There’s a strange thing happening in the U.S. economy these days. Unemployment has been at its lowest in decades, and layoffs remain modest. However, people who are looking for work are having a hard time getting hired and it’s frustrating to send resume after resume and never hear anything back. What gives?
Business Insider says that despite a strong economy, employers are cautious about hiring more employees until they’re sure inflation is under control and that the Federal Reserve will eventually lower interest rates.
“It feels like the job market is in a bit of a holding pattern,” Daniel Zhao, a lead economist at Glassdoor, recently told Business Insider.
YouTuber Levi Flemming had fun with the frustrations many people experience while job hunting these days in a new video called “The Typical Job Search Experience. Painful.” In the video, Levi has to go through the daunting task of filling out applications on countless websites and then when he finally gets an interview, he has to go through the gauntlet of middle management interviews, only to be rejected.
The typical job search experience. Painful.
Like many job seekers, Levi began his journey on LinkedIn. “We need to make a LinkedIn profile, by the way. It’s like Facebook but more professional,” he says in the video with nearly 2,000 views. Soon, he was off to the races and mindlessly filled out job applications on Indeed, Workday, Monster, Glassdoor—the list goes on and on.
Why does the auto-populate never work on these sites?
“Got to create my 800th Workday account and I need to upload my resume,” he continued. “Drag and drop successfully uploaded, and the auto-populate didn’t do anything, so now we have to … manually enter the dates do you have at least 5 years of experience.”
And there are all the strange questions:
Do you have experience with C++?
Have you ever been terminated from a job before?
Have you ever stolen from your employer?
Have you ever committed terrorist acts against the United States?
Finally, Levi lands an interview that quickly turns into what feels like a speaking tour of the entire company.
“Hey, look these guys are actually going to give me an interview. Go through the first interview with the hiring manager,” Levi said. “Second interview with the boss’s boss. Third interview with the senior boss. Have to do this take-home written assessment that takes me 4 days to do—got myself a fourth interview with the junior director. A fifth interview with the senior director and now we’re waiting just waiting, waiting, waiting. Yey look, they finally emailed me back…”
And it’s a rejection letter—time to start all over again.
The video resonated with a lot of folks in the comments.
“Man! This is spot on. So much of my personal data floating around in company website job portals!” Jackbits6377 wrote. “Looking for work right now and the amount of tests I had to do for a f’ing customer support position was ridiculous. I just closed the application, lol,” NowayConway added.
“Painful to watch, yet so damn true…” Pastilance wrote.