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meat market for talent

meat market for talent

7.4
A place where employers quickly judge job seekers like products
  • noun
  • Offensive
translation icon : mercado laboral deshumanizado
  • The job fair felt like a meat market for talent, with recruiters quickly sizing up each resume.

Examples

  • More and more, graduate recruitment events have become a meat market for talent rather than a place for thoughtful discussion.

  • He was discouraged by the meat market for talent that greeted him at the networking session.

  • It's a meat market for talent!

  • The job fair felt like a meat market for talent.

  • He was discouraged by the meat market for talent that greeted him at the networking session.

  • More and more, graduate recruitment events have become a meat market for talent rather than a place for thoughtful discussion.

  • The job fair felt like a meat market for talent, with recruiters quickly sizing up each resume.

Synonyms

labor market
vsmeat market for talent
  • Specialized
27 3.5

A system where employers find workers and people look for jobs

is more about impersonal and transactional judging of people for work
culture of careerism
vsmeat market for talent
7.9

A workplace where people focus on moving up in their jobs more than other things

focuses on impersonal competition and transactional judging rather than personal ambition

How Competitive

meat market for talent
  • Offensive
7.4
labor market
  • Specialized
27 3.5

Surface Forms

Morphology

meat + market + for + talent

The core element 'market for talent' is compositional and would be understood as a place where talent is traded, but the modifier 'meat' introduces a metaphorical, objectifying sense (treating people/talent as commodities) that is not directly deducible from the literal words. The metaphor is somewhat inferable (meat → commodity/object) but requires cultural or idiomatic knowledge to recover the evaluative meaning, so it is partially but not fully transparent to a B1 learner.

Etymology

Meat market for talent comes from the image of a busy meat market where buyers quickly pick pieces of meat. When people with talent are treated the same way, looked at and chosen fast and without care, it means a 'competitive, impersonal place'.