been there before,” Davies says. And all those people out of jobs.
“Shark Tank” and “The Apprentice” both come from Mark Burnett, who is the other big reality TV name involved as executive producer.
“It’s fun to make it. I’ve proven in the last few years, a kinder approach on TV does work. Certainly it does with the ‘The Voice,’” Burnett says. “People don’t want to see people getting ripped down.”
On the eight episodes of “The Job,” 40 people compete for 16 jobs. But some of the 24 who won’t get those jobs will be hired away by others.
Besides that, it’s instructive to viewers. “If viewers get nothing more from it of what not to do, it’s very valuable.”
Tips from executives come in between acts.
“A goal of this is to shine a light on the job interviewing process,” says host Lisa Ling.
But it’s important to be entertaining and dramatic as well, Burnett says. And humiliation is so entertaining in its way.