What Hiring People Get Wrong

After more than a year of job searching, I discovered an awful contradiction that too many choose to ignore.

Let me start with the good news: I might be close to an offer. Sure, it’ll be a lot less money than I made in technology—but it’s still better than trying to write for a living. The most important benefit of landing a job, any job, is that I can call off the goddam search (at least for a while).

Let’s get real: Applying for white-collar jobs in 2025 sucks. If you’re gainfully employed or independently wealthy, consider yourself lucky and definitely don’t try to take jobs from the rest of us, or I’ll scream at you like the guy in the photo above. Stay right the fuck where you are and be happy.

The core issue with hiring—beyond the ever-increasing length of the average hiring process—is that to be successful, a candidate often has to show up as if he’s ready to go from day one. He has to conform and adhere to rigid standards at the expense of substance or originality.

The candidate has to play a game whose rules are set almost entirely by the hiring team. This includes the length, quantity, and quality of interviews, whom the candidate has to speak to (or which “boss” they have to defeat in order to move to the next stage), which exploitative task, puzzle, or test they have to complete, and so on. Every mistake can result in game over for the player, but the game masters can be totally incompetent, lazy, inconsistent, and/or abusive with near-zero accountability. The biggest mistake a player can make is to merely question the rules.

It’s not a fun game. Assuming the position is filled at all (which is far from a given these days), there is only one winner, and even the runners-up come away with nothing more than vague feedback—if they get that much. No payment for the player’s time and trouble or reward of any kind. I didn’t even get the promise of preferential treatment once for coming in second or third seven times in seven months. (Yes, this really happened.) Was I skipped to the front of the line the next time a similar position opened at any of those seven companies? Nope. At best, I was invited to reapply. The message I received: Better luck next time, sucker.

While I’m encouraged by the recent attempts at conciliation by recruiters on LinkedIn—intended to placate the shrieking masses of desperate job seekers—I consider it more PR than substance. Don’t get me wrong: I like most recruiters. I have had a few truly dreadful ones who could “fuck up a cup of coffee”—to quote Nicky Santoro from Casino—but I consider some I’ve worked with in the past to be friends because they went the extra mile (and were open to hearing me vent on an industrial scale). But change is hard, and most recruiters and hiring teams reflexively avoid the unhappy path, which often includes going that extra mile I mentioned. In short, the people in charge want guarantees not projects. Sometimes, though, a project pays off the most.

To non-sports fans, this analogy may be lost on you—but consider Major League Baseball, which is heating up again. Every July there’s an amateur draft—think NFL or NBA Draft but with a lot less fanfare — and most of the players drafted are multiple years away from stepping on a Major League diamond. In fact, many of them will never make it to the big game at all, but this is beside the point. The point is that 30 Major League clubs are willing to invest millions on high schoolers (in some cases) based on how they project to perform 4–5 years later. Incredible, isn’t it?

By contrast, almost every job I’ve applied for—seemingly ever—demands that the candidate be ready to perform immediately with minimal training, little-to-no professional development, and no five-year plan. In fact, I’ve been told not to ask about any of these things during the interview process because it’s often considered a “red flag” to hiring teams that a candidate would dare give a fuck about his future at the company or otherwise.

Let me bring the point home: How is a job candidate supposed to enter the hiring process fully developed and ready to go if no one bothered to give him a chance in the past? This is the central contradiction in hiring that no one wants to address. Yes, I know that (overpriced) colleges and universities exist, along with trade schools and other training programs—but this kind of experience is often buried on a resume and for good reason: Employers don’t care. Everyone has a degree, a license, and/or certification these days (or so they think). Employers want that coveted direct and highly specific experience that is not only difficult but impossible for some to get without giving their labor away for free while calling it “freelancing.”

How did we let this happen in a supposedly free society? How did we cede so much power to our corporate masters while expecting so little in return?

It’s all a game, and it’s a miserable one. The most desperate of us might even prefer to test their luck at Squid Game. Even if you find yourself on the winning side, just wait until your clueless CEO decides to build his own equivalent of the Metaverse with the profits that your hard work and sacrifice bestowed upon his spoiled, rich ass. When it flops and he lays you off for “poor performance,” or something of the sort, I hope someone on LinkedIn blithely suggests that you “start your own company” while you’re downing six packs of cheap beer just to keep yourself from screaming as you mechanically submit resumes to the all-powerful, unforgiving ATS gods. You’ll get it then.

In short, unless we’re in the CEO throne or close to it, we’re all fucked. Let’s admit it now so that we can start a proper resistance—one that goes beyond shitposting.

I’ll be (impatiently) waiting, like a disgruntled job seeker, for you to wake the fuck up.