Is job hunting fucked, or is it me?
Honestly can't tell. Happy to be told I'm useless, but this feels harder than it should be.
After months spent dutifully looking for job, sending countless cover letters (OK, I am counting) I’m precisely nowhere except with less money in the bank. Either I’m doing this wrong, I’m useless or the process is broken. Fingers crossed its the latter.
Future Me would have advised past me not to deliberately stop work to find a job. When Past Me said “surely it will give me the time and space to really think about what I want to do and not apply in a rush at the weekend” Future Me would have replied “don’t be a wanker”. And whilst I don’t have the financial worries of the truly unemployed (yet), I do, perhaps, have a sense of what a long period of not feeling useful feels like. It strongly suggests Norman Tebbit never had to apply for a job. Trust me all you right-wing bigots, no one, no one, chooses to remain jobless.
It’s hard, no matter how much the rational segment of your mind tries, not to feel defective. Broadcasting one’s self-doubt probably doesn’t endear one to future employers either, no matter how authentic organisations claims to want your leadership. (It wouldn’t be the first bullshit over-claim The Man made.) But if day-after-day all you receive are signals telling you that you are not good enough, then maybe you’re not.
When I’m feeling optimistic I try to remember I’ve done some hard things, that people I worked with I count as friends and mentors. I try to remember, too, that for each role I apply for, several hundred people are doing the same probably with equal levels of despair. Then LinkedIn suggests I should be working at B&Q - no offence to those who do, but I’ve no skills to help you. Have I become de-skilled? Was the imposter syndrome that dogged me from job to job, in fact, true? Is it me?
Or, is the traditional recruitment process fucked? I’m not the only one struggling and unless all of us are morons then maybe civilisation has not found the peak way to hire new blood. A cover letter nowadays proves little more than your prompting skills and bravado. Interviews are the best way to hire someone who looks, sounds and thinks like you do. CVs tell you about the past.
Economics likes to yammer on about the harms one person can cause another; it calls them externalities. (These impacts are external because the harm-causer doesn’t have to pay for the consequences of their actions.) Pollution is the archetypal example but I argue that the recruitment process is causing harms that no-one is accountable for. The impact of cumulative rejections under an opaque system is they chip away at your mental health with nothing positive being added to balance the loss. Ironically this makes it ever harder to write the next application or turn up beaming at the next interview. Economists fix externalities by “allocating property rights and creating a market” but until we find a way to tax organisations for making us feel shit, then more honesty and transparency would go a long way.
Technology has made the whole brutal process more painful. As the marginal cost of the next application gets ChatGPD’d towards zero the supply of applications for each role is heading towards infinity. This wave is will be fought with more technology that desperately tries to find a justifiable way to narrow the field to few enough one can interview. Given the only data meaningful data input is a machine-written letter, abandon all hope of objectivity.
Add the creeping pervasion of LinkedIn. Mankind couldn’t create a more soul crushing, dull, monotonous advertising delivery mechanism if we threw our best minds at it (did we?). Fair play Microsoft, you created a digital monster. I hear it’s done wonders for the psychotherapy business. If finding a job ought to be based on your ability to reach out your presumably figurative arms to your equally non-physical network and send non-sensical denominal verbs back and forth about how wonderful we each are, then I’m happier unemployed. If pressing a button to “Quick Apply” for a job without providing any additional information whatsoever can be considered sufficient then you have to worry deeply about what other corners your potential future employers may have cut. But like all good monopolies, what’s the alternative?
Maybe applying for jobs is my mistake. I suspect most people don’t. I should have paid more attention to offers of spending my 20s with people I found vacuous and sociopathic because one day they might come in useful. If I’d have been told it would have given me a way out of writing cover letters, I might have joined a club or two.
It’s hard to conclude much recruitment is strangely performative and opaque. Neither buyer or seller are left happy yet no one has the desire to solve the coordination failure. As in many broken markets a secondary market springs up to try to help. These come in the form of recruitment agencies but they are not much more than a way to outsource the drudgery.
Humans are famously myopic. Those hiring forget they will be stuck with a bad hire for years, even decades. More time spent with prospective recruits must be a good thing: trial periods, meeting the team, shadowing opportunities, open days; less meaningless tests, no pointless cover letters and something less weird than 45 minutes in a room with strangers is likely to yield better results.