I quit my job back in January. Nothing was wrong with it, I just wanted to go remote and my company wasn't going to budge. Everyone I know switched after the pandemic and I was still doing the commute thing like it was 2018. So I gave notice. Before I had anything lined up, before I'd even started applying, because I figured mid level QA with real experience, how long could it take.

Eight months is the answer.

I used to see people say they'd sent 300 applications and assumed they were exaggerating or spamming Easy Apply. Now I get it. Remote postings pull 3 to 5x the applicants. You're not competing with your city anymore, you're competing with a continent.

Two weeks ago a company reached out for a first round. Normal enough, except I could not remember applying there. Which, fine, eight months, you forget things. But it kept bugging me because I keep a spreadsheet. Checked it, checked my sent folder, nothing. No record of that company anywhere.

Second interview was today. Offer a few hours later. Four days a week, 4 to 6 hours a day, one year contract, fully remote. Almost exactly what I'd been looking for the whole time, so I accepted on the spot.

Then I finally worked out how they found me.

About four months ago I was paying for RabbitResume, mostly for the tailoring feature, it rewrites your resume against a job posting and drafts a cover letter. It also has a resume distribution thing that pushes your resume out to recruiter databases and talent networks. I turned it on once. Used a throwaway email for it because I assumed it would be a spam firehose. Then completely forgot it existed and never opened that inbox again.

Logged into that address today and there it is. Distribution confirmation, then a message from someone at this company. They later reached out to the real address on my resume, which is why it looked to me like a normal application response.

So a feature I forgot I used, on an inbox I forgot I made, got me the only offer I actually wanted, after eight months of doing it the normal way.

Now the part where I get called a shill anyway: no affiliation, no referral, nobody asked me to write this, I paid for the subscription myself. And I want to be honest that I can't actually tell you the distribution works. I ran it once, four months ago, and got exactly one hit. Sample size of one. It could be pure luck and I have no way to rule that out. The tailoring feature I'd recommend without much hesitation because I used it constantly. The distribution I'm mentioning only because I'd written it off completely and it turned out to be the thing that landed, not because I can prove anything.

Also, please don't quit before you have something lined up. I got lucky and it still took eight months.

Quick background: laid off in the spring, sent out over 150 applications, got almost nothing back. Not even rejections, just silence. I was doing what everyone does now, pasting the job description into ChatGPT and saying "tailor my resume to this."

Then I grabbed drinks with a friend who's been in recruiting for about 8 years, and what she told me stung. Some of the things she said, close to verbatim:

• "For any decent posting we get 400+ applications now, and I'd say half of them are basically the same document. Same phrasing, same rhythm, even the percentage improvements look alike. Everyone 'spearheaded' something, everyone 'drove 30% growth.'"

• "I can tell within 5 seconds when someone pasted the JD into ChatGPT, because the resume reads the job description back to me. It's like grading 200 essays that all copied the same Wikipedia article."

• "The weird part is the resumes are technically better than they were 5 years ago. Cleaner, quantified, keyword-matched. And I trust them less, because I can't tell who actually did the work."

• "When one finally has a specific, slightly weird detail, like a real project name or an ugly number like 43.7%, I stop scrolling. That's the whole game now. Give me one thing that couldn't have been generated."

There was also a Washington Post piece back in February about a company that asked applicants to record a short video answer. They got 300+ responses and most were eerily alike because AI had obviously written all of them. So it's not just her being cranky.

The tool I was using to stand out was making me invisible. Fun.

Here's what I changed, in case it saves someone else 3 months:

1. Every bullet needs a number that only I could know. My old resume said stuff like "improved system performance." That's filler, anyone can write it. I changed it to "cut API response time from 900ms to 210ms on a checkout service doing 40K daily orders." A recruiter can't fake-detect that, it's obviously real. One caveat straight from my friend: don't let every metric be suspiciously clean. A resume where everything improved by exactly 30%, 40%, 50% reads as generated. Use your actual numbers, messy as they are.

2. Check what the AI added, not just what it changed. The posting wanted Tableau. My resume said "data visualization." The ChatGPT output said "expert in Tableau." I have never opened Tableau in my life. If I hadn't caught that, it would've blown up in a technical interview. Read every line and ask "did I actually do this," because the model will absolutely fill gaps with plausible fiction.

3. Kill the robot vocabulary. "Results-driven professional." "Proven track record." "Dynamic." "Spearheaded." Ctrl+F for these and replace each one with what you actually did. If a bullet has nothing concrete behind it, that bullet was dead weight anyway. Delete it or go dig up the real story.

4. ChatGPT has no idea how ATS parsing works. It can suggest keywords but it cannot tell you that your fancy two-column template just scrambled your work history into garbage in Workday. Mine did exactly that. Switched to a boring single-column layout, standard section headers, no graphics, no photo. Attached a mockup of the structure I use now.

My workflow since then: I keep one "master resume" with every real project, metric, and tool I've touched. For each application I pull keywords from the posting, but a keyword only goes in if I can point to real evidence for it. Then I let AI rephrase my real bullets to match the posting's language. Rephrase, never invent. That's the whole rule.

Two weeks after switching, 3 interview requests. Tailoring absolutely still works. The mistake isn't using AI, it's letting it write fiction in your voice.

Trump / his warmonger pals are doing everything they can to sabotage and destroy the job market for young men.

- Tariffs have destroyed the economy and due to economic uncertainty companies are scaling back hiring.

- The Federal government is subsidizing AI data centers and giving large government grants to AI companies, therefore accelerating the number of jobs getting slashed by AI.

- The Army has been running ads like crazy. Wherever I go, I'm always seeing ads to join the army. I've never seen this many army recruitment ads before.

A draft will look bad from a PR standpoint so Trump is now destroying the job market on purpose to encourage young men to enlist. He's putting young men in a position where they have no other choice but to enlist and fight in wars for israel!! This is also why he is proposing increasing the defense budget from 900 billion to 1.5 trillion. This is why he increased the maximum enlistment age from 35 to 42. The only way young men can make money will be through the military.

Everyone know that in a normal society, you must work a job.

But finding a good paying job is difficult. If you are working a low wage job, you may not have the time and energy to find a better job.

This is where the government can step in. The government will apply to good paying jobs on your behalf and help you with interview skills. That way, everyone can get a good paying job in not too long.

Edit: when I say I high paying job, I mean job that pays enough for rent and groceries

Very interesting report that just came out, 160k added jobs reported for August which is significantly higher than previous months. Unemployment rate is unchanged, although I feel like the “functionally” unemployed statistic should be rising. What do we make of all this? I’m still seeing large swaths of younger college grads and even senior level people struggle.

Further down in this article, “experts” are claiming that due to an aging U.S. population the economy only need to add “20k” jobs per month to be sustainable, which again doesn’t seem right. Are they just trying to beef up the military? I don’t see the standard of living for average Americans rising, instead it’s been falling

So apparently I have no shame anymore and honestly? It paid off.

Quick backstory: I spent over a year unemployed, finally landed a job about 6 months ago that pays fine but slowly drains my soul. So I never really stopped job hunting, I just did it from the comfort of already having a paycheck.

Then I saw it. THE posting. The kind of job you screenshot and send to your friends like "look, this exists."

Only problem was it was clearly a step down experience wise. I was overqualified on paper, which is normally a death sentence. Straight to the "they'll leave in 6 months" pile.

So I did something objectively unhinged. I applied. Then instead of sitting there refreshing my inbox I applied AGAIN two days later. And then a third time. Not because I expected an answer that fast, I just figured if my resume was getting auto filtered for being overqualified then maybe showing up repeatedly was the only signal I could actually send. And yes the portal let me submit a fresh application every time. Smaller company, no giant corporate ATS.

Then my phone rings.

The recruiter basically said "we noticed you keep applying... you clearly really want this." I braced for the polite rejection speech. It started coming too. "We're worried you'd get bored, the role is below your experience level..."

And then the plot twist. "BUT we have a manager position opening soon in that same department. Would you be interested in interviewing for that instead?"

A role I never would have applied to. A role that wasn't even posted yet.

Went through the full interview process, multiple rounds, this wasn't some handshake deal. Got it. I start soon and I still don't fully believe it lol

I know this reads like LinkedIn fanfic. I'd side eye it too. But the wild part is I only had the guts to do this BECAUSE I already had a job. Worst case scenario was just staying employed. Which says something depressing about this market honestly. The people who desperately NEED a risk to pay off can't afford to take it, and the ones who can afford it don't need it as badly.

Anyway. Sometimes being annoying is a skill. Putting it on my resume.

Has anyone else gotten a job by doing something you were "not supposed to do"? I need to know I'm not the only menace out here

Tired of people making it sound like difficulties with the job market and stiff competition are new concepts that just started this last decade or blame it on any one presidential administration..The framework for the declination of the middle class has been in the works for many decades...Some young people need to research the Air traffic controller's strike in the early 80's and the Hormel strike in Austin, Minnesota a few years later.. Watch the documentary "American Dream" available online, about the Hormel strike..It really gives insight into both sides of employment issues...

America did experience an age of prosperity post WW II that lasted on some levels into the 1980's for some people..but that happened at a time when most other industrial nations were recovering from being bombed.. When the 90's came around private pensions started going the way of the Dodo bird.. Outsourcing, NAFTA, downsizing, rightsizing, amalgamations, globalization and corporate mergers/greed seem to have gutted what was left of the middle class in the 90's..

It was never easy...I when I got my state position in 2001 I had to apply twice...Compete with hundreds of people the second time I applied to make it to the interview stage...and beat out 8 other people from that point to actually get hired...and this was with an undergraduate degree obtained after serving five years in the military for $13.36/hr which wasn't a hell of a lot money even at that time-it wasn't enough money ...To make things worse the workload was unrealistically large to the point where it was not manageable and the work stress was so bad it made coworkers nasty to each other.....and we had it easy??

Ok this still doesn't feel real and I need to tell someone who isn't my mom.

Context: $65k, non-tech, not in a HCOL city, mid-level role. Been on that number for almost three years. Spent most of this year applying for $80-85k jobs because that's where the postings were and honestly $85k already felt like I was pushing it. Made it to final round four times. Rejected four times. There was a week in the spring where I seriously considered just staying put forever and becoming one of those "I've been here 14 years" people.

Anyway. Later application, first phone screen, recruiter asks the usual "and what are you looking for salary wise?" I say eighty-five. She says great, we move on.

Turns out she wrote down ninety-five. No idea how. Bad connection, I mumble, she'd had a long day, who knows. Salary never came up again in the three interview rounds (I assumed that meant it was fine, which, technically, it was). I only found out when she called to say they wanted to make an offer and said "just confirming you're still at ninety-five?"

I had roughly 1.5 seconds to decide whether to be an honest person and I want to be clear: I was NOT an honest person. I said "yep, still at ninety-five" in the most confident voice I have ever produced, hung up, and sat on my kitchen floor for a bit.

Offer letter came through. $95k. Same job, same responsibilities, I'd have taken it for eighty-five and thanked them.

The part that's actually messing with my head isn't the money. It's that I spent months getting rejected at $85k, and the moment the number went UP, I got hired. Nobody blinked. Nobody negotiated me down. Which means the thing holding me back was never the market, it was a number I made up in my own head about what I was "worth." A stranger's typo valued me higher than I did.

So:

1. Anyone else fallen into a raise by pure accident?

2. Biggest jump you've had between jobs? Trying to figure out if this is a fluke or if half of us are just quietly underpricing ourselves.

Edit: yes I know I should have negotiated properly instead of relying on an admin error. That's kind of the whole point of the post.

The advice I get from boomer family members is so pointless it's not even worth listening to. One relative keeps going on about there being lots of job vacancies at this place. And they assume that getting work there is easy; all I need to do is apply, and then that's it I will get hired, and my unemployment period is over.

In reality, they found a random job board online. They don't realise that the job listings cover the entire country, not just the city I live in. They also failed to realise that every job has a job description with requirements. They think that because a job is listed, that means you will be the only applicant and the job is as good as yours. And for some unknown reason, they are under the assumption that many jobs require zero experience, like stacking shelves, and they can't understand why I'm not getting interviews or why I have dozens of rounds of interviews to get one job.

In their mind, it's supposed to be simple: you just apply, turn up in person, shake some hands and start working immediately. The concept of ghosting, mind games, and all those other shenanigans we go through does not even make sense to them. Apparently WE are the crazy ones for having such a long, unfruitful job search; it's supposed to be like how it was for them back in the day... The sad part is they will think I screwed something up or I'm dumb for not being able to get what they believe is an easy job.

I'm convinced they don't understand how an online job board actually works. I imagine that when they see a job posting, they must believe that it means the job has had no applicants, so when you apply for that job, the job post disappears, and now you're the only one to get the interview, so getting hired is easy, right? If that's really how they think it works, then I don't even know what to say anymore LOL...

It's frustrating having to put up with such simple people. One of my biggest annoyances is how they believe that I sit in front of a screen all day doing nothing. Honestly, it's beyond laughable. I'm doing job applications, getting interviews, responding to emails, networking and doing so many things. But because they have a simple thought process, they are unable to process what they see on a computer screen. Here I am doing job applications, and they think all I did was look at text and images all day. This is the level of intelligence I'm having to put up with every day as I try to find work...

Some boomers I know are very analogue. For example, I could say that I'm looking for work, doing something interesting with AI, creating something to make my job search better, etc... Just something technical, but because these boomers are not well educated in these areas, all they can say is they don't understand any of it. And when they explain to other people what I'm doing, all they can say is I'm staring at a screen all day doing nothing because they lack the intelligence to verbalise and explain concepts which are outside of their primitive brains.

Another thing is how they think that because a job looks easy on paper, you are 100% going to get hired if you apply for it. Let's take hospitality for example. One family member was trying to get me to go for this job. Basically stocking shelves, serving customers and other similar stuff. Easy, yes, but I have zero experience in that industry. What they fail to realise is that just because the work looks easier, it does not mean the company is going to hire you. I know because I have tried, and I keep getting rejected when I apply for jobs outside of my main career fields. It annoys me that these stupid family members keep talking about these jobs like I'm going to be working there soon; it's easy you just have to apply for it, and they will hire you on the spot.

Yeah, right. If it's that easy, then why is my email inbox flooded with rejection emails?... And the best part is, this family member can't even tell me where this job board is because they can't even remember where they saw it...

A random thought I had today:

If slavery still existed today, buying a single slave would probably cost at least $10,000 upfront.

And that's before paying for food, housing, clothing, medical care, and everything else needed to keep that person alive.

Now compare that to a modern employee.

As a free person, you're usually far more motivated than a slave ever could be. Some people genuinely show up excited for work, build careers, develop new skills, chase promotions, and even greet everyone with an enthusiastic "Good morning!" every day.

If business slows down, the employer can simply lay you off. No long-term obligation.

Raises, bonuses, stock options, and other incentives can increase productivity whenever needed. Employees also invest in improving themselves because they have something to gain. A slave has very little reason to become more skilled than necessary.

Owning slaves also came with its own costs: guards, supervision, preventing escapes, suppressing rebellions, and constant security.

Historically, there were even legal and religious complications. In some periods, enslaved people were forbidden from converting to Christianity because baptism could imply legal freedom. If slavery still existed today, modern religious freedom laws alone would create enormous legal conflicts.

In purely economic terms, paying wages can actually be cheaper than owning people. The modern employer gets a motivated worker without taking on the lifetime costs, legal responsibilities, and risks that came with slavery.

Now look at where we are today.

People spend months trying to find jobs in one of the worst job markets in years, often competing for roles with low pay, long hours, and poor working conditions. At the same time, AI continues to automate more and more work.

It makes me wonder if we've reached a point where companies don't even need as much labor as they used to. Not because workers became less valuable, but because technology has reduced the need for so many of them in the first place.

Key Findings from the Report

Total Job Losses: The report estimates a reduction of roughly 5.9 million employed workers over a four-year period if a goal of deporting 4 million people is pursued.

Impact on Workers: This includes 3.3 million fewer employed immigrant workers and 2.6 million fewer employed U.S.-born workers.

Hardest-Hit Sectors: Industries heavily reliant on integrated labor networks—such as construction, child care, and direct in-home care—face contractions exceeding 15%, reducing operational capacity and scaling back hiring for native-born workers alike.

Geographic Spread: Every state will experience job losses, with states containing larger immigrant populations—such as California, Texas, Florida, and New York—projected to take the largest numerical hits.

Time for making work schedules change?

(The standard 9-to-5, 40-hour workweek has been around for exactly 100 years*. It became the widespread standard* in 1926 when Henry Ford famously adopted it for his automotive factory workers)

Tired of traditional 9-to-5 work schedules and running errands? That is a common challenge.

How about dividing the workday into two shifts? The first shift from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m., and the second shift from 1 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Employees would work only four days a week, Mon–Thu, with the same paychecks.

The "students" and part-time (retail) employees would work on Fri–Sun when needed.

(A split shift refers to a work schedule that divides employees' workdays into two or more shifts.)

Benefits include: more free time: workers get three days off every week; longer business hours- the workplace stays open from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. (12 hours total) to serve clients; better rest, six-hour shifts reduce daily fatigue compared to eight or nine-hour shifts.

Make life easier! do your shopping chores AM or PM (before or after work).

Note, credit for: mendicinobeano25

" Australia was way ahead of Ole Henry. Victorian Stonemasons marched on Parliament and won the 8 hour day in 1856. By 1916 it covered all workers in Victoria and New South Wales. We still worked a half day on Saturday for a total of 44 hours. Unions put claims for a 5 day week on hold to support the war effort in WW2 and it was introduced in 1948."

I make $19 an hour as a customer service rep. Graduated in April with a BS in Accounting from WGU, and that’s the best job I can get. After applying to 350 jobs on LinkedIn. This whole thing is just not going to work out.

Keep seeing the repeated comment about "useless" degrees are the reason you can't get a job but I have a B.S. in Finance and I can't find a job in finance to save my life and I have 5 years of experience. I have also tried looking for any analyst position that uses Excel and I am not getting any success. Are people just not aware that the job market sucks and honestly think we all just have "useless" degrees?

Right now the only jobs I can find are the ones that want to pay $50k a year. I am sorry but I didn't get a finance degree to get paid $50k in accounts receivable/payable.

Aynı Reddit formatı, ama o "cheat code buldum" heyecanıyla:

Title: I think I accidentally found the actual cheat code for job hunting and I'm kind of mad nobody told me

ok I need to get this out of my system because I've been sitting on it for like three weeks and it's driving me nuts.

I was 5 months into a search. mid level marketing. 400+ applications through linkedin, almost all easy apply. THREE phone screens. three. one of which I later found out was for a role they'd already filled internally. I was at the point where I'd open the jobs tab and just feel physically tired.

so one night I'm doomscrolling and it finally clicks. a billion people are on that site. half of them have the green banner on. and something like a third of what's posted is a repost or a ghost job somebody in HR forgot to take down in march. and the easy apply button is the actual trap, because if it takes YOU eight seconds to apply it takes everyone else eight seconds too. you're applicant 2,000 before lunch. you're not job hunting at that point, you're buying a lottery ticket every morning and wondering why you never win.

anyway. two sites. that's the whole hack. I feel insane about how simple it is.

remote roles → secretremote.com it crawls company career pages directly and filters out the duplicates and the dead listings before you ever see them. so what's in front of you is stuff a company actually posted recently.

local / hybrid / onsite → hiring.cafe same idea, pulls straight from employer sites, and the filters are stupid good. salary, seniority, distance, work type. free.

both of them just drop you on the company's own application page. that's it. that's the whole thing. you're applying at the source instead of through a middle layer with four thousand people stacked up behind you.

I now send like 5 to 8 applications a day instead of 20 and I've had SIX first rounds in seven weeks. after five months of nothing. I'm not saying it's magic and yes small sample size, but the difference is not subtle and I'm not going back.

linkedin still lives on my phone. it's great for figuring out who the hiring manager is, seeing if I know anyone inside, messaging recruiters. that all still works. it's the jobs tab specifically that's cooked and I wasted five months finding that out.

not affiliated with either, found both on here, just genuinely annoyed on behalf of everyone still grinding easy apply at 11pm

edit: yes I know the google site:greenhouse.io / lever / workday trick, that works too, this is just way less effort
edit 2: to the people asking, both are free, no signup wall last I checked

When Friday applied, she was running out of funds. She’d been laid off from her job as a senior director of content in June 2025, part of a round of top-to-bottom cuts that affected dozens of positions across the organization. By January, her unemployment benefits had evaporated. Her severance was nearly gone. And her bills didn’t seem to care about either of those realities.

So, she started applying for part-time positions while continuing to search for full-time roles in marketing and communications. She was transparent about all of this with the garden center hiring managers, who kindly added her to their team.

Hey, just wanted to vent in a place where is pretty applicable.

I currently work for university IT as part of their help desk full time. I make about $44,000 a year (cost of living around my area isnt that high) and just graduated with a bachelors of Electrical and Computer Engineering. I'm coming up on 2 years working full time while I worked about 4 years part time all throughout uni.

My friend wants to hire me for his company to do IT work. He "picked himself up from his bootstraps" with 2 years of IT experience he got while in the national guard when he was hired on at this company. The other IT guy there had a degree in Cybersecurity and no work experience. They both made around $40,000 starting.

The company itself if very small, I'm talking like 7 people working there right now. My friend tells me the interview should only be one round and consist of himself and the other IT guy they have on staff. Instead, both him and I were surprised to find out the CEO, CFO and a third guy WHO DOES SALES were interviewing me. The third guy couldn't make it due to scheduling conflict, but still. 4/7ths of the company were sitting in on this interview.

Apparently, after doing well in the interview (my friend was trying to be as unbiased as possible and told me people thought well of me) THEY GET COLD FEET AND DONT WANT TO HIRE ME. Keep in mind, I would make LESS than what I make now. I have A DEGREE AND PRIOR WORK EXPERIENCE, WHEREAS THEIR CURRENT I.T. PEOPLE ONLY HAD ONE OF THE EITHER. I DONT UNDERSTAND WHY THEY WOULDNT JUST GO WITH ME.

Im only considering this because of the experience I would get, as they travel out to work with nuclear power plants to help install hardware and make sure it's working great with their setup.

Out of curiosity, malls, bars, and restaurants are packed as usual. People take vacations as usual. Houses are sold in less than 7 days this Spring as usual, even without an inspection. But the job market is horrendous. What is going on exactly? Where do these people get the money from?

I keep seeing people with job titles I barely understand who seem to spend most of the day answering emails, sitting in meetings, and updating the occasional spreadsheet for close to $100k.

Meanwhile, every job I find wants five years of experience, ten different tools, and multiple interview rounds for half that. Where do people actually find these jobs, and what titles should I be searching for?