Conducting a job search implies the identification of a target—an intended job. However, this assumption has been little studied, and just two main conclusions have been drawn, namely: jobseekers have an incentive to adjust their targets to the jobs available, and returning to work tends to lead to occupational downgrading. This article explores how job search experiences shape and alter targets. Biographical interviews were conducted with 57 unemployed people registered with the French public employment service. Ultimately, all of them revise their occupational expectations as, faced with the uncertainties inherent to the job search and experiencing difficulties in reaching their priority targets, they try to adapt and define more realistic goals. Four contrasting processes of expectation revision are used to track these tensions between desirability and realism. In conclusion, we stress the following facts: that unemployed people are flexible and develop rationales in order to adapt to the labour market; that their experience of failure, alongside advice and beliefs arising in the course of the job search feed directly into these revisions, and that these revisions both vary in magnitude and reflect inequalities in the defining process of target jobs.

中文翻译：

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正在寻找一份工作——但是找哪一份工作呢？失业者如何调整他们的职业期望

进行求职意味着确定目标——想要的工作。然而，这一假设的研究很少，仅得出两个主要结论，即：求职者有动力根据现有工作调整自己的目标，而重返工作岗位往往会导致职业降级。本文探讨了求职经历如何塑造和改变目标。对在法国公共就业服务机构登记的 57 名失业人员进行了简历访谈。最终，他们所有人都会修改自己的职业期望，因为面对求职固有的不确定性以及在实现优先目标方面遇到的困难，他们试图适应并定义更现实的目标。预期修正的四个对比过程被用来追踪愿望与现实之间的这些紧张关系。总之，我们强调以下事实：失业人员具有灵活性并发展理性以适应劳动力市场；他们的失败经历以及求职过程中提出的建议和信念直接影响到这些修订，而且这些修订的幅度各不相同，反映了目标职位界定过程中的不平等。