I’ve been applying constantly, I’ve got references, I have previous work experience, I got resume help what can I possibly be doing wrong
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the last time I was applying for jobs I created a spreadsheet to keep track of all the relevant information. I applied to just shy of 2000 listings. I got 3 phone calls, only one of which led to 3 separate interviews with 12 different people and totaled about 6 hours of my time. they hired internally
jesus christ that’s bleak
I think most job listings are fake. For one, I think most companies set up a job posting service and just ignore it until they actually need someone and don’t have any candidates from in-person referrals. So the jobs get posted repeatedly or updated every few months and that’s it. None of those positions are actually vacant. It’s in the interest of job board companies to make it seem like they have a lot of jobs and information. Part of their model is collecting and selling data about jobs markets. So they’re incentivized to have ghost listings everywhere because they don’t investigate or discount fake listings. It all helps their internal numbers.
I wouldn’t be surprised if the government got lazy and started relying on these job listing companies for market data. Which means there’s a big bomb of shit data rolling around in stats, convincing people that there is more activity in the market than there is.
Linkedin job posts have a free tier which means a posting can be left up indefinitely whether the search is active or not. Indeed posts cost a minimum $5/day, so a given company would likely take the listing down if their search is not active. I’ve heard that Linkedin is actively resume harvesting, for what reason I don’t really know (maybe training some resume AI?) so it could just be a rumor, but I have a chip on my shoulder about Linkedin anyways for trying to make a pay-to-win job search platform.
Whatever you do, don’t apply at the individual job board. Go to the company’s careers page to see if its even still posted and apply there. For whatever that’s worth (not much in my experience).
This isn’t just a theory.
Many, maaaaany companies openly admit to posting fake job listings, ghost jobs, and your explanations of why they do this are pretty much spot on.
https://www.newsweek.com/ghost-jobs-rise-1924351
https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240315-ghost-jobs-digital-job-boards
It is of course difficult to get accurate numbers because of regional / industry variance, which platform are you looking for jobs on, and oh of course those job seeker platforms are highly incentivized to not let their users know how prevalent this is…
But uh yeah, between these 3 fairly recent articles, we’ve got somewhere between 20% to 60% of companies admitting they post ghost jobs / number of actual job listings that are fake.
Yeah. Its really fucking bad, obviously for job seekers, and also in other ways (which you also correctly surmised) because it makes many metrics other companies and policy planners and econ data all fucked… normally, job openings are… you know, correlated to actual hirings?
Yeah thats all broken now, has been for years.
This phenomenon really kicked in to high gear during and after covid.
In fact, probably a whole lot of the Dems ‘the economy is fine actually, stop complaining’ rhetoric is because they were too stupid to realize this has been going on and have been relying on bullshit metrics.
Its one thing that they’re unrelatable policy nerd wonks who have 0 charisma, can’t read the room, nor actually do effective messaging… its another thing that they are also incompetent data dorks.
(I am an unsociable autist data nerd with a degree in econ and career in data analytics myself… and thus this is personal for me lol)
they hired internally
Gut punch
We need to actually admit that laying off and terminating employees is an act of violence.
I tried to frame my layoff this way to everyone I knew while I was unemployed. Suddenly I couldn’t go to the doctor, I was draining my savings to pay rent so I wouldn’t go homeless, and every trip to the grocery store felt like an indulgence. They make you suffer and starve to make their scraps more appealing when you get hired at a shittier job six months later
Six months? Look at Mr. Employable here!
i have always seen it that way even before i became a communist i thought other people did too?
i had an ok paying job pre-covid, full benefits, gym in the office building, i was planning on working there for 5+ years. i didnt even work a year there and then i got laid off before the early pandemic lockdowns and ive struggled to get a consistent job since. gotta love capitalism!!!
Hard agree. Hell, porky just not being in the hiring mood is a form of violence.
What the fuck do you mean I am not allowed to start my life because employers “only hire the best of the best”? What the fuck am I supposed to do to get out of my parents? Hell, what am I supposed to do while I wait for porky to stop being scared of his own shadow and get off his lazy butt and start making jobs?
Before I deleted my Indeed account, I had filed over 8200 applications on their platform, got 5 interviews, and got a temp job that lasted for less than 6 months.
Literally hopping on a bike and just spending a month or so repeatedly going into every place in town with a Now Hiring sign in the window and demanding an interview was a better use of my time.
So it’s not just me?
Yeah I’m like literally throwing my resume into a black hole everyday
A job search is one of the worst things that could befall a person outside of dismemberment.
trying to find a good partner is about as bad, especially post-app
Getting a partner and getting a job are pretty much the same thing, your require the same skills
guess i’ll die
Everything’s a market in hell
Hate to say it but you have to meet the right people in non-work contexts :/ it’s all a bullshit game and this is a surefire way to be handed a job
Edit Would also like to add that there are very little guardrails in place for people who struggle socially.
Yet another instance of the world fucking you over if you can’t dance right
how do i make one of those people have car trouble in front of my house?
Stinger strips! Eventually one of em is gonna be rich right?
setting up cameras at either end of the block so i can deploy them when anything nicer than a lexus goes by
No more half measures.
no more half measures walter
just put on your best shirt and walk on in there, ask for the manager and give him a nice firm handshake, look him in the eye and say “You may not know it yet but I’m exactly what this company needs to go to the top!”
but really idk, seems rough
It’s crazy that boomers and silent Gen will unironically still say this shit. I heard it just last week.
It was kind almost true back in my day for certain industries but even 15 years ago it was 80% “oh we only accept applications online”
Unironically better than filling out an online form and submitting it into the void. Seriously.
Go to career fairs, stalk hiring manager on linkedin, go to their homes.
Submitting resumes online and expecting to hear your name called is almost akin to placing faith in a nonexistant meritocratic system. What, you think someone is going to read your resume and be more impressed by it than the resume of a guy who bullshitted everything or some person, somewhere with 3 phds in your field?
Only good jobs I’ve ever gotten have been from knowing someone (nepotism) or just sending resumes to everyone in the area and getting insanely lucky (unreasonable for most people)
Until i got into a trade union of course but that’s got a whole set of issues in and of itself
This is very good advice. But I would note that many career fair booths are glorified billboards that tell you to apply online anyway
Find a recruiter. Just started working with one and she told me that companies (in my industry at least) will work directly with a recruiting company to find talent, because public job postings these days get like hundreds of applicants that might not even be qualified for the job. I am now convinced that this is how most hiring is done and just going around doing a bunch of job applications by hand is a complete waste of time and energy.
It’s more like thousands. My small company had two positions posted and got something like 5000 applications in the first week or two. I think it ended at almost 10000.
I’ve been wondering about this lately, as I’m unhappily employed but don’t want Indeed to be the only place I window shop.
The challenge is, I’m not really sure what to look for in terms of “good” recruiters. Based on your recent experience, do you have any tips or advice you’d be willing to offer?
Watch out for small new recruiting firms trying to take advantage of the market, good chance without reputation/experience they won’t get people hired. Stick with established places/people with good reviews (probably on the hell that is LinkedIn)
how do you find a recruiter?
I was referred to one by a friend personally, she gave me the name of the person that helped her find a job when she was unemployed. Apparently if your resume is shiny enough they will come to you via linkedin. Other than that there’s looking up firms or individual recruiters on google or linkedin that have good relationships in your desired industry/locale, giving them your resume, and hoping for the best.
I get lots of recruiters pinging me on LinkedIn and always assumed it was a scam. I’m also in a pretty niche industry and have desirable experience though, so maybe they do just want me
I just posted my resume on Linked in and was contacted by like a dozen different recruiters over a few months. I imagine that this varies a lot by profession.
When I used to do data entry, I contacted a couple of recruiting firms I found on Google, and they were able to find me suitable work very quickly.
This is how I got my current job. They advertised it as temp, but it turned into a full-time contractor job where the company keeps us around for years but refuses to actually hire any of us and give us the standard paid time off and other benefits.
Is it ideal? No. But it beats retail by a long shot.
Idk it’s insane, and most job application processes are designed to be as humiliating and awful as possible.
“One-way” interviews
have you tried putting on your job helmet and squeezing down into a job cannon?
Either that or take a trip to job land, where jobs grow on jobbies.
just get a job at your dad’s business
9 months in, this shit sucks.
I’ve been rejected from places for having a degree. I’ve been rejected from places for not having a masters. I’ve received literally no word from several hundred applications.
I used to keep a spreadsheet of the jobs I applied to but I gave up on that because it was adding a substantial amount of time.
It was already bad and then the NIH cuts meant my entire industry is on fire because the private biomedical industry is a fiction made up as cover for giving a handful of people a ton of government money.
Luck, lying, nepotism
Couldn’t have said it better, myself. I fucking hate the good ol’ boys system for hiring.
I tried nepotism and all I got was a once-a-week office-cleaning job where I get $400 that I split with my sibling because my body’s too shitty to do the whole thing by myself.
18 months after losing a tech job…
This is the neat part - you dont!
It’s crazy how the tech employment scene imploded at that time when the free money machine (low interest rates) dried up. I got laid off around that same time
are we all unemployed tech workers? what the fuck
also i have this feeling that unemployement numbers are… not fudged in some way necessarily but like, even the TRU metric which is way higher than “headline unemployment” is still lower now than it was in the late 90s/early 00s pre-financial crisis. the TRU has been consistently going down barring covid but everything is getting shittier and worse for everyone. But the Numbers are still able to go up in some way bc the Numbers have lost all meaning or sense of reality. “the signs of the real have been substituted for the real” - like a zombie economy doing all the things a living economy would do while completely dead, as the cells/people that constitute it are rotting away in a perma-recession
I went through a whole-ass final round interview last week. Every step, they clearly all really liked me, even said they thought I was a good fit. I was two of the interviwers’ #1 pick. But then they just rejectred me today because someone else had more years of experience. Why did they waste my time going through that process if they were just going to pick someone with more years of experience?