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From college to dating to jobs, no one in history has been rejected more than Gen Z
This is an interesting article about the trend of mass-applications that has become increasingly normalized across many areas of life. If you've applied for a job in the past decade or so, you'll know that the signal:noise ratio is very bad, and as such you're kind of expected to mass-apply to dozens or hundreds of jobs. Each job will get bombarded with something like 1000 applicants in the first few days, and while many of those applicants will be junk, there will probably be at least a few dozen high-quality candidates that you're competing with. This has led to companies becoming extremely picky. In my specific area of tech, its led to an expectation that you need to do dozens of hours of "leetcode", which are little toy problems that are ostensibly used to make sure you actually know how to program, but which actually do a terrible job at this because real programmers will usually be somewhat bad at these, while people who grind leetcode but know little else can do quite well. There's also a further expectation that you might be asked to do other ridiculous feats like have 8+ rounds of interviews for an entry-level position, and you might be ghosted at any point in this process, even after you've interviewed with real people. Heck, you might even be ghosted after you've received and accepted a formal job offer, then if you show up to work the company will just lie and say they have no idea who you are. While there's theoretically some recourse by suing for promissory estoppel, it's almost never worth the effort so it rarely happens. The accepted answer is "that's just part of the game now, swallow your pride and move on".
Dating, and to some extent college applications are also like this. Young people live in a world where they constantly have doors slammed in their face. While I think a little bit of rejection can be good to build resilience, I doubt humans are psychologically well-equipped to handle the barrage of rejection that's become commonplace. Getting rejected hurts even if it's just a small annoyance from not receiving a response. It makes you feel like you're being treated like garbage a little bit, which would almost certainly prompt some amount of nihilism after a while. It might also lead to some amount of risk aversion. I myself simply refuse to deal with online dating at all, which has dramatically limited my romantic options. But if dying alone is the price required to remove this nonsense from at least one aspect of my life, that's a deal I'd gladly take.
I graduated with a Masters in 2020.
I’m now 41 and still work retail.
I have 22 years of retail management experience.
The amount of no’s I’ve received is in the thousands.
I don’t even believe entry level positions exist - I’ve never seen one. No idea why I got a Masters.
My idea was that ‘ hey my experience and this degree will mean I’ll be making 6 figures in a few years. LOL
Applying for jobs is bad, but not that bad. When I was applying for my first real jobs in 2017-2018, I had about a 10% conversion rate to first-round interviews. Even if you have 1/10th of the level I had, you should still get several interviews per thousand applications, and that's pretty conservative. If you're not even managing that, there's a good chance there's something fundamentally wrong with the way you apply.
There’s clearly something off about me that prohibits me from finding a new career in some way … and possibly with the way I apply of course.
I’m just at a loss and stuck in retail for now.
It’s not literal Hell - I can probably be a store manager if a Dillards in 5 years and that’s six figures … but I just feel the need for more.
I wouldn't blame you for wanting more, as I've never heard retail to be a particularly wonderful sector to work in. There's probably a lot of that vague existential dread that you're "missing out" in some way when you've worked a job you don't want to for decades.
I don't know what sector you're applying to, but I'd be open to further conversation if you want tips applying to places, or for a second person to look over the resume you're sending. For the record, I work tech in a smallish DC financial lobbying firm.
No pressure to take me up on it or anything.
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