Job Searching Right Now is Hell

~But everything will be fine!!!!!~

I feel like I’ve been neglecting Substack, so I wanted to share WHY.

A few months ago in December, I was laid off. My company cut the business I was working on, so it was nothing personal, but I loved working there so I was sad. However, I wasn’t devastated or embarrassed or hopeless or any of the other emotions I felt 10 years earlier when I got laid off from a company I had been working at for FIVE DAYS lol. This was a big layoff meaning it had probably been planned before I started working there. I was just collateral damage. But it was fine because I was 27 and had no real responsibilities, so I went to LA and wrote a book and got really into cooking and worked out all the time. So yeah, I felt bad that I didn’t have a job. But I also had a really good time.

10 years later, my unemployment experience has been drastically different.

Since December, I’ve been IN the trenches. If you haven’t heard, the job market is terrible right now. It’s like being trapped in a corn maze, or what I imagine being trapped in a corn maze is like because I would never willingly enter a corn maze. Can you imagine the BEES in those things? Perhaps being trapped in the halls of the severed floor at Lumon is a better reference.

I’m constantly going in a million different directions hoping there will be an opening at the end of one of them or that someone will be there to help me. But there never is, so I keep having to run back to where I started. Or, in many cases, back further from where I started.

And going with the Severance theme, I’m interrupted by my outie every 5 to 15 minutes outside of nap time to take care of a now seven-month-old baby because we can’t afford to pay $2,600+ a month for infant daycare while I’m unemployed. Then around 5:15pm every day when my daughter gets home from pre-school, my outie takes over for the three-hour mad dash of feeding, bathing, changing, and putting two small children to bed. Then I summon my innie to work on more job applications while maybe watching a TV show I’ve been trying to catch up on until it’s time to go to bed.

Then I wake up (the baby determines if this happens more than once). And I do it again.

This was a very long way to say that job searching has become more than a full-time job.

I don’t remember it being like this before. That’s because it wasn’t. For starters, the job market right now is unlike anything I’ve ever experienced. Tons of people are unemployed, and the number is growing every day. Jobs are getting over 1,000 applicants. Hiring managers are overwhelmed with talent. Transferable skills are irrelevant.

If you’re not a perfect match—in other words, if you haven’t done the job already at a company similar to the one you’re applying—you likely won’t be considered. Or if by some miracle you are, you probably won’t get the offer. And why would you? In a job market like this, companies can hire unicorns. Not only that, but they often have a choice of multiple unicorns at different price points.

Basically, the job market is the most competitive it’s ever been, meaning even though a lot of the roles you’re qualified for are located in cities where you don’t live and can’t move to with your family, you better apply to a ton of jobs. To do that, you need to consider jobs that aren’t a perfect match, and we just went over why the chance you’ll be considered for those jobs is low. So to stand out, you need to customize your resume and write a tailored cover letter for each role.

The amount of work involved in this process is equivalent to a bunch of high school teachers giving projects to students at the same time while each believing that their project is the priority. The difference is that all those high school projects end up counting towards something. These job applications in most cases end up collecting virtual dust in the cloud, or they get rejected by a machine that doesn’t care about the personal passion you wrote about in your cover letter that could make you a great fit for the role.

Out of all the jobs I’ve applied to over the past couple of months, only 10% of them have invited me to interview.

Honestly, I thought the percentage would be lower. When 90% of the jobs you apply to are either sending form rejections or ghosting you, it can make you feel like nothing is happening. But 10% is not nothing. Especially when there aren’t too many open jobs out there that are a perfect fit for your experience (and location) in the first place.

I still have a 0% success rate for offers though, which constantly leads to the thought process: will I ever find anything? My experience is kind of random. And also so specific. I can do more than this though. Or at least I think I can. Would other people agree? Do people actually like me? What am I doing with my life?

But then I snap out of it because my kids need clothes, food, and a place to live, and also, I know I’m a bad bitch.

While I usually don’t know exactly why I’m being rejected or not considered at all, I always have an idea: There were other applicants with more experience. There were other applicants with better experience. I wasn’t super qualified. I was probably too qualified. I wanted too much money. They wanted someone someone in a different city. I have no experience in that industry. I have no experience with that software. My resume got auto-rejected by a tracking system. They didn’t like me.

I don’t dwell on these things for too long, though, because what’s the point? Rationalizing something that had and will continue to have no impact on the rest of my life is a waste of time.

I can barely recall any memories from all the jobs I’ve applied to and interviewed for since graduating from college.

There was the cover letter I sent as a new college graduate 15 years ago where I forgot to change the company name. This still haunts me.

There was the job that offered me a role and then rescinded the offer after I politely asked if there was any room to increase the salary, which I still find insane.

There was the company I was so excited about that had me do an hour-long presentation after six rounds of interviews and ended up choosing someone else.

There was the Zoom interview where I was late because I was six weeks pregnant and started throwing up one minute before it started, but I didn’t want to tell them I was pregnant because it was so early, so I panicked and didn’t give a reason for being late at all. The crazy thing is, even though being late for an interview is a top 10 fear of mine, I don’t remember anything about this job or the person who interviewed me.

If my mind can completely wipe out details from a virtual job interview that was kind of traumatic for me, that means all of these jobs that don’t pan out will one day vanish from memory, except for a select few of course. But if history is an indication of the future, which it is, I won’t remember much about them. And once I find whatever’s next, I certainly won’t be upset about the jobs that didn’t work out. And even though the unknowns around when I’ll find my next job scare me, I know I’ll find something.

With every rejection, I remind myself that all it takes is one yes.

After I wrote that book when I was unemployed 10 years ago, I sent it to 72 agents. One said yes.

After that, we put together a new book and sent that off to editors. Again, one said yes.

“All it takes is one yes” became my mantra.

In the book I ended up publishing, I wrote about how getting laid off 10 years ago taught me to use rejection as fuel to go after the things I want. I guess this was a good lesson because now after a rejection email hits my inbox, I don’t need to sink into a hole in my couch and watch a trashy TV show from ten years ago until the depression subsides. I just simply move forward.

Sure, this time is different. I have two young children now who keep growing out of their clothes, along with a mortgage and other bills that pop up all month long like whack-a-mole. As the (former?) primary earner in my family, it’s scary not knowing what will happen if the money runs out before I find a job.

When I was younger, I could sustain a low-key version of my lifestyle somehow on unemployment. Now, this is far from the case. I’m grateful I live in Massachusetts though because a lot of states max out unemployment just under the cost of one trip to the grocery store per week.

I know one day I’ll eventually get a job and we’ll be able to send my son to daycare. Maybe we’ll even get the $1,000 deposit we didn’t get back when we had to forfeit our spot at the daycare. Until then, I’ll keep pushing forward, like everyone else.

In the meantime, if you want to get yourself a paid membership to an unemployed person’s Substack, that would literally be so nice! WINK WINK WINK.

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