Recruitment

“Do you have any other questions for me?”

The candidate’s response was negative, as it so often was at this stage. There had been enough time explaining all of the required logistics, the pay range, the next part of the process. The meeting was over. The screen went black as the video call ended.

She pushed her chair back from her desk, breathing a sigh of relief. She’d been in back to back calls for the better part of the morning, often repeating the same information to different people. After a while the faces seemed to blur into one, the information felt like sludge from her mouth and she was barely aware if she’d even said the right thing. Arguably, this was to be expected. After all, she was dealing with a lot of potential candidates for the company and they had to be kept in order.

Still, slip-ups were a problem. Like earlier that morning, when she’d started explaining the details of Company A’s onboarding process when the candidate was in process for Company B. It was only after they started looking confused – believing that she worked for Company B – that she had realized her mistake, apologized, laughed it off and then got back on track.

Standing she left her desk behind, moving from her home office – AKA her front room – through the house and into her back room, which if she was being honest, was another office.

The slip earlier was still nagging at her. She’d heard that Company A occasionally used “ghost candidates” to check on the performance of recruiters like herself. These weren’t real job seekers, but instead plants that were there to make notes on her performance and report back to the parent company. More than one recruiter had been moved off prestigious accounts because of a bad review; she didn’t want to be one of them.

Flicking the lights on around the mirror in her second office, she peered at the face in front of her. It was the face of a serious, professional woman, possibly in her late 40s, with mocha-brown skin, wide, even teeth, dark brown eyes and a medium-sized ‘Afro’ hairdo. Her most defining feature was not something she was born with; large, black-rimmed spectacles that were still quite fashionable, in a retro sort of way. Dressed in her usual “work from home, but on video” attire, she wore a dark navy suit jacket over a light grey button-up blouse, with sweatpants beneath the waist, invisible to the camera.

Her face neutral, she looked closer at her reflection. The lines around her eyes were appropriate for her age, but they did make her look tired. Professional, but tired.

She smiled broadly, almost unnaturally, as if she was trying to exorcise the tired features from her face. It almost worked. She was sort of believable. It didn’t really matter. Most candidates were so nervous, they weren’t really paying that much attention to their recruiter.

Being innocuous, barely registering, was exactly what she was aiming for.

Hopefully she’d perk up for the afternoon’s calls. A good cup of coffee with her lunchtime salad would probably help. She had several hours of calls ahead of her and needed to at least look awake for them.

This was her second job, working for Company A. Like a growing number of work-from-home professionals across the country, she literally held down two full-time jobs, managing to cram what should have been an 80-hour week into 50 or less. It was easier than you might think. Keep your meetings to a minimum, run separate instances of your work chat apps, make sure not to mix up logins… it wasn’t too taxing.

Of course in her line of work, where she had to talk to potential candidates all day, there was one critical thing she had to get right, and remember when she was speaking to them.

Exactly who she was.

Slowly she removed her glasses, carefully folding them and putting them in a glasses case. “Okay,” she murmured. “Time to get dressed for work.”

She looked at the face in the mirror, again; smiled, again. “Hi there, it’s so good to connect with you,” she said, just as she so often did to candidates. “I appreciate you getting on the call with me today.”

She opened her mouth wide, as if she was trying to swallow something huge. Her hand moved to it, fingers grasping for her dentures, dislodging, detaching. As the dentures came away, she said “Did you have any problem with the software for the call?”

It was kind of a dumb question, considering she was screening candidates for tech jobs. It was also spoken in a slightly different way to how she might normally say it, as the dentures had been removed. They were dropped into a glass, to be cleaned later that night.

Next she leaned close to the mirror, one finger drawing down her left eyelid, another plucking a colored contact lens from her eyeball. Deep brown eyes were suddenly a hazel-green, as she repeated this on the other eye, then blinked a few times to adjust to the new feeling.

“You’re absolutely a great candidate for this role,” she said, repeating another statement she often gave, whether the candidate was actually ‘great’ or not. As she said it, she looked carefully at her face in the mirror, turning this way and that. “I think you’ve got a good chance,” she continued, “especially if you nail the next interview.”

She rubbed at her cheeks, like she was trying to warm up or massage them back to life. Rubbing turned to pulling, as she felt things begin to shift and move.

Her eye sockets were loosening.

Leaving her face alone, she reached up and tugged at her hair, dislodging the afro. It was a wig. It came away in one piece, leaving her completely bald except for a few pieces of wig tape, which she stripped away.

With a small smile to herself, she reached behind her head, watching her movements in the mirror. Her nails dug in. A small, slight ripping sound was heard. Then she pulled her hands forward, the back of her head splitting apart.

The face that had smiled encouragingly to strangers all morning was slowly peeled off, back to front, the mask she wore almost being turned inside out as she pulled it forward. With a shudder, she tugged the entire thing away from her face.

Beneath the dark skin was a female caucasian face, with traces of matching makeup left around her eyes. Their hazel-green color seemed to better suit this face. Her hair was short, dyed blond and unkempt, having been hidden beneath the mask all morning. She ran her fingers through it briefly, sighing.

The mask was carefully placed on a nearby head form, stretched into place and resealed for storage. It’d be back in use the next morning. Next to it was another face, another mask which she carefully removed from its own form to inspect it. Everything looked good. After wiping the excess makeup from around her eyes with cold cream, she was ready for the afternoon’s work.

Glancing briefly at her own face, which she rarely saw for more than minutes in an eight-hour day, she said nothing as she opened the back of the new mask and drew it over her head.

As she pushed her face into the mask’s confines, she reminded herself of who she was becoming, of the things she had to do that afternoon, the outstanding projects she needed to finish. By the time she’d pressed the face down over her own, feeling the carefully sculpted interior conform with her features, she’d almost forgotten about everything she’d done that morning.

Blinking at the new face in the mirror, she remembered her name, her position, her responsibilities. She retrieved another set of contact lenses, changing her eye color back to something darker, but a subtle shade different from her previous persona. Unlike the first mask, this one had pronounced epicanthic folds, making it clear that while she might have been born in this country, her family was from Asia. There was a subtle difference to the skin tone too, a sheen that had taken a long time to perfect.

With her head sealed into the new mask, eye sockets carefully adjusted, throat pressed down and smoothed out, she retrieved the wig she wore with this face. Long, black and straight, it contrasted starkly to the frizzy afro. She flipped it over and pulled it down, ensuring it was straight. After running a brush through it for a couple of strokes, she pulled it back into a loose ponytail, ready for work.

Finally she applied a minimal amount of makeup to this new person’s face, all the while thinking about her, about her background and knowledge. She was better educated than the first person she’d been that day, better spoken in some ways. Softer. Just as pleasant, but with different mannerisms. She had a different speciality for recruiting as well, Company A needing a different sort of candidate. There was enough overlap that it was simple to work for both companies, though. Sometimes she would even contact candidates that were rejected for one company to invite them to interview for the second. She got paid based on how many candidates were hired, after all.

As she began to apply some makeup to her new face, she addressed the mirror, finding the voice she used for half the day. “Hello,” she said, the tone slightly off. “Hello, hello. How are you today? Hello.” Satisfied, she continued to apply some subtle eyeshadow. “Thank you so much for getting on the call with me today,” she said, peering into the mirror as she worked. “I know it’s late there so I appreciate your time.”

Switching to her lipstick, she spoke again. “Oh, my family is from Japan originally, but I was born here. How about you?”

The lipstick being slowly applied reminded her of how much she’d enjoyed using this face on her days off, once taking it all the way to Las Vegas for a weekend of gambling and debauchery. There was something about a cute Japanese women that apparently ‘worked’ for the average Vegas high-roller. She hadn’t spent a dollar on drinks or food the entire weekend. And getting finger-banged in one of the private elevators to an executive suite was a small price to pay. She even enjoyed giving the VIP a blowjob afterwards. When she was done, she returned to her room, stripped off her face and went to the spa for the afternoon, giving her usually masked face some pampering.

Finishing her lips, she blotted, then smiled at her reflection. Professional yet definitely still cute. “If you have any other questions, feel free to ask,” she said.

Turning from the mirror, she moved to her second desk and opened her second laptop. “Just don’t ask me about my personal life,” she murmured, “because outside of this call, I really don’t exist.”

She logged into her scheduled video call. “Hey there,” she said to the pixelated image in front of her, being careful with her diction, her tone. “Thanks so much for jumping on the call with me today. It’s great to meet you face to face.”

She smiled at the double meaning, settling into her second face, her second role, her second life.