The Grind

If I traveled back in time to explain to a college graduate the current process of searching for a job, I’d sound Orwellian. The amount of molds one must contort to fit in today just for a chance after graduation can feel suffocating, compounded by the stress of affording to live on your own. Need I mention the political or environmental state of the globe?

I’m putting off job applications just to write this now, but I’ve been bothered by this strange feeling for a while.

It’s a feeling I get when I’m listening to current professionals talk about their experiences post-grad. Listen: I’m thankful for the career resources and opportunities my university provides, and happy that standout alumni and friends-of-professors and the like have been successful in their professional paths. There’s just an eerie thing about almost every one of their success stories.

Their stories are missing struggle. They’re missing the grind of applying to a new internship or job everyday. They’re missing post-interview “thank you” emails, strategic LinkedIn moves, or the constant tailoring of resumes and cover letters. They’re missing a certain kind of desperation that feels taught today—that’s literally embedded in course syllabi the closer you eek toward graduation. 

But they are never without random, “it just so happened” twists of luck. They’re ripe with fortuity. And in the stories that take place in the media during certain years, say the 2000s, seem to be teeming with opportunities that have all but evaporated at this point in time. That’s a whole other thing. 

When AI software doesn’t detect the right codewords in your resume and trashes it before you even close your browser, it’s very easy to blame tech for the inhospitable air of applying to jobs. While tech does afford some conveniences of the process, like video interviews that connect people all over the world, those same affordances can get easily abused: ask a twenty year old how many one-way video interviews (the ones where you record the sum of a 20 minute audition tape of yourself) they’ve completed only to never hear a word from that employer again. Though it’s not just the technology that makes the process feel cold. Consider the video interviews in which the employer’s eyes are glossed over as they fire off standardized questions with the kind of monotony that tells you they’ve already found the candidate they’ll hire.  

It’s hard not to take it personally, even when the process is impersonal. When you’ve jumped through every hoop you were told to—you’ve bought the proper collared button-up and the office appropriate shoes, you’ve exuded confidence and reliability and the strength of a leader, you’ve smiled and appeased and even rehearsed—only to not make it, you’re left with the pitiful, “What did I do wrong?” rattling in your head. If you’re anything like me, you’re vulnerable to critiquing every move you made or every awkward thing you might’ve accidentally let slip. It’s just one other demeaning part of the rat-race. 

While there should be space for some objectivity, I think it’s the genuine connections between person to person that make the hiring process exciting at the most, and bearable at the least, but those true connections feel far and in between. 

Bleakness may be normal… but then, what kind of normal is that to accept and live in?