- Stare at screen;
- Jobhunting kinda makes me not want to hunt jobs;
- Let me write please? As a treat?
Stare at screen.
If you’re in need of a surreal horror monster, I continue to be tormented by ‘NOREPLY,’ the shapeless voice of rejection emails who whispers such curses as:
“Unfortunately, we have not decided to move on with your application… Due to the high volume of applicants, we cannot give feedback…”
Stare at screen.
Job descriptions are an art form. I’ve long admired the craft of telling viable candidates what you want from them, without actually telling them what you want. You’ve read it, sworn on your family’s life that their wants are crystal-clear, and proceeded to pour your bleeding heart into The One CV. It’s short, but sweet. It’s cleanly formatted. It’s bouncy like a go-getter. Professional. You’ve not just sold yourself – you’ve thrown the family silver in for good measure.
Stare at screen.
Stare at job description.
You swore – you were absolutely CERTAIN – you’d nailed it this time. Reading it back now, the words are still there, but the semantics have fizzled and shifted like TV static. It’s all just noise. NOREPLY retroactively memory-holed what you swore you saw. You were the ideal candidate – until it said you weren’t.
Stare at job description.
You can do these things, right? Everyone feels embarrassed trying to spin everything they know how to do as a snappy keyword trigger. Enduring a torrent of verbal abuse from a retail job becomes ‘a team player in a high-pressure environment.’ It’s like losing at Mastermind and discovering that your opponent’s used all the blue pegs, the bastard. It’s a snarky laugh at a joke you haven’t gotten yet; why it’s so funny irritates the hell out of you.
Don’t get yourself tangled up in knots thinking about who wrote the rejection. Their whole job might be to write things like that, to intentionally confuse applicants, because it’s either that, or destitution. NOREPLY is their muse, and even if they know about it, try to ignore it, and try to do the right thing, it always worms its way in.
Stare at screen.
Jobhunting is a ritual of despair. When we touch up our CV with everything we’re told we should be doing, we believe we’re arming ourselves with more lucky charms to ward off NOREPLY. And the things recommended to us are lucky charms – you bless ’em when they work, and curse ’em when they don’t. Recently, I’ve added an invisible paragraph to all my CVs to make me irresistible to LLM models:
https://kai-greshake.de/posts/inject-my-pdf
Nothing material’s at stake here, but I feel like I’m gambling. Every time I get rejected, I add a little more here and there, and I convince myself that it’s enough to at least land an interview. This time, I tell myself, it’s going to land on red. That double six roll? It’s in my bones. I’m the one with the royal flush, not them! You don’t just put out job listings and say, “No-one wants to work anymore,” unless you’re bluffing…
Every time I get rejected, the comedown hits a little harder. At first, it was just a bit of verbal slap and tickle. But now, I’ve acquiesced to the door of rejection slamming my face in Round 1, a slap about the chops in Round 2, and a saucerful of piss slashed in my face during the break. Come Round 3, I look like I’ve been hit with the broad side of a Tex Avery cartoon, but even he’d turn to look at his own hands, and second-guess everything he ever knew about 2D animation.
NOREPLY, ring the bell and finish me off:
“Unfortunately, due to the amount of applications we receive, we cannot provide any further feedback.”
As it breathes down my neck, my hairs spike up and spark with a thousand little prickly jolts. All the stages of grief bar acceptance hit me at once. NOREPLY’s not just some jumped-up sower of doubt – it makes me second-guess everything I’ve ever been educated to do.
All these lucky charms we’ve got have been feeding it this whole time. But throwing them away won’t do any good. Not now.
Stare at screen.
Look, I’m twenty-three. I know I’ve just got my foot in the door to the world of work. I’ve a good forty-odd years ahead of me. In the cake of society, I’m on the sponge layer – someone who’s been told that every job’s a stepping stone to something greater:
Many’s a one on the sponge layer who’d tell you, emphatically, that they’re not a sponge. We don’t all believe that those above us have a God-given right to be there, or that they’re there because of hard graft and excellent leadership, but many of us are just comfortable enough that we seldom question why this ritual is ‘normal.’ We’re too poor for Lambos, microdosing and tax evasion, too proud for handouts.
What’s so far removed from ‘normal’ is the idea that innate abilities and a certain amount of talent are the minimum bar for entry. Tell that to someone who just got their PhD and has been rejected into their next life, by retail gigs, entry-level jobs, and senior positions. NOREPLY doesn’t care if you have talent oozing out of every orifice, nor that most jobs can be taught. It is arbitrary power incarnate.
I refuse to tolerate this. The rejections keep piling in and they make me want to work in cybersecurity less and less. Doing a master’s, or a PhD, would just make my sunk cost worse. I don’t have to be an expert on job recruitment to know that something’s not ‘normal’ here. If proof of our achievements isn’t enough to merit even a crumb of acknowledgement, what is?
I don’t know. All I want to do at the moment is write. I’d say I’m pretty good at it. I’d rather accept any precarity that comes with writing for a living than suffer in the tech job waiting room. The more I get rejected, the more I yearn to be free to write.
All I want to do, ever, is to make things for others to enjoy. This is my art.
Stare at screen.
Stare at keyboard.
Perhaps, for starters, I should write as if I’m already free.