Failing has a new image from all I’m seeing on the bookshelves at Barnes & Noble. If you are a successful business person with a past failure then your book is hot, destined for business school libraries.  But notice that I said, “If you are a successful business person” then…

I’ve also been on LinkedIn for eight years and read more profiles than I could tell you but few share their storied career failures. Leaders, however, will openly tell of the road to wisdom: it most often runs through failure.  I, too, find myself somewhat shrinking back and hiding failure till success arrives. In 2012 I decided to change. I began writing a short book about searching for work during the Great Recession. The main story is about traumatic failure. Suddenly, it transformed into a story of the American experience, not just my own. It became a story about the changing workforce and bio-profiling resulting from an invasion of neuroscience+psychological tests businesses implemented in HR. Abandoning resumes, they fled to predicting emotional intelligence, psychometrics, cultural affinity values - in software.
 
 I told the truth about the end-run toward genetic profiling slowly creeping into big data so that parents and counselors would better understand the future of work placement. They need to know the real significance of enduring being hyper-profiled by businesses right down to their families health factors and neurological test metrics.  Where there is private data employers will find it and apply it within behavioral analytics. Students will be joining a software-selected workforce; that’s not what it’s called but 76% of US corporations are doing it (2014 figure). And their data is still growing.

As for this eBook, it is on Amazon’s Best Sellers Ranked list at 1.652 million – that is, for clarification, lower in sales than 1.6 million other books. That’s not success! Yes, but like all the CEO’s whom once failed and later penned their successes, I went straight to my low point. The real success; what makes the story interesting and original, comes next. We are, indeed, on the path to being genetically profiled. The consequences will be enormous.

They’ve spoken for us again, they’ve turned us against each other again; it never stops. I am a believer and you are gay. They say I hate you, they say you fear my values.  The media is wrong and they are stoking a false narrative about both of us.

I have a few stories to relate. In 1986, in the Northern Virginia region called Tysons Corner, Manpower sent me off to a new job every two weeks for one entire year. These were low-level computer jobs helping me establish my career. I met many gay men, some older and most about my age of 26. We took lunch and snack breaks together and complained about boredom together but, one day a gay man asked me to pray for him without my disclosure of being a believer. He said I was praying at my computer when actually I was only rubbing my tired eyes. What was I to say, “no”? During that lunch break we prayed for his personal needs in my old VW and then went back inside. On to the next job. Another encounter with a gay man, this time after a supervisor had yelled at him. The man chose me to vent his anger toward but not personally. The next day he said I seemed like a dad – which I wasn’t. He later shared his personal struggles with me and yes, we prayed.  Such encounters went on all year sharing work life with several gay men going site to site for Manpower. After I moved to Nashville in 1991, I was approached by a 70 year old man named Houston on the Vanderbilt campus where my fiancé was attending. He asked for sex but remembering back to Virginia I just asked him outside to talk – and we talked and talked. He took me through 70 years of life. Then, to my surprise, he asked me to pray for him. What was I going to say, “no?”

None of these men hated me and I hated none. We talked and interacted about life. So what: I go to church and you don’t, I love clouds, you love rainbows, I have kids and you don’t. We both experience discrimination. I lost my job at age 49 and according to businesses I am too old to be productive and intelligent. I’ve been labeled and discriminated against. Even more, I worked in a mall and met many, many gays and lesbians and one transgender who worked in my store. I sat in the food court chatting with gays frequently and we didn’t hate. What’s killing us is the media that plays LGBT’s out to be victims of believers and believers as aggressive haters – and yet, in my 31 years in the church I find these false narratives. Spirituality is God’s gift to everyone and the Father knows we need His connection. No hate there. 

Christians don’t hate the LGBT population but either your victimization by the media as suffering mercilessly at my hands and the same media defining my faith akin to old fashioned bigotry – will soon destroy us. Or we can demand Big media to treat us both with respect and dignity. As long as Bruce Springsteen is allowed to portray our American culture as hateful based upon one law about where we take a crap, we can at least stand together against the media rage, rub our tired eyes and take a walk across the campus of humanity together away from these false narratives. I’d be lying if I said you aren’t loved.

The internet functions by way of multiple layers. The top layer, the applications layer, is where we search for and input information. Telecommunications firms’ hardware and wires moves data on the lower physical layer. What is happening in between the top and bottom layers involves engineering data for proper packaging and routing of bits and bytes.


Marketing and Human Resources operate on separate layers in organizations but  one function has blended. They share the goal in identifying users’ personal preferences concerning group affiliations, countries visited, debt, property ownership - cars and houses  - and so much more.  Also, both want relational data as the who, what and where of your entire strata of human engagement - but - only for the past 10 years! And they both go about assessing people according to behaviors; meaning, labeling people as data, with enterprise software  applications.  Hidden beneath that top application layer there is software discovering personal data. Marketing aggregators and uncountable digital business operators such as Facebook and Google invisibly record our web life as the internet’s profile interrogation systems. Business is doing exactly the same thing with employees. How has the HR process blended into this system? The answer: HR software apps increasingly profile job candidates like Marketing. They are mutually expressing human values categorically psychological, neurological and sociological.  Businesses are relying on HR to find predictable employees taking unstructured data and structuring it.
  
We often read articles about how worried CEO’s and CIO’s are over finding skilled workers.  The trouble is job candidates' lives are interrogated from past to present and then predicted using metrics based on behavioral sciences. Culture.me is more important every day for the use of biometrics and benchmarks, assessments, tests, analytics and algorithms lead to a software-selected workforce.  The trend may support Marketing goals but is counter to forming a workplace with diversity. The HR layer is eliminating quality candidates by practicing profile discrimination; layers of profiling software functioning as science. The US can’t compete globally with these functions compromised  by theoretical social sciences.
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