By: Roshan Jayasinghe
I’m watching an interview unfold.
A young lady sits across from a store manager, in a small corner of ordinary life, doing what almost every human being must do at some point: asking for a place in the world.
And something familiar moves through me. Not the facts of my own past job interviews, but the feeling of them. The quiet pressure. The subtle performance. The unspoken equation.
One person hopes to be chosen.
One person hopes to choose correctly.
We treat employment like a transaction, but it isn’t only that. It is one of humanity’s most common trust agreements.
The old script makes it feel like a test.
One person becomes an assessor.
The other becomes a candidate.
One holds power.
The other tries to earn it.
And somewhere in that imbalance, integrity gets diluted. People exaggerate. People hide. People pretend. Not because they are bad, but because the structure quietly rewards performance more than truth.
Underneath the surface, interviews often carry an invisible ingredient: scarcity.
The candidate isn’t only trying to get hired. They’re trying to secure rent, food, stability, self respect, a future. And the manager isn’t only trying to fill a shift. They’re trying to protect a team, prevent chaos, avoid the pain of a bad hire, meet targets, keep the store from falling apart.
So both people sit there, not just with resumes and questions, but with nervous systems. Two human beings trying to reduce uncertainty in a world that rarely offers certainty.
When I zoom out and think in the way I think about humanity, I see something else.
Employment is not merely about a job being filled. It is about a society rehearsing how it treats human beings.
So what if the script changed?
What if we made employment a practice of common goodwill? A practice of integrity? A practice of building trust, not demanding it?
Because trust is not something you “screen for” like a checkbox. Trust is something you create through clarity, fairness, and mutual respect.
A balanced interview would no longer be “convince me” and “judge them.” It would become: let’s align reality.
Here is what the work truly is.
Here is what the pay truly means.
Here is what the pressure truly feels like.
Here is what support truly looks like.
Here is what growth truly demands.
And here is who you truly are.
Here is what you can genuinely do.
Here is what you’re learning.
Here is what you need to succeed.
Here is what you cannot pretend you’re ready for yet.
When both sides can speak like that, something changes.
The employer stops acting like a gatekeeper of worth, and becomes a steward of responsibility.
The candidate stops acting like a performer of perfection, and becomes a participant in a shared outcome.
This is where competence, knowledge, and expertise become sacred, not as ego, not as status, but as service.
Because competence is not just “I know how.”
Competence is “I care enough to do it properly.”
Competence is respect for the task, for the customer, for the team, for the whole system.
And knowledge, at its best, is humanity’s method of reducing harm. It is how we learn to handle fire without burning the village down. Expertise is simply knowledge matured into reliability.
But there is something we often forget.
Most competence is not found. It is cultivated.
People become dependable when a workplace has structure, training, feedback, and dignity. People become careless when they are rushed, shamed, underpaid, and treated as disposable.
So the right employment process is not only about hiring someone who can do the job. It is about building an environment where people can become capable, and feel human while they do.
If I were to write a simple Humanity Script for employment, something that could live inside any interview room, it might be this:
Truth over theatre: you don’t have to impress me; be real so we can choose correctly.
Clarity over ambiguity: this is what the job is, and this is what success looks like.
Mutual responsibility: if we say yes, we both have duties, not just you.
Training is respect: we don’t punish learning; we coach it.
Dignity is non negotiable: no one earns the right to be treated decently; it is given first.
That last line matters more than most people realise.
Because when dignity is given first, people often rise to meet it.
And if we did this truly, gratitude would return to the workplace in its natural form.
Not forced gratitude. Not “be grateful you have a job.”
But real gratitude.
The gratitude of an employer who knows, this person is giving a portion of their life to help this place function.
The gratitude of an employee who knows, this place is giving me a chance to learn, earn, and grow.
That mutual gratitude becomes goodwill.
And goodwill becomes stability.
And stability becomes trust.
Maybe this is one of the places where humanity can practice becoming more human.
Right here, in an interview. Not because it’s dramatic, but because it’s ordinary.
Because if we can write integrity into ordinary moments, we don’t have to keep searching for it in grand speeches. We live it.
Perhaps the real work is this: to build agreements where no one has to betray themselves to belong. Where employers stop hiring masks, and employees stop selling versions. Where competence is cultivated, not demanded. Where gratitude is mutual, not forced.
The interview, then, becomes what it was always meant to be: two human beings choosing a shared reality with integrity.
Author’s Note
This reflection came to me while watching a simple hiring conversation in a fast food setting, but it reached further back into my own life.
I’ve been on both sides of the employment coin. I’ve sat in the chair hoping to be hired, walking into interviews with the familiar mixture of readiness and uncertainty. And I’ve also sat on the other side, as a business owner, interviewing people and making hiring decisions.
That second seat taught me something I didn’t fully understand when I was only the applicant. When you are the one hiring, you’re not just selecting a worker. You are, in a quiet way, holding another human being’s aspiration in your hands for a moment. You are affecting their stability, their confidence, their sense of direction. The weight of that responsibility is real, even when it isn’t spoken.
Looking back, I feel proud that I’ve carried that responsibility with sincerity. I never saw hiring as a power trip. I saw it as a human decision that deserved care, fairness, and clarity. Because behind every “candidate” is a life, and behind every “job” is a portion of someone’s time on earth.
Maybe that is why this small scene moved me today. It reminded me that the duality of life keeps repeating itself everywhere: the chooser and the chosen, the giver and the receiver, the evaluator and the one being evaluated. And if we’re awake enough, we can bring integrity into both roles.
Integrity doesn’t have to be loud. It only has to be consistent.
And when it is, even an interview becomes more than a process. It becomes a small act of humanity.
About the Author
Roshan Jayasinghe is a humanist thinker and emerging writer based in California. With a background in administration and a deep passion for social equity, he explores the intersections of politics, identity, and compassion through a lens grounded in nature’s own self-correcting wisdom.
Roshan Jayasinghe
