Why job hunting is the worst
This is not meant to be a sob story. The job market has been rough for a while in the US especially for those with less education than myself (I have a Bachelors and Masters degree from respectable public universities) who do not live in areas of the US which have not benefited from the post-Great Recession recovery. This is meant to be more of a critique and means to vent my frustration as a Millennial with a process for finding jobs that to me MAKES NO SENSE. It’s a bewildering Kafkaesque experience that, for those who languish in it, excels at ruining your sense of self-worth.
On the surface of it, the job search world seems pretty straight forward: You send a resume and cover letter to organizations/companies for positions that interest you and/or meets your level of experience as you can tell from the job posting. The organization/company, if they are interested in you, will contact you for an interview (an initial one conducted on the phone usually). Then if they like you from that initial talk, will usually invite for a second interview. After that a company/organization makes a decision whether they want to hire you. But the filtering process itself is a mystery. Employers/hiring managers make snap assessments about people through relatively short, highly scripted, generic interactions based on their personal perception and some unknown criteria.
Growing up and going to school you get accustomed to getting feedback from teachers and (eventually) professors and graduate student instructors about your academic performance and how to improve. Whether it be an exam, a project, or a writing assignment, you pretty much know once you get it back areas you did well in as well as areas you need to improve.
But once you get into the job search world that all changes. In the job search world, you are perpetually in the dark. You send job applications into the nebulous void of websites and e-mail addresses with little certainty you will hear back. Sometimes you never hear back from an employer and you never really know why. Even if you do hear back and get a phone interview or even if you get a second interview but finally get rejected, you never really know why. I've gotten vague responses about “not being the right fit” for the position. Other times you don’t even get a response. You have no idea what the employer/hiring manager really thinks of you or how you could improve your interview performance in the future. Sure I have stumbled with certain questions and could see that I did not do my best during those interviews. Even when I thought I performed well, it apparently was not good enough. You are judged by a criteria that you don’t completely understand. That’s where the career service/job hunt gurus come in with generic insight and generalities about how to successfully navigate the job search and interview processes.
But the crux of the matter is that of power. In no other sphere of life is there such a stark asymmetry of power and knowledge as there is between the applicant and the employer in the job searching process. Because of that, the question becomes: How do I contort myself, my experiences, and my qualifications to fit into the narrow box of what you’re looking for in a candidate? How do I separate myself from faceless competition who I assume always can one-up me in experience and qualifications?
In the end, after you fail to get a position, all you can do is reflect, scrutinize and criticize yourself, and then move on to apply to the next one. Going through the process for a while though, the constant rejection starts to wear on you. You doubt yourself in every which way. It’s completely soul crushing. But we have to deal with it and push through because right now there is no alternative.
