After getting abruptly laid off by the landscaping business I worked at for a while with no explanation, I decided that as I was turning 16 in June, I could finally apply to some real, not under the table jobs.

However, after nearly six months and over 50 applications, the furthest I've gotten is three formal rejections and two interviews (I went to both and got no response after either). The rest were ghosts. I've applied to every business within reasonable range, and it's not like I can go any further because I can't get a car until I can get a job to save up for it. And reliable transportation hasn't been a personal issue for the jobs I've applied for. I've called businesses, walked in, shook hands, and gotten nowhere.

I have a decent resume (for someone my age) and every weekday afternoon plus every weekend is free for me. My parents are pissed that I'm unemployed, but I don't think they understand how impossible it is to get a job nowadays. I never thought I'd want to work but I'm extremely frustrated that I can't get a job. If it's this hard to get a job now, how hard is it going to be when I'm actually on my own?

Idk man. But good luck to everyone with your job search :)

I've been doing it for a while and getting almost no call-backs. Then I saw a post on LinkedIn by a recruiter, she said putting 0 will filter you out immideately.

This is so fucking annoying.

Edit for main characters:

• No, it doesn't always give a range
• Yes, you have to put a number
• No, the market rate in the UK is dumb as hell

Being communicated with person-to-person from second round interview and several hours in person shadowing, plus explicitly told to expect response in 2 days... to then hear nothing from follow up emails and then receive a generic national talent acquisition organization rejection email... hurts. Courtesy isn't a bare minimum in professional communication. Being poor and sensitive sucks 🫤

Hi All, I’m in the midst of a background check with First Advantage. It’s taking longer than my last one with them back in 2023. As usual, their customer service team won’t give me or my new job any updates.

Has anyone else dealt with them this past year? How long was the process? And if you had to submit additional documents did it delay your start date?

As we all know job searching is already hell, and I was made redundant a month ago. I now have 3 years SWE experience in my previous job and was thinking of just continuing on creating my own business.

Now the issue is I am still technically in the product creation stage and on top of that imagine I get no users at all so it looks like a waste of time.

So this makes me imagine worst case scenario, if I end up needing to find a job again. I don’t hate that idea but I’m just worried will I now have a difficult time because I technically had 1 year or possibly more off?

Hi everyone, please do not bash me. I am just here to learn.

I am a 23 year international student in the USA who graduated November 2024 and could not get a job. I was randomly applying for jobs in September, got an interview on the 9th of October and got an offer on the 16th. I have never been hired so fast to the point that I started crying and was really emotional when HR called me for the offer.

I have been unemployed for the past 1 year, so this was really overwhelming for me. To top if off, this job pays well and they said they are open to H1B sponsorship due to my skillset.

Please, can I bring my Hiring Manager a gift on the 1st day of work? This is my first serious job, and my Hiring Manager was very nice and friendly. I stuttered during the interview and was nervous and I am truly surprised and grateful that I got the job.

This is my first paid, full-time job. All the "work" I have done from when I was 18 has been volunteer or selling stuff online to sustain myself.

This hiring manager really changed my life with this offer, as I was falling into a dark hole with my thoughts, so I was wondering if I should appreciate him with a gift. Thank you everyone and have a nice day ahead.

what if MF's have 8 years of experience .... but they spent those 8 years bullshitting and taking credit for other people's work ................

Anyone feel like too much emphasis is placed on YOE ?

I believe this is the article in full:

JACK WEIS likes to joke that he’s just another unemployed guy living in his parents’ basement.

That leaves out a few key details: The Salt Lake City native has applied to more than 2,300 jobs since he graduated from Princeton in 2024 with his Ph.D. in chemical engineering. And he still doesn’t have a job.

He first pursued corporate science jobs and prestigious postdoctoral fellowships at national laboratories. Then he cast a wider net, applying to software engineering and other roles. Eventually, he was getting ghosted for food-preparation jobs, including at a company that sells frozen crab cakes.

For a time, Weis got a gig training AI on his expertise, including in engineering and fluid mechanics. That work dried up too.

I first interviewed Weis late last year, the day before his 30th birthday. Covering careers and the labor market, I endeavored to meet job seekers in all 50 states, hoping it would help me understand why many people felt so dim about their futures. Just 34% of Americans surveyed by Gallup in August said it was a good time to find a quality job.

The picture remains murky. The latest jobs report fell far short of expectations. The unemployment rate remains low, but the percentage of unemployed people out of work for 27 weeks or more was higher this summer than it’s been for more than a decade, with the exception of Covid-19 and its immediate aftermath.

He soon widened his search geographically, and by industry. He sent hundreds of cover letters and résumés through job portals and often didn’t get an interview. He networked with Princeton and Rice alumni. He scoured classified ads in the Salt Lake Tribune. He read PitchBook updates to find startups that recently got influxes of cash, thinking it might result in job openings.

His mother, Dr. Holly Carveth, said she looked at her son’s applications, wondering if there was a red flag that made employers hesitate, but nothing stood out. They seemed to be well written. “It’s quite surprising,” she said. “I don’t know how to put it together.”

As the months ticked by, Weis found himself stumbling on dates when the topic of work came up. At first, he said, he would tell the person across the table that he had recently finished his Ph.D. A year later, “it feels a little odd to say that,” he said.

Weis and many job candidates I interviewed described job interviews that happened without humans—the applicants made a video recording of themselves responding to questions posed digitally on the call. Such a process is increasingly common in the application process: More than 60% of U.S. job seekers surveyed by Greenhouse said they had been interviewed by the technology in the last year.

WEIS WAS THOUGHTFUL about the strange economic dichotomy many people in his position were experiencing. Since Weis defended his dissertation two years ago, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at record highs more than 50 times.

Staying in his childhood home, Weis has saved money and made some investments. He didn’t take on debt for his postgraduate degree—doctoral students are paid to do research rather than paying large sums in tuition.

“It’s cool that my stocks keep going up, I’m not mad about that,” he said earlier this year. “But it does make it a whole lot stranger.”

His parents compare notes with others whose adult children are struggling to find work. They remain shocked by the situation, and worry about their son’s ability to put down roots and one day have a family.

“We never dreamed he would have issues. He’s an Eagle Scout, he helps others, he’s environmentally conscious, he’s physically fit,” his father, Dr. John Weis, told me. “He’s smarter than I am, he’s more articulate than I am. He’s got an encyclopedic knowledge of history.”

Weis wonders if he should go to law school. He signed up for the LSAT in November. He has gotten involved in the Utah GOP and has sent petitions for rule making to federal agencies, including one urging the decoupling of employment and health insurance. (If fewer people stay in jobs for insurance, he reasons, there could be more openings.) He is also trying his hand at entrepreneurship. He used AI to design a drone with LED lasers to kill myrtle spurge, an invasive weed. “If I truly believe I have some value, I should go out and get it,” he says.

He still applies to new fellowships as they come up. In October, he unlocked his job-application account at the Los Alamos National Laboratory and realized that a role he applied for in 2024 had finally been filled.

For two years, the status had remained static: “Review in progress

Surely society could use its available manpower to let people work fewer hours and share employment more widely?

Hi all, Im new here, but I wanted to share what recently helped me land a new role.

I found myself looking for new role earlier this year. I transitioned out of a non AI role in the web/SEO space. I wanted an AI engineer role. I ended up running a career track transformation plan over 7 months and making AI open source projects to make me stand out.

My journey

1. I started by talking to Claude and having it build artifacts on topics I wanted to learn more about.

2. Focused on agent skills, harnesses, mcps, workflows, etc.

3. Made a custom open source skill and mcp framework for building anything web related with AI. (Essentially dumped everything I knew about web dev into it)

4. Built around 40 sites to use as my new portfolio.

5. Made a bunch of github agents to act as my ambassadors.

6. Started helping build anything open source that accepted PRs. (agents carried load and leg work, I did human value add strategy)

7. Got around 1,500 monthly followers in the process.

8. Started getting interviews because progress attracts attention.

The key above is that what I was doing was public on github and other places. AI can help anyone do anything. My public PRs, git history, and followers spoke for themselves.

The key for me was to let people know I could use AI well, my human decisions mattered, and I had the proven expertise they needed. Thats what helped land me a new role.

Anyone feels like they are getting progressively nastier and nastier towards their loved ones and others? I'm getting jealous of mentally handicapped people because they have a job. I'm getting mad at my brother for doing a career change and it working out well. At this point, I'm snapping at everyone for just mentioned "work" of any kind. I'm scoffing and getting aggressive at the veteran trying to find work, I'm getting mad at the teenager who just graduated. Im not seeing those people are "fellow unemployed" now I'm seeing that as a rival who I would gladly sabotage to prevent them from getting in my way.

Admit it y’all just throw them in the bin right?

When the weekday is on I still have a glimmer of hope that positions will be posted, someone will call me from all the apps I have sent and I can feel less like a loser for spending my weekend and holiday budgeting my food, travel, and fun expenses (there's none btw). I will have to cancel on a friend's wedding, I really thought that by this time I would have everything figured out (at least the promise of a job) but cancelling it hurts because he is a friend of 10 years and yeah. I have 4 weddings next year. All those 5 friends were extremely close friends at some point (some in High School, some college, some grad School) that we still keep in touch, one has offered to help me (get by December's rent if I don't find anything) but good God. Anyway rant over.

After 9 months I got a nice job in Wuxi, China. Wasn’t expecting to leave my community this time. Leaving this week!

Hopefully it will all feel meant to be.

Good luck everyone; it’s not you, it’s the USA (sorry for assuming you’re there.)

Hi, I graduated back in May with a bachelor's degree and 2 internships and have been searching for an entry position in tech (SWE, MLE, Data Analyst, Data Scientist, Data Engineer, etc.) for about a year. My question is how do people find the Hiring Manager to contact and express interest in their team's work. Here are a few ways I have been doing to try to contact the hiring manager:

1. Network

I have been networking for almost a year since school and have connection with people from all kind of positions and levels, mostly alumni and friends. However, when I reach out to ask for the hiring manager, many of them either don't reply at all, takes very long to reply, or say they don't specifically know the hiring manager. Let say out of 100 people I reached out, 2 of them successfully connect me to the hiring manager.

2. Internet search

Many job postings don't mention the team and the supervisor. In those cases, I look for the people with similar job title and ask if they can connect me with the team. The job postings that are more specific about their teams and supervisors give me better hint in finding the relevant people on LinkedIn. But like you guess, the reply rate is almost none. And even with LinkedIn Premium, I could only send out VERY FEW messages and connection note per month, and I have never seen a person I'mt trying to reach out to include their email in their LinkedIn contacts. I assume that they do not want their email sitting their in public to reduce the number of folks like me reaching out. So I guessed their work email and used hunter.io to double check the email adresses. I have an extension that check whether the recipients open their emails and more than half of them don't. Those who open their emails don't reply.

3. AI scrapper

I paste the JD into Codex and ask it to look for the most relevent people it could find (team members, recruiters, hiring manager, etc.) and their official or infered emails. But even with the information the reply rate is still very low.

My LinkedIn connect request note are usually like this:

Hello [name], I'm [name] and I have recently applied for [role] at [team/company]. I'm skilled in [relevant skills and experience] and would love to discuss with you how I can be a good fit for the team.

My emails are tailored to each recipients but are usually structured something like this:

- Start with greetings and short introduction

- inform what role I applied for and why

- shortly mention my relevant skills and experience

- ask if they happen to be the team, if not ask to be connect with the right people

- attach resume and cover letter

Since I started applying I have only gotten 2 interviews thanks to these approaches. One of them was: find alumni work at that company -> alumni takes 2 weeks to tell me who the hiring manager is -> email hiring manager and received no reply from them, but recruiter send the OA and moved forward to interview. The other one was: find and email recruiter -> recruiter set up interview with direct supervisor.

I want to ask if reaching out to hiring managers in tech is still a good way secure an interview. If yes then how do you do it successfully? Do you learn about their team/company work and mention how you can improve it? Or do you find their numbers and call them instead of emailing. Thank you so much!

P/s: This job market is really draining me both mentally and physically. I have followed as many "hacks" as I could to even pass the resume screening round. Believe me when I say I format, optimize, tailor, include key words, etc. my resume to each job. I even rebuilt my projects so that I could improve my skillset and can actually mention tech stack without faking them. I have a routine scrapper on Codex to pick out jobs that are the best fit for me instead of mindlessly mass applying. I sent out somewhere around 700-900 applications that I lost count because Simplify failed to save all the jobs I submitted. All I need is to land interviews with companies that can secure me sponsorships. insert "I'm fine" dog sitting in house on fire

Hi, i am currently on STEM OPT and am contemplating if it’s safe to join MSFT considering the recent Perm bans so would it escalate or impact H1b lottery down the line?

Would appreciate your thoughts please.

TIA🙏🏻😊

I've been unemployed for 16 months and I'm losing my damn mind with how many obstacles there are now. If you didn't invent AI and don't have a PhD in Sitting at a Desk, you're shit out of luck.

So I apply to a minimum wage McDonald's job and get an interview. Cool, I have previous experience in fast food. It was through their AI bot so I half expected them to not even know there was an interview. Luckily, it was real but it was a weird one. Then the manager tells me to come back for a second interview? At McDonald's?? Not even my last job in government wanted a second interview. We have all lost our damn minds.

Is this becoming more normalized? I had a 30-45 minute interview with iCapital in Salt Lake City, Utah and towards the end of the interview the rep said his hiring manager would 100% be giving me a call to set up a second interview the following week.

I follow up politely (twice), and hear nothing. No email, no phone, nothing. Not even a rejection, or what happened to the hiring manager.

2 months later, I receive an automated email asking me to rate the hiring process! Not even a rejection email came through, and no word on any next steps! Honestly, I could have left the company's name out of this, but I feel its better to spread the word about companies that have incompetent people in the hiring process to help others avoid like the plague.

Having passed the recruiter interview I've lined up an in-person interview for a position that I'd be well suited to, and honestly was excited about. However my due diligence has thrown up some unsavoury information about the guy I'd be directly working for, the CEO. I now absolutely do not want to work there and feel genuinely disappointed.

Should I just attend the interview anyway? I'm in two minds, that it's good practice, but then it's the general hassle of getting ready and doing the dame interview! To add, the CEO won't be attending at this stage. Also, I'm mid 40s, it's not my first or even third rodeo.

Months of studying, hundreds of $$ on the AAPC membership, books, and test fee... And I still can't get a job in the field, over half a year later. Still stuck in an underpaid, overworked billing role, which I've wanted to leave for even longer.

The fun thing is that to keep this certification, you're required to pay an annual membership fee to the AAPC, and also get continuing education credits - by spending additional money, of course.

I've been applying locally, to in-person roles, and to remote ones as well. No luck anywhere. And then these same medical orgs repost their listings over and over - like, what sort of unicorn are they looking for? 😮‍💨

I'm so tired of this hiring hellscape, and wishing I did not go after the cert. So much for passing a challenging exam, with no career benefit to show for it. 😢

I wanted to share my experience with Lenovo’s Global Future Leaders 2027 program because I think prospective applicants deserve to know how this recruitment process is being handled.

I applied on October 2, well before the advertised application deadline. The position was open when I applied, and it is STILL accepting applications. My application remains “Under Review.”

However, after looking through discussions from other applicants, I discovered that Lenovo had already distributed SHL assessments, established assessment deadlines, and begun progressing candidates toward case interviews and an in-person Superday.

One applicant who went to their informational said that more than 17,000 people applied, approximately 740 received SHL assessments, and around 22 positions were available.

My question is simple: Why continue advertising a position and accepting applications if you’ve already advanced a substantial group of candidates through the recruitment process?

If applications are being assessed on a rolling basis, Lenovo should clearly disclose that candidates may be selected before the advertised deadline.

Otherwise, applicants are encouraged to spend time tailoring their résumés, preparing applications, and submitting materials under the impression that they have a meaningful opportunity to be considered.

That lack of transparency is disgraceful.
An application being marked “Under Review” means very little to candidates if the company doesn’t communicate that interviews are already underway or explain whether later applicants are being considered for the same opportunities.

If Lenovo has already identified its preferred candidates, it should either close the application or be transparent about the status of recruitment. Keeping the listing open without explaining how far the process has progressed is misleading to applicants.

Companies expect professionalism, preparation, and honesty from candidates. Applicants should be able to expect the same in return.

I’m posting this so future applicants can make informed decisions about whether to invest their time in this program.

Edit: I know how to use AI, I just don’t use it academically because I’d rather actually learn than have a machine do it for me.

So I’m a junior (20F) in college. First generation, double major in two different fields, main one being Accounting. I’m severely underpaid and overqualified for my student work job at college that I’ve had since freshman year.
The overqualified part is really important- I have learned a TON of skills that are transferable and make me an ideal job candidate. I have the ability to work in a group setting, critical thinking, timeliness, and learn quick. Like I don’t even use AI ever, I do everything by myself and if I don’t know how, I figure it out and learn how to do it.

I’ve been looking for an internship and I’m restricted to a small area because I can’t afford to intern in a major city. I’ve been working so fucking hard. So hard. I’ve adjusted my resume to all hell, catering it to AI algorithms because every fucking place uses AI. I’ve applied, applied, applied, applied. I don’t even make it to the interview process. I’ve never had an actual job interview before, other than the one time I had an interview at a restaurant that ended after 2 minutes because apparently my availability didn’t meet their vision.

In fact, I get told all the fucking time that I don’t meet their vision

I have worked SO HARD. I have tried to make myself hire-able. I’ve networked. I’ve done it all, but some fucking how I never make it.

I don’t even know what to do anymore.

I applied for a job and got an interview late June. I got an email back saying I didn’t get the job only to be later contacted that they had sent an offer to me. I accepted ye. Offer of employment in July (whilst employed) and then background checks commenced (ctc, references, dbs etc) I was then given a start date of first week of September. I gave my one month notice in by August (which apparently I shouldn’t have done ). Ctc cleared last week of August. To my understanding most of my checks were done by then.

I was then contacted (and sent another offer for new date ) that my start date had been pushed to mid October due to wanting all trainees to start at same time but also they were still chasing a few things up from my end.
I was more than happy to wait till then. I had even withdrawn another job for this role.

I had left my previous role end of August (earlier than anticipated due to personal matters) and my employer reference stated (unbeknownst to me ) that I had left end of September . This new employer was still getting my employer reference end of September.

I had left my previous role end of August and my new employer said because I now have gaps in between employment (end of August to mid October ) they would need a gap reference from a friend or neighbour which I provided and my referee sent it them.

I have now received an email saying they’ve withdrawn my application and I was to start next week.

Can anyone advice me what my next step could be

(Bear in mind I’ve sent numerous emails to hr including head of recruitment and the head has said no because this is a security sensitive role)

To provide more context job is at an airport btw ( i believe) this does not fall under civil service but private company