Well, it’s that season again—time to boot up Handshake, brush off your résumé, and submit yourself to the unstoppable forces of capital that govern our society. Those summer jobs and internships aren’t gonna wait for you, so you better make room in your busy schedule for a few hours of job hunting and cover letter writing. For students of all walks of life, especially graduating seniors, March and April means job application season, and here’s why they’re awful.
Modern job applications are a uniquely terrible experience where you must prove yourself to a series of HR managers and bureaucrats so that they can judge your value to the company. For our Baby Boomer grandparents, a job application might have been as simple as walking down to the local ice cream parlor and showing the manager that you could add, subtract, and put on an apron. Now, however, applicants must prove “a history of singular customer service, a unique ability to enhance operations, and a proficiency in astrophysics and quantum mechanics.” While the actual demands of service jobs have changed little in the past decades, applicants are expected to have more qualifications for relatively lower pay.
Applying for jobs is much like a job in and of itself. Increasingly, applicants must distinguish themselves against the competition, requiring them to specifically tailor their resume to each company they apply to. That’s not to mention writing a cover letter, which subjects you to the humiliating experience of professing your deep passion and interest in the company. And for the excessively detail-oriented, this process often adds up to multiple hours per application, not to mention the time spent trying to figure out the company’s outdated application website, or the time spent resume-rewriting for redundant employment history questions.
After all this work, you’re only partly finished. Now, you must pray to your god that the company deems your application worthy of a response. Oftentimes, you’re not going to hear back because HR doesn’t see it fit to dignify you with a clear “No.” Instead, you’re left in anticipation while the hope in your heart slowly withers and dies. This is the most frustrating aspect of job applications, especially in the era of generative AI, where all hiring managers have to do is give ChatGPT a prompt to tell unworthy applicants to go away. Sometimes this Irish goodbye strategy even occurs after you’ve personally spoken with HR in an interview, adding another edge to that insult.
Speaking of interviews, they’re quite an inhumane process when you really think about it. You are brought before a stranger (or two or three), equipped with nothing but a nice shirt and a memorized line about a challenging experience. In front of this tribunal of staring eyes and false smiles, you divulge your life story and answer what are usually meaningless riddles and formalities. Worse, this might only be the first of a series of interviews, and there’s no consolation prize for second place if you’re not hired. This is a system seemingly designed to waste as much human life as possible.
Despite all this, people still manage to get through the circus of job applications. Unfortunately, if you’re hired, you now have to work, which is a whole other thing. To everyone who has endured this process, I admire your fortitude of will and strength of character, and you deserve more than you get. Keep in mind these words from musician Bobby Conn: “You’re never gonna get ahead giving [it] to the man.”
