u/my_peen_is_clean

Lost my job in tech beggining of the year and I was in job search mode for around 3 months after that.

First 2,9 months I did it the way I was used to. Indeed LinkedIn spam my resume all over the place and nothing.

Started reading on reddit about how crap the current job market is with all the AI crap and decided to go back to basics.

I made a list of 15 companies close to my area that had open positions I would be interested it.

I rewritten my resume to be a damn near perfect match for each.

Went in and handed it over in the front desk, some accepted, some didn't. But just 15 tries resulted in 3 interviews. Ended up getting 2 offers. Got a job in 2 days pretty much. Luck? Maybe idk but it worked for me. I think this approach is worth a try.

Unbelievable. My husband and I both fell for this and we are both pretty tech savvy millennials! I applied for a very senior position with a corporation on Indeed. (These hackers are relying on the fact that you are rushing to fix the tech issue so you can make it to your fake interview). Days after applying I received an email asking me my availability for interview. Absolutely nothing suspicious yet, no grammatical errors, weird spaces, email and company names all check out.

THEN they sent me an interview confirmation and told me that they will send the invite link to me the morning of the interview. 10 minutes before my interview I click the zoom link to take me to the interview and a message pops up that says my zoom is outdated and it took me to what looked like a zoom website. It AUTOMATICALLY started downloading a "zoom" application on my laptop. I tried to open the application in my downloads folder but apple wouldn't let me open it. I went back and read the company's email from when they sent me the link and it said that their software doesn't work with Macs so the interview has to be done from windows (yes, I know this should've been what woke me up).

I started panicking that I was already late for my interview so I called my husband. He told me to get his computer and try the link. I clicked the link from his computer and the application called "serviceconnect" again started immediately downloading to his computer. I put him on Facetime and showed him the screen and we immediately both snapped back to reality and realized it was a hacker. We tried to end the task from task manager but each time we ended the task, 3 more would pop up. We shut down the laptop, changed our passwords everywhere including banking, computer, emails, etc. These scammers use real companies with real company emails and are relying on you being rushed trying to make an interview, not really thinking or paying attention closely. Never thought my husband and I would fall for something like this.

I know this is long but I wish someone had posted something like this when I was in the middle of it so I'm putting it all out there.

Last year I quit my job with no backup offer. No plan really. I'd been at this company for about three and a half years doing operations work and the last year was brutal. I started getting bad anxiety, couldn't sleep, stomach issues, the whole thing. I went to my doctor and she straight up told me the stress was making me sick. I tried to work with my manager on adjusting things and asked about shifting responsibilities, working hybrid for a bit, even suggested a temporary reduced workload while I sorted my health out. Got nowhere. Lots of "we'll look into it" and then nothing changed. HR was even worse. Basically told me to use my PTO if I needed a break.

So I did the math. I had enough saved to cover about 10-11 months of expenses if I kept things tight. And I quit. My friends thought I was insane. Quitting in this market with nothing lined up. But I was at a point where I couldn't think straight at work anyway so staying wasn't really doing me any favors either.

**The first three months I didn't job search at all**

I just stopped. Slept. Went outside. Started seeing a therapist every two weeks which I should've done way earlier. The first few sessions were rough because I didn't even realize how wound up I was until I started unwinding. My therapist helped me work through a lot of the guilt around quitting and this pattern I had of tying my self worth to being productive at work. By month three I actually felt like a normal person again. Could think clearly.

That's when I started looking.

**Month one of searching was a disaster**

I did what everyone says to do. Updated my resume, wrote cover letters, applied everywhere. I'm talking everything that was even close to my experience. Operations analyst, project coordinator, business ops, program manager, whatever had the word operations in it basically.

Applied to 142 jobs in about five weeks. Got ghosted by probably 90-95% of them. Got maybe 11-12 screening calls. Made it to a second round twice. Zero offers. Nothing.

It was demoralizing in a way I wasn't ready for. You start wondering if something's wrong with you specifically. Like is it the gap on my resume. Is it the market. Am I just not as good as I thought I was.

**Month two I tried the networking route**

Shifted strategy. Started reaching out to old coworkers on LinkedIn. Hit up a few people I'd worked with at previous companies. Went to a couple of local meetups. A few people said they'd keep an ear out or pass my resume along. One guy told me about an opening at his company and said he'd refer me.

None of it turned into anything real. Just a lot of "I'll let you know" and then silence. I'm not blaming anyone … people are busy and the job market is rough on the hiring side too. But two months in with nothing to show for it I started to spiral a little.

**The thing that actually changed things**

I called my old manager from my first real job out of college. He's one of those people who doesn't sugarcoat anything which is exactly what I needed. I told him what was happening and he asked me something that caught me off guard. He said stop telling me what jobs you're applying to and tell me what you're actually good at.

I gave him the generic answer about being organized and good with cross functional teams and he basically said yeah that's what everyone says. He pushed me to think about it differently. Instead of looking at job descriptions and trying to match myself to them, he wanted me to figure out what I actually bring to the table and then find roles that fit that. More like reverse engineering it.

He also pointed out something I hadn't thought about. A lot of the skills I was listing on my resume were the exact things companies are starting to automate. Data entry, reporting, basic project tracking. He said I needed to figure out what I could do that a tool couldn't and lead with that.

That conversation messed me up for like two days because I realized I'd been applying to jobs on autopilot without really thinking about whether they even made sense for me. Which is probably why nothing was landing.

**So I did the uncomfortable work**

Spent about two weeks just doing self assessment stuff. More like trying to get an actual picture of where I fit instead of guessing.

I did a few different career assessments. One was through pivoto. tools which is more of a misalignment check which basically helps you see where your current path doesn't match how you actually work. That was eye opening because it showed me I'd been chasing roles that looked right but were a bad fit for how I operate day to day. Then I did Pigment which was more about strengths and adaptability to different types of roles. That one helped me see patterns in what energizes me and why my last job was such a bad fit beyond just the environment being toxic. Also did CliftonStrengths which I'd heard about for years but never tried. That one was more about natural talents.

Between the three of them I started seeing overlap. I kept showing up as someone who's good at building systems and solving problems but bad in roles where I'm just maintaining someone else's process with no room to improve it. Which was literally my last job. I was stuck executing a broken system and getting stressed about it while being told not to change anything. No wonder I was miserable.

**Then I fixed the practical stuff**

Took my resume and ran it through a couple of ATS focused resume tools to make sure it was actually getting past the filters. Rewrote it based on what I'd learned about my strengths instead of just listing every responsibility from my last three jobs. Made it way more specific about what I'm good at and what kind of impact I've had.

Then I did mock interviews using Claude and ChatGPT. I'd paste in a job description and have it interview me. Sounds weird but it was incredibly useful because I realized how different I sounded compared to what my resume said. My resume was all polished AI language and then I'd open my mouth and sound like a completely different person. So I kept practicing until the way I talked about my experience actually matched what was on paper. Or more accurately I rewrote the paper to match how I actually talk about my work.

(**btw none of the tools I mentioned are recommendations and that shouldn’t be the focus. I don't even know if they'd work for everyone. I'm just listing what I personally used, so do your own research.**)

**Two months later I had an offer**

Not from a mass application. From a targeted search where I actually knew what I was looking for, could explain why I was a fit, and didn't sound like I was reading off a script. The role is in operations but it's a building and improving type role, not a maintain and report type role. The difference is massive.

**What I'd tell someone in the same spot**

Stop applying to everything. It feels productive but it's not. 142 applications got me nothing. Knowing what I was actually looking for and applying to maybe 30 targeted roles got me a job.

If your job is making you sick, take that seriously. I waited way too long and it cost me. The gap on my resume has come up exactly once in an interview and I just said I took time off for health reasons and nobody pushed further.

Do the self assessment stuff even if it feels stupid. I rolled my eyes at it too. But I genuinely didn't understand why I kept ending up in roles that made me miserable until I looked at the pattern. Sometimes the environment is the problem. Sometimes it's a mismatch between how you work and what the role needs. Usually it's both.

Fix your resume so it actually gets past the screens but make sure you can back it up in person. The gap between the AI version of you and the real you will kill your interviews if you don't close it.

And talk to people who knew you when you were good at your job. Not people who'll just gas you up but people who'll tell you the truth. That one phone call with my old manager did more than two months of applying ever did.

It took me eight months from quitting to getting an offer. Three of those were recovery. Two were wasted. Three were focused. I wish the ratio had been better but I'm glad I figured it out eventually.

Happy to answer anything if people have questions.

About 8 months ago, my partner got laid off and started applying to jobs. She'd send out 15-20 applications a week and hear... nothing. Not rejections. Just silence.

I'm a developer, so I started digging into how ATS (Applicant Tracking Systems) actually work under the hood. I ran thousands of tests with different resume formats, keyword densities, and layouts against real ATS platforms like Workday, Greenhouse, Lever, iCIMS, and Taleo. Here's what the data showed.

1. The "75% auto-rejection" stat is misleading - the real problem is worse.

You've probably seen the claim that 75% of resumes get rejected by ATS before a human sees them. I believed it too. But after digging into how these systems actually work, the truth is more nuanced and honestly scarier.

A recent survey of 630 recruiters found that 92% say their ATS does NOT auto-reject based on content. The system isn't saying "no" to you. It's just... never surfacing you. Recruiters search the ATS like a database. They type in keywords, filter by job titles, set experience ranges. If your resume doesn't match what they search for, you simply don't exist.

You're not getting rejected. You're invisible.

2. One change increased interview callbacks by 10.6x.

This was the single biggest finding. Resumes that matched the exact job title from the posting in their header/summary got callbacks at 10.6 times the rate of resumes that didn't.

Not a synonym. Not a creative interpretation. The exact title.

If the job posting says "Senior Product Manager," your resume should say "Senior Product Manager" - not "Product Lead" or "Head of Product Strategy." ATS keyword matching is still largely literal, and 99.7% of recruiters use keyword filters to sort applicants.

This is free. It takes 30 seconds per application. And almost nobody does it.

3. The "pretty resume" tax is real.

This one hurt to see. Designers, marketers, and creatives consistently had the worst pass-through rates - not because they were less qualified, but because their resumes were unreadable to machines.

The biggest offenders:

\- Two-column layouts. ATS reads top-to-bottom in a single stream. Two columns get scrambled - your job title from column A merges with a skill from column B. It's gibberish on the other end.

\- Fancy icons and emojis. That cute phone icon next to your number? The ATS sees U+260E or just a blank. Your contact info becomes noise.

\- Non-standard section headers. "My Journey" instead of "Work Experience." "Toolkit" instead of "Skills." The parser doesn't know where to put that information, so it dumps it in a miscellaneous field nobody searches.

\- Info in headers/footers. Most ATS straight up ignore header and footer content. I saw hundreds of resumes where the candidate's name, email, and phone number were in the header - meaning the recruiter's system had no idea who they were.

4. The keyword sweet spot is 25-35. No more, no less.

Resumes needed 25-35 relevant, role-specific keywords to consistently score above 80% in ATS matching. Below 25, you're not surfacing in enough recruiter searches. Above 35 and you start tripping the keyword-stuffing detectors.

Here's the thing - 83% of companies now use AI-assisted screening. The old trick of pasting the job description in white text doesn't just not work anymore - newer systems flag it. Your resume gets penalized, not boosted.

What does work: naturally weaving in the specific terms from the job posting. Not synonyms. Not abbreviations (unless the posting uses them). The. Exact. Words. There are good apps that do it for you like Jobowl.co

"Adobe Creative Cloud" and "Adobe Creative Suite" are different strings to a parser. Match what the posting says.

5. Dates matter way more than you think.

One of the weirder findings: inconsistent date formats caused ATS systems to miscalculate total experience. I saw resumes where candidates had 8 years of experience but the system calculated 3 - because they mixed "Jan 2019," "2019-01," and "January '19" across different roles. Pick one format. Use it everywhere. "Month Year" (e.g., "Jan 2020 - Mar 2023") parsed most reliably across the systems I tested.

6. The real competition isn't what you think.

Only 2-3% of applications result in an interview right now. That sounds brutal, and it is. But here's the flip side - most of that 97% is getting filtered out for completely fixable reasons.

Bad formatting. Missing keywords. Invisible contact info. Creative headers that confuse parsers.

The bar for a technically optimized resume is shockingly low because most people don't know these rules exist. You don't have to be the best candidate. You just have to be visible.

TL;DR - the quick-fix checklist:

\- Match the exact job title from the posting in your resume header

\- Use single-column layout, no tables, no graphics

\- Standard section headers: "Work Experience," "Education," "Skills"

\- Keep contact info in the body, not headers/footers

\- 25-35 keywords pulled directly from the job posting, use tools like Jobowl.co for this

\- Consistent date formatting throughout (Month Year)

\- Save as .docx unless told otherwise

\- No icons, emojis, or decorative elements

\- Don't keyword-stuff - AI screening catches it now

My friend has been job searching for 4 months with barely any callbacks. She asked me to look at her resume (I've done some hiring in previous roles) and found some issues that are really common but easy to fix.

Posting here because I see these mistakes constantly:

1. Two-column layout

Her resume looked gorgeous. Clean design, two columns, very professional.

Problem: ATS (applicant tracking systems) read left-to-right, top-to-bottom. They can't handle columns. Her resume was being parsed as gibberish.

When I ran it through an ATS simulator, her job titles were getting merged with dates from the other column. Instant reject before a human ever saw it.

Fix: Single column. Boring but functional.

2. Job duties instead of accomplishments

Her bullets were things like:

\- "Responsible for managing social media accounts"

\- "Handled customer inquiries"

\- "Assisted with event planning"

These tell me what she did, not how well she did it.

Better:

\- "Grew Instagram following from 2K to 15K in 6 months through daily content strategy"

\- "Resolved 50+ customer inquiries weekly with 95% satisfaction rating"

\- "Coordinated 12 company events for 100+ attendees each"

The formula: \[Action verb\] + \[what you did\] + \[measurable result\]

3. No keywords from job postings

She was applying to marketing roles but her resume didn't include words like "campaign," "analytics," "SEO," "content strategy" - all common requirements in the postings she was targeting.

ATS systems often filter by keyword matching. If you're missing the key terms, you don't pass the filter.

Fix: Look at 5 job postings you want. Note the terms that appear in all of them. Make sure those words are in your resume (naturally, not stuffed).

4. Including "References available upon request"

This takes up space and tells them something they already know. Everyone has references available upon request.

Delete it. Use that line for an actual accomplishment.

5. Objective statement at the top

She had: "Seeking a challenging role where I can utilize my skills and grow professionally."

This tells the employer nothing. Everyone wants this.

Either delete it entirely or replace with a 2-line summary that specifically says what you bring: "Marketing coordinator with 3 years of B2B experience. Specialized in social media growth and event marketing. Increased engagement 40% at previous role."

6. Resume was generic and not tailored to each job, you need to sort the skills and surface whats most relevant. You can do this manually or with good tools like Jobowl, probably one of the most game changing points

The result:

We fixed these five things. Took maybe 2 hours total.

She applied to 15 jobs the following week with the new resume. Got 4 callbacks.

Was it the resume changes? Can't be 100% sure, but she'd sent out 60+ applications before with almost nothing. The timing is suspicious.

Anyway, hope this helps someone. Resume stuff is tedious but it matters more than people think.

I was working at this IT consulting company in Milan for like 4 months as a developer, salary was €3.5k/month and thats what we agreed and signed for.

Then one day my manager calls me saying the company was “reviewing costs” and asked me if I was open to reducing my salary. Like wtf?? We alredy signed the contract

I said no obviously. I wasnt even rude about it, just said no sorry im not accepting a lower salary than the one we agreed on. Am I wrong?

Now every small thing became a problem, random criticsm, passive agressive messages, getting micromanaged for stupid sh. I knew it was coming

Then few weeks later they fired me for “bad performance”

Crazy part is before the salary discussion nobody ever never ever complained about my work

Now I actually have a pending lawsuit with them because this whole thing feels shady as fuck honestly and Inhave no intention of getting scammed by another corporate. WTH of a world we live in?

If anybody of you is in a lawsuit with a previous employer pls let me know what happened and what did you do bc I don’t really know how to move

I kept seeing this advice on TikTok. Don't apply online. Just message people on LinkedIn and ask for a 15 min coffee chat (virtual). No asking for a job. Just "informational interview." So I tried it for two weeks. I messaged 25 people. All of them worked at companies I wanted. I wrote a short message: "Hi, I admire your work in X. Would you have 15 min for a quick chat about your career path? No pressure."
Out of 25, only 8 replied. 5 said "sorry too busy." 3 said yes. I had chats with all 3. One was super nice and gave me really good feedback on my resume. One was awkward and kept checking his phone. The third one actually said "we dont have openings now but send me your resume anyway." I did. She forwarded it to a hiring manager. I got an interview.
I didnt get the job. But I got to the final round. That never happens when I just spam apply on Indeed. The downside? It takes so much time. Writing 25 personalized messages took me like 6 hours. And the rejection stings. Some people just left me on read. One guy said "stop bothering people for free labor." That hurt.
But I think I'll keep doing it. Just less. Maybe 5 messages a week instead of 25. Has anyone else tried this? How do you get over the embarassing feeling of begging for attention?

You owe your customers explanation. How is a business of this size not equiped for proper failover. One DC failure and you are a sinking ship. How is this possible?!?! You just controbuted to hundreds of milions in losses with your poor risk management. Crazy

I’m 30M and I’ve been job hunting for about two months for a mid level ops coordinator type role. Nothing fancy, but the process has been a circus. I kept running into the same pattern: recruiter screens me, says I’m a “great fit”, asks for my availability, I respond within an hour, then silence for a week. Sometimes they’d pop back up like nothing happened and ask for another set of times, like the first message evaporated. I’m not proud of how much I started spiraling over it. I kept thinking I’d said something wrong, or my email went to spam, or I was supposed to chase harder and I just didn’t know the secret handshake. After the fourth time it happened in one week, I tried a tiny change that sounds almost stupid, but it has been working way better than I expected.

Now, every time I send availability, I also send a short “receipt” email that is basically impossible to misunderstand or ignore. It’s not rude, it’s not a novel, and it doesn’t beg. It’s just a clean summary of what we agreed on, plus a clear next step. Like: “Confirming I’m available Tue 10:00-11:30, Wed 14:00-16:00, Thu 9:00-10:00. Please let me know which slot you’d like to lock in and I’ll hold it. If none work, feel free to send two alternatives and I’ll respond same day.” That’s it. I also started putting the job title and req number in the subject line every time, even if they didn’t. And I stopped answering with a wall of open ended niceness like “I’m flexible any time!” because I realised that gives them nothing concrete to act on. The weird part is how often recruiters reply to the receipt but not to the original availability, like the summary flips a switch in their brain. One recruiter literally responded, “Thanks for laying it out, booking you for Wed at 2.” Another one had ghosted me for 9 days, then after the receipt email he replied in 12 minutes with an apology and a calendar invite.

The biggest win was last week. I had a great phone screen, then silence, then the recruiter came back with the classic “Are you free today?” message at 11:47am. Old me would have panicked and said yes, then rearranged my entire day. Instead I did the same receipt thing, but for boundaries: “I can do 3:00-4:30 today or tomorrow 10:00-12:00. If you need earlier, I can do a quick 15 minute call at 1:30 to confirm details and schedule the full interview.” I expected them to vanish again. They didn’t. They picked 3:30, sent an invite, and the hiring manager actually started the call by saying, “Thanks for being organised, our scheduling has been messy.” I got moved to final round two days later. Maybe it’s coincidence, but I’ve used this on six conversations now and it’s cut my ghosting down hard. It also makes me feel less desperate because I’m not just tossing availability into the void and hoping someone respects it. Boring little receipt emails are not sexy, but they seem to force a next action, and apparently that’s half the battle.

​I just had the most surreal "first day" experience at a company called Alpha Test (an SAT prep/coaching firm).

​The official hours are 9:00 AM to 6:00 PM. I stayed until 6:30 PM to make sure everything was wrapped up. I thought I was being a "good intern."

​At 7:30 PM, while I was finally home, the Partner called and ordered me to return to the office immediately. No emergency, just a random demand. When I told her I couldn't make it back, she fired me on the spot.

​Her literal words: "Our company focuses on efficiency and profit, not on the employees' personal time. Our philosophies do not align."

​Let’s do the math: The pay is 200 RMB (about $28 USD) per day. They expect to own my entire life for less than $2.50 an hour.

​I’m sharing this because I refuse to accept this as "normal." This is a company that claims to "educate" students for their future, yet they treat their own staff like disposable tools with zero human dignity.

​Every dollar spent on such a business is a vote for this toxic culture. If you're a student or a parent, please know who you are actually supporting.

I was applying for a project coordinator role and before the interview I spent like an hour just reading through the company's glassdoor reviews, not the overall rating but specifically the ones from people who LEFT. And I mean the bitter ones, the "I regret joining" ones. Turns out the hiring manager mentioned almost the exact same things as red flags in the bad reviews during our first call, just framed positively. Like "we move fast and wear many hats" appeared in both the job posting and three separate 2-star reviews lol.

Ever since then I use bad glassdoor reviews as a kind of cheat sheet before every interview. They tell me what questions to actually ask, what to watch out for, and honestly sometimes they save me from even applying in the first place. Last month I skipped what looked like a dream job because literally every departing employee mentioned the same director by name and not in a nice way. Felt weird to turn it down but also kind of relieving.

Curious if anyone else digs into exit reviews this way or if theres other "negative" sources you use to research a company before interviewing? Feel like nobody talks about this side of prep.

I have over fifteen years of experience in my field and i always thought that showing my long history was a sign of seniority and stability . But for the last six months of job hunting i was getting almost zero responses even for roles where i was a perfect match . I started to suspect that recruiters were looking at my graduation year from 2008 and immediately putting me in the overqualified or too expensive category before even reading my skills .

Last month i decided to run an experiment and i stripped every single date related to my education from my resume . I kept the degree and the university name but the years are just gone . I also trimmed my experience to only show the last ten years and moved the older stuff to a small additional section without specific dates . The result was insane . I went from maybe one automated rejection email a week to three actual interview invites in the first seven days . When i finally got to the interviews nobody even asked when i graduated because they were too busy talking about my recent projects . It turns out that focusing on what you can do right now is way more important than showing how long you have been around . If you are an experienced professional and feeling stuck please try this because age bias is real and this is the easiest way to bypass it .

I’m just confused. Rent is skyrocketing, salaries are being reduced to Pennies, and “rockstar candidates” are being gaslit, dragged through endless interview rounds, and ghosted like it’s normal. Everyone keeps asking what they’re doing wrong.

NOTHING. You’re doing absolutely nothing wrong!

The job market is a joke, and I’m tired of everyone pretending the economy hasn’t completely collapsed. I can’t even get a retail job folding shirts. I was literally put through three interview rounds for retail, only to be ghosted multiple times, despite an immaculate sales background. I could sell a leaf if someone asked me to.

If that doesn’t say everything about where we’re at, I don’t know what does.

Edit: Since the wording seems to be ruffling feathers, let me rephrase. Why are people acting like we are not heading toward the biggest recession many of us will ever see?

For those replying with technical definitions of what “counts” as a recession, here is the perspective I’m offering: What do you think happens when hiring freezes, people cannot find work, wages stay stagnant, and the cost of living keeps rising? Where exactly do you think that trajectory leads?

You can call it whatever you want, but the outcome is the same. If people cannot afford to live and no one feels secure in their job, the label is irrelevant. The reality is what matters.

Hi. Me again. Here to bitch and moan about my folks again.

My dad wants me to give up on an IT career. He says that "Because you have had opportunities come by and they don't pick you, its not the job opportunities" and then shrugged. All because I bombed an interview with a company he helped me get an interview at. 1 interview i did bad at and suddenly im the entire problem. Not that hiring is fundamentally broken right now or everything is AI slop and recruiters don't want to get back to me for whatever xyz reason. Its me. Then my mom says "Most people apply for a job and have it in a few days except you". I almost screamed. I calmly said "thats not how things work anymore" and she also just laughed it off.

So just to clarify this is what they want from me:

1. Find a full time career that isnt IT related despite me being in that area for over 10 years.
2. Find immediate work. Like wake up tomorrow and immediately have a job.
3. Accept that the IT career is not going to happen BUT dont give up on it because it could still happen.
4. Do all this as soon as possible in a world where IT people take WEEKS to even respond

Then, my dad asks me about the recruiters i spoke to a week ago. "What about all the people who told you they can get you back to work?" I tell him "I have followed up and heard nothing". He just shrugs and goes "How much longer are you going to be doing this until you realize its not gonna happen?" and i just walked away.

How am i suppose to come to grips with the concept that I've wasted the last 13-ish years studying IT and just "move on" to a new career that i have no clue what it could be. I have zero idea right now what I can do. Realistically I want an IT engineer job but that is just not happening but not for a lack of trying. There is an insane amount of pressure on me and i feel like im ready to burst.

Also, keep in mind last Wednesday I managed to start part time work with a guy I met driving who I can bill for $45 an hour and he pays. I made 900 bucks in 3 days last week. "thats nothing" says my mom. "You need something more". Something to get you "out of the house and motivated". They also claim I have zero motivation in life. Not that Im under tremendous pressure from all sides at all times and deal with depression ("We all get a little sad sometimes" my mom says).

God fucking damn it.

DM's are open if anyone wants to give advice. Im going to cry.

*(Disclaimer: I have nothing against my roommate on a personal level. She's been a great friend and has been by my side through all the ups and downs of college. This is just me venting about the situation.)*

So my roommate and I are both fresh CS graduates. We formally graduated in June 2025 and since then, I've been job hunting like it's a full-time job. I've practically applied to every entry-level programming/software development job posting in my area. I've sent out 500+ applications and only got around 20 first interviews, and out of those, only about 5 moved me to the second interview stage. No third interview at all, let alone an offer.

My roommate, on the other hand, only started job hunting properly at the start of this year. The only thing she did for 'job hunting' the past six months was noting down the companies she's interested in and ranking them in terms of how much she'd like to work there. On January 5, she told me she'd submitted her first application. At the time, I was ready to comfort her/commiserate with her when she eventually got her first round of rejections. Our resumes are pretty similar since we worked together on the same projects in college, so I assumed that her job hunting experience would go as well as mine was going (in other words, not well at all).

So imagine my surprise when, literally only 3 days later, I find out that she's already got some interviews lined up. Out of the 6 companies she applied to over the three days, four had already gotten back to her to get a first interview scheduled. Four!! And before I knew it, she had two offers lined up, with one of them from literally her top choice company. She accepted that company's offer today.

Obviously, I asked her what her secret was. I was genuinely under the impression that in the eyes of a company, the two of us were interchangeable because of our similar background and experience. Turns out that one of her dad's friends is pretty well-known in the industry, and so when her dad told his friend which companies my roommate had applied to, he 'put in a good word' for her. That's it.

I want to be happy for my roommate and celebrate with her because she's someone I consider a good friend, but I can't help but feel so bitter and jealous that I've been here in job hunt hell for over half a year and she breezed through it in like two weeks.

"I see you've been a cook for 8 years, but you didn't mention any 'stove' experience. Do you have any 'stove' experience?"

"It says here you're fried food in a pan, but we'll really looking for someone who's fried food in a skillet."

That's you, tech recruiters.

That's how stupid you sound.

Last year, I applied to work for a marketing firm. As a part of their interview process, they asked me to write a communications plan for a new social media management service they were going to offer (they focused on SEO). I wrote a 5 page launch plan, and they loved it!

Unfortunately they decided that they no longer had budget for the role. So I removed their access to the google doc, thanked them for their time, and went on my merry way.

About 3 days later they emailed me LIVID that they no longer had access to the file, as they had planned to roll out my plan the next month and had scheduled a meeting to go over it with the team. I advised them that since the plan was a skills assessment for a role I did not receive, they would not be able to use anything in the plan without compensating me at my freelance rate of $100 /hr.

Needless to say, they were not happy.

Had an interview with one of the Big4 today. I already had my camera turned on when I joined but the interviewer's camera was off.

I asked him politely if he could switch on his camera too and he laughed and straight up said "No, not exactly". Then he asked me to remove my video background filter. When I asked why he said it's as per company's policies. So as per company's policies only I was supposed to turn my camera on and not him?

Also, during the interview I could not answer one of the questions, and he started screaming at me that I did not know the answer. Do these people even realize that what the job seeker has been going through? I have been unemployed for 2 months now, it's really tough.

This happened in India, as you all might have guessed by now.

P.S. If anyone works for/knows of a company which has good working environment, please help. Have experience in Program/Project management, Product Ops and Customer experience.

Once upon a time, if you lost your job, you could typically find a new job in a few weeks or months. But now it looks more like this:

You will first take 1-2 years minimum to find a shitty job. The good jobs don't hire the unemployed, and really the shitty jobs don't anymore, either. So you spend 1-2 years firing off thousands of applications, getting ghosted left and right. Racking up a mind boggling amount of consumer debt just to survive.

Finally, you find a shitty job. It's at a toxic, shitty small business. You make half your previous salary, with no benefits or PTO. Your boss is an incredible micromanager and screams at you for the smallest things. Every day you feel physically ill at the thought of going in (and go in you will - your two remote days a week are called "Saturday" and "Sunday"). But you are grateful to have any job in this shitty economy. You make minimum payments on that consumer debt, and those minimum payments make your already-lower salary feel even lower. Your debt load actually grows despite the payments, given the crushing weight of the Fed's interest rates.

Now you have to spend 2-3 years having your soul crushed in that shitty job, in order to rebuild your professional credibility and not look like a job hopper. Not to mention, this job will take so much out of you, you won't have any energy to look for anything else. You'll be in survival mode.

Then, finally, you score a good job again. But now a huge amount of your salary is going towards tackling that consumer debt!

I fear this is going to be the new reality for *most* people. Even if you are currently employed, cut all non-essential expenses NOW and start bulking up your emergency funds. And spend some time this week cultivating your network, because by the time you lose your job, it's too late to do either of those things.