For anyone desperately looking for a job right now—it’s not you, it’s them.
Photo @wocintechchat
I just recently landed a great job. It’s great news. Wonderful news, and it couldn’t have come at a better time. From the outside looking in, it probably seemed easy. I’m not even taking any time off between the old one and the new one. Not a day’s gap in my resume. And so, according to the default LinkedIn post, congratulations are in order because I effortlessly picked up another. Seamless.
But behind the scenes, it was a gruelling slog to find my new role. Months of searching, hundreds of applications, sleepless nights, some ugly crying , panic and anxiety spirals, you name it...
What about stripping?
You know the job search is desperate when you start considering a career switch. I got my bartending certificate way back in the day and thought about dusting that off. At the time, my instructor had said that I was a “drink mixing machine.” But that was 20 years ago, would I still have it? Would anyone hire me? How do I write a resume for that path? Do I erase my graduate degree and work experience and just beg instead?
What about drywalling, that’s in demand. I could be a drywaller. I have a little bit of experience, mostly on my own renos. Would that get me a foot in the door? Again, would grovelling be necessary? Maybe I could drywall by day and bartend by night and make enough to match my usual salary. All these questions circled through my head endlessly as I grew more and more desperate on the inside while pretending not to be desperate on the outside.
Why didn’t anyone want to hire me? I have a graduate degree, years of experience, I’m presentable enough. Why wasn’t I even getting calls for interviews when I was a perfect skills match for the role? What the actual fuck?
This job market is the worst I’ve ever seen it. A few years ago, I was looking to make a change, and put out 127 resumes. I remember being shocked then. It seemed like so many. But I had some interviews. This wasn’t on the same scale at all.
Since July 2023 to the end of the year, I have put out hundreds of resumes. Over 400 actually. That’s a record in my lifetime. An abysmal record that filled me with self-doubt.
But then it occurred to me, maybe it’s not me?
Maybe it’s…them?
Let’s spreadsheet
So let's look at my numbers. And maybe looking at my numbers will help you feel better about your numbers, because mine aren't great.
By December 2023, I had applied to 417 positions.
Out of those 417, only 131 gave me some kind of a response, and I landed 10 interviews.
That's a callback rate of about 2%.
The rest were ghosted. And because I put out so many resumes and for so long, I saw many of the same jobs that ghosted me repost their ad 3 months later. Presumably because they still hadn’t found anyone. But in many of those positions, I was matching quite high with their requirements. Sometimes I checked every box for what they said they were looking for...I just hadn’t heard from them.
So what gives?
Let’s Conspiracy Theorize
At the same time that I was experiencing a very real opportunity shortage, I was hearing companies complaining about a worker shortage. Something is definitely off. There were lots of vacancies to apply to each day…but none of them really led anywhere.
I came to the conclusion that three things could possibly be going on here:
They’re not really hiring from outside the company.
They’re obligated to post the job, but have no intention of interviewing outside candidates because they already know who their internal person is. This explains some of the jobs, but not all of them. Not the ones that repost their ads every couple of months because they “can’t find good talent.”
They’re running scams, immigration or otherwise.
I came across dozens of jobs advertised on the Government of Canada’s Job Bank that were so obviously fake you have to wonder at the audacity. A few dozen more that seemed real, but were probably fake. In most cases, these jobs had a title that didn’t really match the job description, and salaries that were unrealistic. I saw a few that had copy & pasted the job descriptions from different roles, so it became clear that they were just using a laundry list of tasks as a catch-all template. These jobs also ask you to send your resume and cover letter to a weird looking gmail account. Usually not related to the company name at all. Just someone’s name or a random bunch of letters and numbers @gmail.com. This might be normal in some industries, but is definitely a red flag for the corporate world. I reported a few of these, but there were a lot of them. Based on some past experience, I might guess that some of them are legitimate business trying to get friends or relatives a work permit. Or maybe they're phishing for personal data…? Hard to say...but scammy either way and they’re definitely not going to call you back.
They don’t know how to use AI filters.
They don’t know how to use AI filters! Of course. This would account for all those jobs that search for candidates, come up empty, and keep reposting the position for months on end. I have this suspicion because it happened to me a few years ago when we were hiring a graphic designer for our team. HR gave us 30 resumes, and said that’s all there were. Most of them were not what we were looking for. Students. People who were grossly under-qualified. People who were grossly overqualified. 30 resumes. In Montreal. A city practically (and gleefully) overrun with graphic designers and creatives. My boss and I both felt like something was off, so we pressed harder and found out that HR had filtered out dozens of candidates because they “didn’t meet the basic requirements.” We asked to see every resume that had come in and found our perfect match. HR had been filtering, and throwing context to the wind. Think of all the possible variations of your job title…there could be half a dozen that all mean the same damn thing but if you’re using the wrong one you’ll get filtered out. Maddening.
Of course, the other possibility is that there were simply better candidates out there. That I just wasn’t good enough and was passed over for legitimate reasons. That was likely the case for some of the positions. And that would make sense as an explanation for all of them if it weren’t for the fact that a lot of people seem to be having the same experience that I had. I saw a TikTok from one woman in my area who had been looking for over a year. She was worried she’d never find work again and couldn’t for the life of her figure out why. Another who was convinced that the government was in one the scam job ads because they can use the number of postings to boast about the efficacy of their jobs creation efforts and garner public support for their administration. Stranger things have happened.
Regardless, if you’re out there searching and not having much luck just remember—it might not be you, it might be them. Keep your chin up and remember your worth. Something will come around.