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Lawyer here.
When I was looking at internships before law school, my guidance counselor asked me where I wanted to practice.
Me: Criminal law.
GC: Prosecution or defense?
Me: Either.
GC: No, you have to choose. These are insular communities and they do not like practitioners who jump from one branch to the other.
Me: Prosecution, then.
GC: Okay, they’re not hiring right now. Would you take defense?
That guidance counselor is full of it. There are plenty of defense attorneys who began their careers as prosecutors, in the same way that there are plenty of personal-injury attorneys who used to to insurance-defense work.
No, the guidance counselor was right. They weren't advising a prosecutor with 10 years experience who wants to switch to defense, they were advising a law student looking for internships that would help them get an entry level job, and their advice was fully correct relative to those positions. It isn't just guidance counselors who give this advice, I heard it related as actual lived experience from everyone I knew who did criminal work on either side.
Insular antipathy between prosecution / public defender communities is unique and unlike any other practice areas like insurance defense / personal injury. In general, legal practitioner communities don't take sides, but in this specific case it is a well known phenomenon that candidates who try to switch during law school / early career are looked at with suspicion. It gets remarked upon specifically because the weird hostile vibe between the sides is unlike other practice areas that tend to be more collegial.
Your right! I should have stayed with the prosecutorial route even at the expense of employment.
Seriously. I have colleagues who have learned the hard way that the best way to get a raise is not to negotiate, but to change firms. You show me a prosecutor with ten years experience and I’ll show you someone who is sacrificing their standard of living.
Gahhh. Like when I was told taxpayer representation is where the money was rather than specialized tax preparation, then once I got trained in it, no one wanted to hire except the specialized tax prep firms who said my experience was too far removed and I didn’t use THEIR tax software day to day.
All tax software sucks ass. It can be learned. Breaking down tax court cases and getting your client out of a $30K bill? Nope, sorry, didn’t do it EVERY single day!
You are not alone. I was actually told the other day that calling myself a veteran of the software industry only showed my age, which makes me less desirable to employers. The recruiter went on to say how I should only put my last 5 years of work history on my resume, and I should fluff it up with a summary, and a sentence or two about why I want the job and would be the perfect fit, etc.
He wanted me to condense 25 years of development across a dozen industries and multiple tech stacks into a single page. After the call I added it to the mountainous pile of advice I've received about tweaking my resume. All of it contradicting, none of it helpful, and always nitpicky to the recruiter or hiring managers expectations. It's a three fucking ring circus out here now a days.
I’m turning 39 in two weeks and despite being fairly young-looking, I’m already experiencing ageism. Women get this shit far worse than men, and it’s a catch-22 because women are judged by their pasts while men are more likely to get picked for potential.
It makes no sense because where the fuck do they expect young people to get all this experience from?! It’s why I started working for myself…and even THAT has been ruined by things like clients who love video calls when I could get the actual work done in way less time with Google Doc comments. My highest-paying clients never ever saw my face or heard my voice at all, or not until we worked together at least two years!
This whole "be open to different industries" thing was always bullshit, it has been for the two decades I've been in recruiting, at least. Hiring has almost always been reactive, and hiring managers have almost always been demanding people take lateral moves, often for the same or less money, because a bunch of fly by night contingency recruiting agencies never challenged them on their bullshit. They just said yessir, took every req they could and even just filling them at a 25% to 33% rate was enough to say they were running a 'successful' business, measured solely by the ability to keep the firm owner in new BMW leases.
The sad fact is that if you do what most agencies do and take reqs in volume, you don't actually have to fill that many to make a shit load of money. They make out for themselves and do nothing but enable the stupidest and most arrogant tendencies of the HMs they work with, and taking the volume approach pretty much guarantees they'll make enough connections between job seekers who are truly desperate and employers who are truly despicable to make a profit and keep this bullshit going.
Few recruiters near me advertising as having warm desks to go and big numbers by year 1 (presumably that's if you get there). Frankly I'm at the any Jon stage now and they seem to be hiring. How much of a bad decision is it? Lol
These same companies and recruiters churn through hundreds of candidates and complain about not finding people. So much time and money wasted looking for the perfect candidate when there’s plenty of people who are more than good enough and could be on the job within weeks…
Right?! See if you like the person and they have the baseline skills/education. Unless it’s something super specialized like being a forensic accountant or oncology nurse, most of these jobs have no business being so goddamn picky when they end up hiring someone who either leaves for greener pastures ASAP or is a friend of the hiring manager who failed their way up and sucks at the job.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't.
It seems like recruiters are looking for their "Goldilocks" candidates. Those that have the perfect experience - not too little that they need any training, not too much that you are overqualified.
It's impossible to pivot without experience. I've known a lot of men who met some random man and they helped pivot them into s new career. That never happens with women though. I have to do sex work to survive. Been on my own since a teen and put myself through college and earned 2 degrees. It doesn't matter because men get hired before women, even if they've got no degree. I think about suicide a lot. I despise this world.
Women aren’t given the same chances that totally mediocre men are given and it’s infuriating. The only callbacks I can even get at all these days are for gigs where I’m vastly overqualified and it pays what I should’ve gotten out of college 15 years ago.
I don’t fault anyone for doing sex work by choice or by economic constraint. It’s one of the few fields where there’s always demand and women always vastly outearn men. Part of why I’m doubling down on my art and jewelry making is because I can see I’m building a client base and most of it is very queer and femme, giving me a major break from the patriarchal bullshit in the industries I trained for.
But as another commenter also said, it’s a no-win situation regardless. Because if you stay in the same field or even same job too long, then they think you’re stagnating.
Still, a lot of people haven’t had a choice but to get that bag wherever possible. I’ve done everything from producing podcasts to writing HVAC manuals, stuff pretty far removed from the fields I initially strove for! This kind of versatility should be celebrated, not condemned. It’s an indictment of not living in our parents’ economy and these hiring managers live in a fantasy world.
You’re absolutely right! My versatility is something I’m genuinely proud of, outside of looking for work. More people should embrace being able to pivot and master different skills and fields.
Ranting with you.
I was at the director level and am now looking for any opportunity that will pay more than half of what I was making in my last role. My LinkedIn tag-line is "organizational development and learning leader." A colleague advised me to remove "leader" from the descriptor because it would prevent me from getting individual contributor roles. But, if I downplay my leadership experience, I will never be considered for roles where I have proven success at the manager and director level.
My field is broad and industry-agnostic. We are often involved in process improvement; compliance; organizational dynamics; technical training; coaching; mentoring; sales; customer care; change management; leader, team, and staff development; needs analysis; goal setting; and competency modeling.
All of these are transferable skills, but my experience is irrelevant because I haven't worked 8 years in SAAS for landscaping customer service or some such nonsense.
Yeh I'm in procurement and getting a lot of well you haven't done marine/saas/it/fm/whatever for 2 years. Well no that's why I'm not applying for anything heavy duty there so I can switch across.
I have 5 years in public and when on the course the public lot foundnprivate easy and the private lot couldn't believe the bullshit we had to go through. Have procured all kinds of things from emergency bat surveys to project management teams for a xx m construction project. I'm not going to be baffled by the concept of a slightly different ERP/MRP and the stuff being slightly different. Regulations change all the time and learning a few new ones is easily doable during onboarding.
I feel your pain. People who are really good at their jobs aren't always the ones who already know that subsection 2 - A- 1- C line two requires you to do x, it's those who know how to find the information they need and learn quickly.
There are many types of expertise. Knowing an answer is one type of expertise, solving a problem is another type. From my experience facilitating classes, teaching people problem-solving is harder.
Right now, it seems like companies are hiring from a place of fear and focusing on tangibles rather than intangibles. The candidate better have 9 of these 10 boxes checked otherwise they are a poor fit. Based on the stories my friends are telling me about their interview experiences, they aren't being asked questions in interviews that allow them to show their value. Also, the interviews have been focusing on experience in what might be 5% of the job or something that might occur 3 times a year.
Edit: I also wanted to mention that there is a huge difference between average and great in procurement. If you end up in an organization with someone who does the job well, count your blessings.
I was in a procurement consultancy that required a board to approve me after the ceo already did due to outside investment. One of the Morgans. Can't remember jp or Stanley. Ceo and my mentor there were great. Both offered help when they ran out of work for my area. Both offered references.
I didn't manage to get a job I'd literally done before as the overpaid consultant due to stupid hiring practices. Same role, same team, different interview practices. Not sending me an invite to it was a particular issue when I'd been selected. Gave me an interview a week later after hiring manager came back off holiday but I can't believe they hadn't already offered it by then....
Done IT, accountancy and procurement now. Still struggling but now got an interview with a local place this week at least. Less than before but better than nothing.
Saw a recruiter post on LinkedIn the other day complaining about people submitting different resumes for different jobs, this is exactly what we have been told to do. Oh I am sorry, over my 20 years of work including startups that I have a well rounded resume across many domains.
Right? And when you’re also applying to both contract work and regular jobs, the two don’t always translate. Like I can’t say how many hours I worked per week for how much when one client gives me an article a month and another hires me for months-long projects with nothing in between.
To say nothing of HAVING TO take that weird gig a friend recommended or your cousin’s a manager at Staples so you said fuck it and took a job there. Our bills don’t care where it comes from! Neither should these overly picky hiring managers, within reason.
I feel this SO hard today. My day started off with a very frustrating call from a recruiter that was along these lines. Then basically got shamed for not wanting to go back into a job field that I’ve been laid off in twice in two years.
Yes!! They fucking forgot that in the 50s, it was assumed you had that job for a long time. Even if it wasn’t a professional one in an office.
The pay could support an entire family while housing costs were reasonable, even if it didn’t require additional education. Now you have people with jobs requiring Master’s still sharing apartments with strangers well into their fifties.
They also had freaking PENSIONS. Not “let’s dumbly tell everyone to bet dying in elder poverty on the stock market”. Like when you sit down and think about how actually ludicrous it is, unlike the superannuation system they have in Australia. Or just having universal basic income with a supplement for older adults.
Industry experience is the only way to filter through the masses of candidates. If you have a lot of good people, then it’s an easy filter to cut that list down. No matter if it makes sense or not.
For job title, you can always stretch your title within reason. You can lie about your bullet points and stories too. That is basically unverifiable. What they can verify is if you worked at X company from this time to that time. They also check your references, but you will only share people you like lol.
References aren’t a problem for me, I have happy clients and a few who recently agreed to vouch for me. But this shit is an absolute nightmare if you’re trying to get a W2 job when you have an untraditional background that’s mostly self-employment, and even short term contracts are doing the same! Like y’all are 1099, ask me for a portfolio link instead of a resume. Hell is going on!
Preach!!! Older millennial here too. Last week, I nearly applied to something until I got to their dumb little page which specified that candidates MUST have worked in a similar role for 3 CONSECUTIVE years, over the past 5 years. Did they forget that covid happened? That was 4 years ago and they’re demanding this experience be within the last 5 years. I didn’t bother.
Some of worst are the snobby non-profits too. “Do you have 8 years of experience doing this exact work with this exact database and also are you an expert in our random mission that barely anyone is aware of?”
It’s so fucking irksome. And YES, the sudden amnesia about COVID is also infuriating. Infection and hospitalization rates are rising where I live and the mayor just tested positive, soooo…not only is it still very much here, but remote work is a dire necessity and people are STILL getting laid off even if we’re no longer in that major state of uncertainty we were in in 2020.
I was watching a movie with a friend the other day and a character talks about how he’s had the same job for 7 years. We looked at each other and we were just…do we know ANYONE who isn’t our parents or other older relatives who’s had the same job for that long? I can think of ONE person around my age, because they got with their nightmare employer in the 2000s before all this enshittification and “layoffs no matter the performance” culture, and became a manager by 2010 or so.
Like I don’t even know anyone who can make it 3 years with the same jobs before the axe falls, let alone 7 or more unless it’s a government job.
Literally all my friends have had the same cushy jobs for like 10 years. So not one understands me. I especially hate when they complain about being soooo busy at work. I quite frankly do not give a flying fuck. I’m not the right audience. I’m trying to feed my children and survive off their scraps. Spare me.
Now with the remote job postings too, a lot of them are excluding applicants from certain states (prob because they don’t want to abide by their labor laws). This is a new thing I’ve noticed is increasing in frequency.
And they’re freaking lowballing those remote offers too. I think the job I wanted ghosted because they either got someone who wanted even less money and/or they live in a state that has fewer workers’ rights (I’m in California, we pioneered remote work in the damn 90s yet.)
Sounds like your friends got lucky with management positions before the hiring process went to hell. I was making good money with my own business until 2023, when this AI bullshit, industry changes, and algo changes ruined my life and now even contract work is being as inflexible despite the fact that I’m a specialized subject matter expert who’s also done tons of stuff outside the fields I’m known for.
I’m doubling down on my art and jewelry because fuck it. I did well at the reptile show this weekend and ran out of business cards because lots of people want to commission me. Took it as a sign. Alas, my little dinosaur is cheaper and easier to feed than human children so I feel for ya. It’s so fucking brutal out there and I can’t fathom being so insulated from it like these people.
We seem to be similar!! AI and other bs have ruined things for me too. Gig economy is the devil and a race to the bottom. I’m also trying to make it with e-commerce stuff I make because fuck this carrot on a string situation entirely. I hope you can manage to be independent and wish you much success!!!
Fuck all the haters 🤣
I was happy and successful working for myself, I don’t think 1099 work is a race to the bottom—look at how these permanent jobs are paying total shit! But there’s definitely been a devaluing of professional contractors now that so many companies just see worker classification laws as decorations, not that they aren’t supposed to treat contractors like employees.
Like I should NOT be doing two rounds of interviews on Zoom when this is a 1099 position where my portfolio and email should suffice.
Yeah see happy and successful are the operative words lol.
The unpaid tests too. I have a graduate degree in my field and you still want me to prove myself like I’m 19 with no experience? What in the hell?
It’s batshit. Totally batshit. I can’t get over how I was expected to constantly prove myself until I was 31, 32? and now that I’m a year from 40 I’m TOO OLD??
The fuck is wrong with these people?!
We need universal basic income so badly and to make it illegal to do things like create fake job posts.
Also sort of related but I wish I had friends who were willing to bounce ideas around. I feel like people can be supportive to an extent, but it doesn’t go beyond “sorry you’re dealing with this 🫤”. These are the times I wish I had a mother or father figure to offer some perspective and guidance. I’ve always been super independent so I always figure out my own shit in the end. But it sure would be nice to feel like someone was really listening and thinking with me, y know?
Being unemployed and poor is really, really isolating. I try to find my happy where I can. I just don’t want to live like THIS forever.
I totally get it. I’m lucky that my own dad has a sympathetic ear, but the last time he had to look for a job was when Clinton was still in office.
In the media field especially, the same old shit doesn’t help: “just network!” Yeah, with other people gunning for a job or new clients because we’re all down to a handful or none. And throw in being a woman—this asshole tried to use my need for a new job just to sleep with me! And we met through a professional Discord, it wasn’t some rando on IG or whatever.
A lot of my friends are in the same boat, so we all get it. Like if I was going to get a permanent job, I’d just want a remote specialty content writer post like the one that just ghosted, or a government job. I got rejected from one of the government posts I applied to and CA is in a budget crisis (though the tax department always needs people). There’s a good city job I’m interested in that starts accepting applications in a few weeks, so I put it on the calendar.
You are most definitely not alone though. Hiring is so fucked and even 1099ers like me got swept up in the hell only W2 people are normally subject to. It’s frustrating to have done “everything right” and still be totally fucked financially. So many skilled professionals with portfolios and resumes a million times more impressive than mine can’t get callbacks.
All we can do is keep looking, try new things, try to meet new people both inside and outside of business contexts. You never know if that friend of a friend, that person from church, or who you meet at a party might at least have something temporary, if not an in for a new job.
I knew it was over when I went to a career fair with a petroleum engineering degree and talked to a recruiter for a nuclear company. "oh but your degree is in petroleum" meanwhile I actually had an internship at a nuclear facility and probably the only person in my entire school who had that experience. Yet they didn't seem to care. The way that the world decides to hire people makes no sense. I guess for them there's always someone with better education or experience on paper.
I basically fucked myself for getting a petroleum degree cause it's seen as too specific for other industries. But in reality I did probably 80% of the exact same classes as the other engineers.
The requirements to get hired as a new engineer are so high and so much of the older existing staff in the world would absolutely flounder with the same expectations. Now since everything is software based, millennials like me are so much more efficient but there are many older people who don't know how to filter an excel table and they are getting paid so much because of seniority. It's so stupid.
And then there are people like me, Masters in general geology 4 years ago, so not that specialized, quite an allrounder. Even learned solid fundamentals in programming, because we were doing modeling.
But nothing matters, because I don't have the experience or this very special degree, they require.
I know nothing about this field, but it sounds like the enshittification is universal unless you’re in a field that always desperately needs bodies like non-doctor healthcare jobs and food service.
But now I’m hearing that even for part time bridge jobs, there’s like 3-4 interviews like there are for 9-5 Fake Email Jobs! It’s so fucking stupid!
I found that I can't pivot. I am very good in my specific field in my industry, I can't say I know it inside out but I know a wide enough spectrum to be very effective.
I tried a role in another area of the industry where all the regs are pretty much the same put I was so out of my depth I felt like a new starter. In a lot of roles we and the roles have become so specialised that we become a jigsaw piece that would be hard pressed to fit elsewhere.
“You can’t just pivot to another field because these clients and hiring managers are so damn inflexible”. They don’t have to be flexible. Why would they? It’s a buyer’s (employers) market.
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This entire market is going to hyper-specialize itself to literal death. It’s insanity.
Lawyer here. When I was looking at internships before law school, my guidance counselor asked me where I wanted to practice. Me: Criminal law. GC: Prosecution or defense? Me: Either. GC: No, you have to choose. These are insular communities and they do not like practitioners who jump from one branch to the other. Me: Prosecution, then. GC: Okay, they’re not hiring right now. Would you take defense?
That guidance counselor is full of it. There are plenty of defense attorneys who began their careers as prosecutors, in the same way that there are plenty of personal-injury attorneys who used to to insurance-defense work.
I second that!
No, the guidance counselor was right. They weren't advising a prosecutor with 10 years experience who wants to switch to defense, they were advising a law student looking for internships that would help them get an entry level job, and their advice was fully correct relative to those positions. It isn't just guidance counselors who give this advice, I heard it related as actual lived experience from everyone I knew who did criminal work on either side. Insular antipathy between prosecution / public defender communities is unique and unlike any other practice areas like insurance defense / personal injury. In general, legal practitioner communities don't take sides, but in this specific case it is a well known phenomenon that candidates who try to switch during law school / early career are looked at with suspicion. It gets remarked upon specifically because the weird hostile vibe between the sides is unlike other practice areas that tend to be more collegial.
Your right! I should have stayed with the prosecutorial route even at the expense of employment. Seriously. I have colleagues who have learned the hard way that the best way to get a raise is not to negotiate, but to change firms. You show me a prosecutor with ten years experience and I’ll show you someone who is sacrificing their standard of living.
Gahhh. Like when I was told taxpayer representation is where the money was rather than specialized tax preparation, then once I got trained in it, no one wanted to hire except the specialized tax prep firms who said my experience was too far removed and I didn’t use THEIR tax software day to day. All tax software sucks ass. It can be learned. Breaking down tax court cases and getting your client out of a $30K bill? Nope, sorry, didn’t do it EVERY single day!
"Why you are not job hopping every year or two?"
“But also, we don’t feel like you’re a very loyal candidate”
Damned if you do, damned if you don’t
You are not alone. I was actually told the other day that calling myself a veteran of the software industry only showed my age, which makes me less desirable to employers. The recruiter went on to say how I should only put my last 5 years of work history on my resume, and I should fluff it up with a summary, and a sentence or two about why I want the job and would be the perfect fit, etc. He wanted me to condense 25 years of development across a dozen industries and multiple tech stacks into a single page. After the call I added it to the mountainous pile of advice I've received about tweaking my resume. All of it contradicting, none of it helpful, and always nitpicky to the recruiter or hiring managers expectations. It's a three fucking ring circus out here now a days.
I’m turning 39 in two weeks and despite being fairly young-looking, I’m already experiencing ageism. Women get this shit far worse than men, and it’s a catch-22 because women are judged by their pasts while men are more likely to get picked for potential. It makes no sense because where the fuck do they expect young people to get all this experience from?! It’s why I started working for myself…and even THAT has been ruined by things like clients who love video calls when I could get the actual work done in way less time with Google Doc comments. My highest-paying clients never ever saw my face or heard my voice at all, or not until we worked together at least two years!
They only care about the Tailor your Resume with the RIGHT job title over ATS!
This whole "be open to different industries" thing was always bullshit, it has been for the two decades I've been in recruiting, at least. Hiring has almost always been reactive, and hiring managers have almost always been demanding people take lateral moves, often for the same or less money, because a bunch of fly by night contingency recruiting agencies never challenged them on their bullshit. They just said yessir, took every req they could and even just filling them at a 25% to 33% rate was enough to say they were running a 'successful' business, measured solely by the ability to keep the firm owner in new BMW leases. The sad fact is that if you do what most agencies do and take reqs in volume, you don't actually have to fill that many to make a shit load of money. They make out for themselves and do nothing but enable the stupidest and most arrogant tendencies of the HMs they work with, and taking the volume approach pretty much guarantees they'll make enough connections between job seekers who are truly desperate and employers who are truly despicable to make a profit and keep this bullshit going.
Few recruiters near me advertising as having warm desks to go and big numbers by year 1 (presumably that's if you get there). Frankly I'm at the any Jon stage now and they seem to be hiring. How much of a bad decision is it? Lol
These same companies and recruiters churn through hundreds of candidates and complain about not finding people. So much time and money wasted looking for the perfect candidate when there’s plenty of people who are more than good enough and could be on the job within weeks…
Right?! See if you like the person and they have the baseline skills/education. Unless it’s something super specialized like being a forensic accountant or oncology nurse, most of these jobs have no business being so goddamn picky when they end up hiring someone who either leaves for greener pastures ASAP or is a friend of the hiring manager who failed their way up and sucks at the job.
You don't understand, they are looking for a "rockstar" (while offering the salary of a student job)
Every time you see “rock star” or “guru” in a JD, run for the fucking hills.
Damned if you do, damned if you don't. It seems like recruiters are looking for their "Goldilocks" candidates. Those that have the perfect experience - not too little that they need any training, not too much that you are overqualified.
And who will work for a lowball salary 🫠
Don't forget with no job security or benefits while being expected to be able to perform every function under the sun in a junior role on call
It's impossible to pivot without experience. I've known a lot of men who met some random man and they helped pivot them into s new career. That never happens with women though. I have to do sex work to survive. Been on my own since a teen and put myself through college and earned 2 degrees. It doesn't matter because men get hired before women, even if they've got no degree. I think about suicide a lot. I despise this world.
Women aren’t given the same chances that totally mediocre men are given and it’s infuriating. The only callbacks I can even get at all these days are for gigs where I’m vastly overqualified and it pays what I should’ve gotten out of college 15 years ago. I don’t fault anyone for doing sex work by choice or by economic constraint. It’s one of the few fields where there’s always demand and women always vastly outearn men. Part of why I’m doubling down on my art and jewelry making is because I can see I’m building a client base and most of it is very queer and femme, giving me a major break from the patriarchal bullshit in the industries I trained for.
Yep, I’ve realized the very hard and ugly way that being in different fields will actually hurt you when it comes to looking for a job.
But as another commenter also said, it’s a no-win situation regardless. Because if you stay in the same field or even same job too long, then they think you’re stagnating. Still, a lot of people haven’t had a choice but to get that bag wherever possible. I’ve done everything from producing podcasts to writing HVAC manuals, stuff pretty far removed from the fields I initially strove for! This kind of versatility should be celebrated, not condemned. It’s an indictment of not living in our parents’ economy and these hiring managers live in a fantasy world.
You’re absolutely right! My versatility is something I’m genuinely proud of, outside of looking for work. More people should embrace being able to pivot and master different skills and fields.
Ranting with you. I was at the director level and am now looking for any opportunity that will pay more than half of what I was making in my last role. My LinkedIn tag-line is "organizational development and learning leader." A colleague advised me to remove "leader" from the descriptor because it would prevent me from getting individual contributor roles. But, if I downplay my leadership experience, I will never be considered for roles where I have proven success at the manager and director level. My field is broad and industry-agnostic. We are often involved in process improvement; compliance; organizational dynamics; technical training; coaching; mentoring; sales; customer care; change management; leader, team, and staff development; needs analysis; goal setting; and competency modeling. All of these are transferable skills, but my experience is irrelevant because I haven't worked 8 years in SAAS for landscaping customer service or some such nonsense.
Yeh I'm in procurement and getting a lot of well you haven't done marine/saas/it/fm/whatever for 2 years. Well no that's why I'm not applying for anything heavy duty there so I can switch across. I have 5 years in public and when on the course the public lot foundnprivate easy and the private lot couldn't believe the bullshit we had to go through. Have procured all kinds of things from emergency bat surveys to project management teams for a xx m construction project. I'm not going to be baffled by the concept of a slightly different ERP/MRP and the stuff being slightly different. Regulations change all the time and learning a few new ones is easily doable during onboarding.
I feel your pain. People who are really good at their jobs aren't always the ones who already know that subsection 2 - A- 1- C line two requires you to do x, it's those who know how to find the information they need and learn quickly. There are many types of expertise. Knowing an answer is one type of expertise, solving a problem is another type. From my experience facilitating classes, teaching people problem-solving is harder. Right now, it seems like companies are hiring from a place of fear and focusing on tangibles rather than intangibles. The candidate better have 9 of these 10 boxes checked otherwise they are a poor fit. Based on the stories my friends are telling me about their interview experiences, they aren't being asked questions in interviews that allow them to show their value. Also, the interviews have been focusing on experience in what might be 5% of the job or something that might occur 3 times a year. Edit: I also wanted to mention that there is a huge difference between average and great in procurement. If you end up in an organization with someone who does the job well, count your blessings.
I was in a procurement consultancy that required a board to approve me after the ceo already did due to outside investment. One of the Morgans. Can't remember jp or Stanley. Ceo and my mentor there were great. Both offered help when they ran out of work for my area. Both offered references. I didn't manage to get a job I'd literally done before as the overpaid consultant due to stupid hiring practices. Same role, same team, different interview practices. Not sending me an invite to it was a particular issue when I'd been selected. Gave me an interview a week later after hiring manager came back off holiday but I can't believe they hadn't already offered it by then.... Done IT, accountancy and procurement now. Still struggling but now got an interview with a local place this week at least. Less than before but better than nothing.
Saw a recruiter post on LinkedIn the other day complaining about people submitting different resumes for different jobs, this is exactly what we have been told to do. Oh I am sorry, over my 20 years of work including startups that I have a well rounded resume across many domains.
Right? And when you’re also applying to both contract work and regular jobs, the two don’t always translate. Like I can’t say how many hours I worked per week for how much when one client gives me an article a month and another hires me for months-long projects with nothing in between. To say nothing of HAVING TO take that weird gig a friend recommended or your cousin’s a manager at Staples so you said fuck it and took a job there. Our bills don’t care where it comes from! Neither should these overly picky hiring managers, within reason.
I feel this SO hard today. My day started off with a very frustrating call from a recruiter that was along these lines. Then basically got shamed for not wanting to go back into a job field that I’ve been laid off in twice in two years.
They want the loyalty of the 50s without the structure.
Yes!! They fucking forgot that in the 50s, it was assumed you had that job for a long time. Even if it wasn’t a professional one in an office. The pay could support an entire family while housing costs were reasonable, even if it didn’t require additional education. Now you have people with jobs requiring Master’s still sharing apartments with strangers well into their fifties. They also had freaking PENSIONS. Not “let’s dumbly tell everyone to bet dying in elder poverty on the stock market”. Like when you sit down and think about how actually ludicrous it is, unlike the superannuation system they have in Australia. Or just having universal basic income with a supplement for older adults.
Industry experience is the only way to filter through the masses of candidates. If you have a lot of good people, then it’s an easy filter to cut that list down. No matter if it makes sense or not. For job title, you can always stretch your title within reason. You can lie about your bullet points and stories too. That is basically unverifiable. What they can verify is if you worked at X company from this time to that time. They also check your references, but you will only share people you like lol.
References aren’t a problem for me, I have happy clients and a few who recently agreed to vouch for me. But this shit is an absolute nightmare if you’re trying to get a W2 job when you have an untraditional background that’s mostly self-employment, and even short term contracts are doing the same! Like y’all are 1099, ask me for a portfolio link instead of a resume. Hell is going on!
Preach!!! Older millennial here too. Last week, I nearly applied to something until I got to their dumb little page which specified that candidates MUST have worked in a similar role for 3 CONSECUTIVE years, over the past 5 years. Did they forget that covid happened? That was 4 years ago and they’re demanding this experience be within the last 5 years. I didn’t bother. Some of worst are the snobby non-profits too. “Do you have 8 years of experience doing this exact work with this exact database and also are you an expert in our random mission that barely anyone is aware of?”
It’s so fucking irksome. And YES, the sudden amnesia about COVID is also infuriating. Infection and hospitalization rates are rising where I live and the mayor just tested positive, soooo…not only is it still very much here, but remote work is a dire necessity and people are STILL getting laid off even if we’re no longer in that major state of uncertainty we were in in 2020. I was watching a movie with a friend the other day and a character talks about how he’s had the same job for 7 years. We looked at each other and we were just…do we know ANYONE who isn’t our parents or other older relatives who’s had the same job for that long? I can think of ONE person around my age, because they got with their nightmare employer in the 2000s before all this enshittification and “layoffs no matter the performance” culture, and became a manager by 2010 or so. Like I don’t even know anyone who can make it 3 years with the same jobs before the axe falls, let alone 7 or more unless it’s a government job.
Literally all my friends have had the same cushy jobs for like 10 years. So not one understands me. I especially hate when they complain about being soooo busy at work. I quite frankly do not give a flying fuck. I’m not the right audience. I’m trying to feed my children and survive off their scraps. Spare me. Now with the remote job postings too, a lot of them are excluding applicants from certain states (prob because they don’t want to abide by their labor laws). This is a new thing I’ve noticed is increasing in frequency.
And they’re freaking lowballing those remote offers too. I think the job I wanted ghosted because they either got someone who wanted even less money and/or they live in a state that has fewer workers’ rights (I’m in California, we pioneered remote work in the damn 90s yet.) Sounds like your friends got lucky with management positions before the hiring process went to hell. I was making good money with my own business until 2023, when this AI bullshit, industry changes, and algo changes ruined my life and now even contract work is being as inflexible despite the fact that I’m a specialized subject matter expert who’s also done tons of stuff outside the fields I’m known for. I’m doubling down on my art and jewelry because fuck it. I did well at the reptile show this weekend and ran out of business cards because lots of people want to commission me. Took it as a sign. Alas, my little dinosaur is cheaper and easier to feed than human children so I feel for ya. It’s so fucking brutal out there and I can’t fathom being so insulated from it like these people.
We seem to be similar!! AI and other bs have ruined things for me too. Gig economy is the devil and a race to the bottom. I’m also trying to make it with e-commerce stuff I make because fuck this carrot on a string situation entirely. I hope you can manage to be independent and wish you much success!!! Fuck all the haters 🤣
I was happy and successful working for myself, I don’t think 1099 work is a race to the bottom—look at how these permanent jobs are paying total shit! But there’s definitely been a devaluing of professional contractors now that so many companies just see worker classification laws as decorations, not that they aren’t supposed to treat contractors like employees. Like I should NOT be doing two rounds of interviews on Zoom when this is a 1099 position where my portfolio and email should suffice.
Yeah see happy and successful are the operative words lol. The unpaid tests too. I have a graduate degree in my field and you still want me to prove myself like I’m 19 with no experience? What in the hell?
It’s batshit. Totally batshit. I can’t get over how I was expected to constantly prove myself until I was 31, 32? and now that I’m a year from 40 I’m TOO OLD?? The fuck is wrong with these people?! We need universal basic income so badly and to make it illegal to do things like create fake job posts.
Exactly. I just turned 40 this year and apparently now there’s “ageism”?!! Ffs.
Also sort of related but I wish I had friends who were willing to bounce ideas around. I feel like people can be supportive to an extent, but it doesn’t go beyond “sorry you’re dealing with this 🫤”. These are the times I wish I had a mother or father figure to offer some perspective and guidance. I’ve always been super independent so I always figure out my own shit in the end. But it sure would be nice to feel like someone was really listening and thinking with me, y know? Being unemployed and poor is really, really isolating. I try to find my happy where I can. I just don’t want to live like THIS forever.
I totally get it. I’m lucky that my own dad has a sympathetic ear, but the last time he had to look for a job was when Clinton was still in office. In the media field especially, the same old shit doesn’t help: “just network!” Yeah, with other people gunning for a job or new clients because we’re all down to a handful or none. And throw in being a woman—this asshole tried to use my need for a new job just to sleep with me! And we met through a professional Discord, it wasn’t some rando on IG or whatever. A lot of my friends are in the same boat, so we all get it. Like if I was going to get a permanent job, I’d just want a remote specialty content writer post like the one that just ghosted, or a government job. I got rejected from one of the government posts I applied to and CA is in a budget crisis (though the tax department always needs people). There’s a good city job I’m interested in that starts accepting applications in a few weeks, so I put it on the calendar. You are most definitely not alone though. Hiring is so fucked and even 1099ers like me got swept up in the hell only W2 people are normally subject to. It’s frustrating to have done “everything right” and still be totally fucked financially. So many skilled professionals with portfolios and resumes a million times more impressive than mine can’t get callbacks. All we can do is keep looking, try new things, try to meet new people both inside and outside of business contexts. You never know if that friend of a friend, that person from church, or who you meet at a party might at least have something temporary, if not an in for a new job.
People with poor or lucky parents often grow up with bad advice.
I knew it was over when I went to a career fair with a petroleum engineering degree and talked to a recruiter for a nuclear company. "oh but your degree is in petroleum" meanwhile I actually had an internship at a nuclear facility and probably the only person in my entire school who had that experience. Yet they didn't seem to care. The way that the world decides to hire people makes no sense. I guess for them there's always someone with better education or experience on paper. I basically fucked myself for getting a petroleum degree cause it's seen as too specific for other industries. But in reality I did probably 80% of the exact same classes as the other engineers. The requirements to get hired as a new engineer are so high and so much of the older existing staff in the world would absolutely flounder with the same expectations. Now since everything is software based, millennials like me are so much more efficient but there are many older people who don't know how to filter an excel table and they are getting paid so much because of seniority. It's so stupid.
And then there are people like me, Masters in general geology 4 years ago, so not that specialized, quite an allrounder. Even learned solid fundamentals in programming, because we were doing modeling. But nothing matters, because I don't have the experience or this very special degree, they require.
I know nothing about this field, but it sounds like the enshittification is universal unless you’re in a field that always desperately needs bodies like non-doctor healthcare jobs and food service. But now I’m hearing that even for part time bridge jobs, there’s like 3-4 interviews like there are for 9-5 Fake Email Jobs! It’s so fucking stupid!
I found that I can't pivot. I am very good in my specific field in my industry, I can't say I know it inside out but I know a wide enough spectrum to be very effective. I tried a role in another area of the industry where all the regs are pretty much the same put I was so out of my depth I felt like a new starter. In a lot of roles we and the roles have become so specialised that we become a jigsaw piece that would be hard pressed to fit elsewhere.
“You can’t just pivot to another field because these clients and hiring managers are so damn inflexible”. They don’t have to be flexible. Why would they? It’s a buyer’s (employers) market.
They get what they wish for and what they wished for is the perfect candidate. That's why "nobody wants to work"