I got a job interview at Dollar General. GMail filed it as spam, so I missed my appointment.
Whatever happened to just talking to a human in person and saying ‘I need a job, and I’ll try not to clog your toilet’?
In my lifetime I got to watch it go from just being able to walk into any place and ask if they were hiring and you might talk to a manager and hand them your resume to 100% online and you are automatically rejected the millisecond you hit send on the application.
I just want to be able to submit my resume and be done. Fuck their website making me reinput all the same shit that’s on my resume.
I guess they want to see if you can tolerate bullshit meaningless work.
Seriously. If AI can write cover letters and solve complex philosophical problems, it sure as hell can parse a resume. Not taking advantage of this obvious time-saving device just screams that the entire job is about wasting your time.
There are actually a few tools that crawl job sites and can auto submit your resume already. Predictably, there was a lot of complaining about it. With agentic tools maturing, it won’t be long before you can just give AI your resume and have it trawl the job sites and apply to relevant jobs. They will have reaped what they sowed.
There’s an excellent, way underrated scifi novel that I love telling people about because it predicted our current moment. Greg Egan’s Permutation City, written in freaking 1994.
You follow the simulation of a man as that man runs experiments on him of how simulated people work. If you played SOMA, those folks definitely read it! Advanced AI spam filters are used to detect advanced AI spammers in a nonstop cold war for your precious attention. I think eventually the AIs are replaced by simulations of yourself enslaved to the task of responding to messages, but I may just be combining that story with qntm’s short story Lena which is also terrifying yet likely soon to be true!
I watch HR jerk my boss around like this all the time lol
I’ve had a few interviews here in town that ended with “we aren’t hiring anymore”.
This is not realistic at all. In sweden they are all blonde and a bit to cute, so you forgive them.
all blonde and a bit cute
🏆 Most Swede Comment Award
It was so bad job hunting a couple of years ago. Took me months and months. I even used AI to help me write cover letters after a while. No one was reading them so might as well have no one write them too.
Productively, I hate to say it, but I think we’ve actually circled back to Boomer job hunting advice being good. I got my current job by attending local industry meetups, meeting a recruiter, and they got me face-to-face at a company which immediately hired me.
At this point, I’d just go for the most unhinged approach. Put on a suit, show up where you want to work, walk in and demand to meet the ceo or something. Tell him you’re not here to waste time with “process”, you’re here to make some real money. If you aren’t a white man, make friends with one and have them do this, then bait-and-switch the hire. Act like you’ve always been a queer black woman, it must be their mistake.
The time for asking to be hired is over. We’re just taking the jobs now!
Actually the way to stick out is to do some basic research on the company that you want to work for. Enough to understand their business. Then tell them what skill or previous experience that you have that can help THEM. Never say anything like … “you’re here to make some real money”. It’s about them not about you
This was super frustrating when I was looking for a job last year. A few “sure” job interviews that went well (reached multiple stages of the interview process) ended up getting ghosted.
I even had one company in the past ghost me for a year and a half before contacting me again for the role. I was like dude, I already found another job.
Recruiters definitely don’t pull $100k+ by not hiring people - it’s pretty common to get paid on a commission-basis for successful hires.
This is not to say trying to get a job doesn’t suck, it definitely does. Sales is generally pretty shit if you’re not used to it, and getting a job is at the end of the day a sales process.
Hope it gets better for anyone stuck in it
