These days, it goes like this: You see a job you like. You apply, competing with over a hundred other applicants, just as eager and just as qualified as you (probably more). You don’t hear back for weeks. Two months later you receive an email (it mysteriously ended up in your spam folder) saying you have been selected for an interview. You do an interview where they spend twenty minutes barely listening to you and you spend twenty minutes feigning excitement for a company you didn’t even know existed three days ago. You smile, are polite, lie ever so slightly. After the interview they ghost you again. A month passes, and then they ask you to complete some project for them (they call it a “skill assessment,” but you know it’s actually just free labour). They then ignore you for two more weeks. Then, another interview. And then another. And then one more. After a fifth round of interviews, they let you know that you have not been selected (they don’t actually tell you, of course; they just ghost you until you get the hint). Meanwhile, you have wasted over three months on one job application. And you didn’t even want the job that badly.
You tell this to anyone over the age of fifty and they will look at you as if you had just told them there is a monster under your bed. It’s that mix of disbelief, derision, and commiseration teetering on the brink of pity. They won’t believe you. They will shake their heads and say how “all you young people don’t want to work,” and laugh at your expense and at your sense of loss.
There didn’t used to be all these hoops to jump through just to get a meagre chance at consideration.
And you know, their refusal to sympathize isn’t too hard to understand once you discover how job applications used to be like back in their day. People used to be able to show up places with a neatly printed CV in hand, immediately get an interview, and then be hired on the spot. There didn’t used to be all these hoops to jump through just to get a meagre chance at consideration.
I asked both my parents (who are well over fifty) about their first experience searching for a job, and they both told me it actually involved no search: The jobs were offered to them. All they had to do was get a decent level of education, and the jobs just fell into their laps. They did not have to seek for jobs; the jobs were seeking them.
As soon as I heard that, I knew there was no way to make them understand my plight. How could I ever make them get it? How could I make them see how nerve-wrecking and mortifying the job search is these days? How could I make them know that we are not lazy or unwilling to work, but that there simply aren’t enough open doors for us? These frustrations are familiar to nearly everyone who has had to look for a job in the past five years.
“It’s exasperating,” says Katie, 24. “I went to university because I was told that’s how you get a job. I studied. I worked hard. I had a good GPA. And now it’s been almost one year since graduation, I’ve applied to over a hundred positions, and I still haven’t been able to land a single job.”
A new graduate has to send between 100 and 250 applications (at least) before landing a job.
If you tell the Over Fifty Crowd about having applied to 100+ positions to no avail, they will accuse you of lying and say there must be some grave flaw in your resume that is hurting your chances. “One-hundred applications and none working out is not possible, you MUST be doing something wrong!“
Turns out that what you are doing wrong is applying to only 100 positions, ’cause that just doesn’t cut it anymore: According to 2026 reports, a new graduate has to send between 100 and 250 applications (at least) before landing a job. When I saw that number, two thoughts popped into my head. Thought 1) That is depressing. Thought 2) How could anyone even send that many applications and get an offer in a reasonable amount of time?
Applying for jobs nowadays isn’t some cute little activity you can get done in five minutes. No, ’cause first you need to tailor your resume to the job position to make you appear as the perfect, shiniest candidate, the one they’ve been looking for all along, the chosen one of the corporate world. And then, they make you fill out a form (that hardly ever works) to answer a series of tedious questions that range from information that is already in your CV that they’re asking you to reiterate for some godforsaken reason, to questions that border on HR violations. Or, worst of all, they ask you to send them a cover letter.
Cover letters. The hottest humiliation ritual in town. 250 to 400 words of complete bullshit where you try to make yourself sound humble and modest (but also like you’re the smartest person to ever roam the earth), telling them information they already have in their hands (as it’s *right there* on your resume), trying to convince them that it’s actually always been your dream to work there and that you are “thrilled” by the “opportunity” to “contribute to your exciting mission” (you’d never heard about that organization prior to that morning). Three to five paragraphs of pure, shameless begging. Why don’t they just ask you to go up to the hiring manager and bend over?
“I feel like I’m at an unfair disadvantage if I don’t use [AI]. It feels like the system is rigged against humans.”
And of course, you cannot just write a cover letter once and submit that same one for every job application. No, they have to be tailored for the specific position each time. “Sending the same cover letter to multiple companies? *gasp* How sacrilegious! You shouldn’t even bother applying then!” But what your 55-year-old uncle who hasn’t had to send a job application since fax machines were around doesn’t understand when he says that is how time-consuming the job application process is right now.
Tailoring your CV, writing a cover letter, filling out mind-numbing application forms that seem specifically meant to mock you, and formatting pleading emails that sound bright yet pitiful enough, takes time. From one to several hours. Each. Now, imagine having to do that 250 times, and tell me you’re not immediately contemplating walking straight into the ocean? Honestly, it is no wonder that more and more job-seekers are beginning to turn to AI for help.
“I just cannot see any other way to prepare and finalize multiple applications every day,” Helen, 25, told me. “I don’t even like ChatGPT or AI, but all the people I know who manage to do that use AI tools, and I feel like I’m at an unfair disadvantage if I don’t use them. It feels like the system is rigged against humans.”
Job-seekers may be putting so much effort in polishing and prettying up their applications just for them to not even be seen by a human being.
And it may actually be. New research shows that 87% of organizations employ AI in their hiring processes, with 58% using it to screen resumes. Meaning that job-seekers may be putting so much effort in polishing and prettying up their applications just for them to not even be seen by a human being.
Ethics of AI usage aside, numbers like those really make you understand why many candidates are turning to chatbots when job searching—it’s difficult to feel motivated enough to go through the whole ordeal of preparing an application yourself when you know it will likely be read by a robot.
These companies are crying wolf when they’re the ones who let the beast inside.
Even so, some hiring managers don’t seem to like candidates using AI. Despite the vast majority using it themselves, studies have found that 82% of companies are concerned about job-seekers employing AI in their job applications. They cite worries of no longer being able to trust whether someone’s application truly reflects their abilities, or if it’s only reflecting their ability to cheat the system. A bit ironic, considering that companies are the ones who set that system up by making candidates feel the need to use AI in the first place. These companies are crying wolf when they’re the ones who let the beast inside.
But while the irony is not lost on us job-seekers, it’s clearly lost on many from the other side. Earlier this year, a tweet from a hiring manager went viral, where they lament, “I’m reviewing job applications and 90% of the cover letters are AI generated. They use identical phrases and have exactly the same structure and word count. Why do people do it?”
Why do people do it? Well, when companies post jobs and require applicants to go through endless steps that make them feel like trained monkeys dancing for bananas just to be considered for an interview (not even the position itself), are you sure you wouldn’t do it too?
There is a stark lack of empathy from the employed to the unemployed. People who have jobs love to be wilfully obtuse, to mischaracterize job-seekers and make them out to be lazy bums, unwilling to put in any effort because they are perfectly content staying at home twiddling their thumbs. But what they struggle to grapple with is the reality of job searching these days: It’s depressing.
Being unemployed and looking for work is increasingly demoralizing and very, very lonely.
It’s not just the constant humiliation or the necessary willingness to beg that you must display at all times—being unemployed and looking for work is increasingly demoralizing and very, very lonely.
“It’s a constant vicious cycle,” Katie confesses. “Every time I apply to a position and get rejected, I become more discouraged and have less hope that I will ever find a job, and that makes it harder to keep applying to jobs. And then I have to watch friends thrive at work and go on with their lives, while I feel stuck in unemployment.”
The job market nowadays feels like quicksand, meant to drag you down into an abyss of misery and unemployment.
I believe most current job-seekers will second that. The job market nowadays feels like quicksand, meant to drag you down into an abyss of misery and unemployment. Sure, sometimes a Good Samaritan tosses you a rope in the form of a “Congratulations!” in an acceptance email, but it’s worrying how deep into the spiral you have to get before that happens.
If you are really lucky, you will enter that quicksand with a rope already tied to your waist and manage to find something via connections (apparently, 85% of jobs are filled through networking). But if the friend of your aunt doesn’t know someone who is hiring or if you simply do not happen to be gifted at small talk, you are pretty much screwed.
I really wish to end this on a hopeful, less bleak note and give an encouraging conclusion about the endless possibilities of the future, but I don’t seem to be able to that at the moment. I’ll be honest—having been stuck in the job market quicksand for months, I have grown disillusioned with the whole job seeking process. The more I continue, the more dehumanizing it feels, and the harder it becomes to conceive the possibility of someone tossing down a rope for me. Don’t get me wrong, I keep sending out applications and I will continue to do so until something happens! But I must admit that each cover letter makes me begrudge this a little more.
So, I guess my final message goes out to the employed, rather than to the unemployed. If your child / sibling / nibling / friend / neighbour / acquaintance is complaining to you about how bad job searching is these days and you are struggling to believe them, please take them at their word, Listen to them. Trust them when they tell you they are trying but it’s just not happening. I promise you they aren’t lying. It truly is that bad.
