the hunt
applying to jobs in 2025
I am freshly post-grad. Okay, technically not “freshly,” since I officially graduated in May, which makes me… seven months post grad. Alright, definitely not fresh. But far from stale. My sell-by date hasn’t been passed yet, shall we say. No need to toss me in the rotten pile yet. But the date is approaching. I’d love to say that by Dec 31st, I’ll have been picked by the hiring gods and not have to enter the new year in my home town wearing sweatpants and clinking champagne flutes with my parents. That really is nightmare material. Yet, the way things are going now, I’m starting to wonder how avoidable that outcome really is.
Does a college graduate expire like a forgotten fruit? The months after graduating truly felt like being shot out of a canon, as it should, so I’ve been told. I finished my classes— no more homework, for life! I got a shiny official diploma from a highly esteemed private university— creds to junior year high school Tori for pulling that one off. I have many positive relationships with some incredible professors, some of whom may even be receiving this here writing piece in their inboxes! Hello, my very valuable and “guaranteed job-securing” trojan family! Where are you are all located in the world? Apparently we’re 500,000 members going strong.
I didn’t line up a job for myself before graduating. It wasn’t really something I even considered, although I guess it’s the “way” for many people. While “in college,” I focused on being “in college,” and all that that entailed. Especially leading up to my senior spring, which was spent studying abroad in Spain. I wanted to retain the freedom to stay abroad for as long as the fun continued, which lining up a job back in the states would not allow me to do. Accordingly, over time while in Europe some of my American friends dropped off the euro-train one by one as their summer/early fall job demanded them to be back. I stayed right up until my visa ran out and I had to return state-side, hitching a ride from Helsinki, Finland to New York City baby.
Ahh, New York. The American air hit me hard. But I cracked my knuckles, pulled up my boot straps, and stomped off that plane with vigor. I felt fit and enlightened. And newly aligned with an exciting career path to pursue. Something in my brain came online in the months between graduation and my arrival back home, and suddenly, for the first time, I knew exactly what job I wanted. Thank God! Now, with my travels out of the way and my USC credentials backing me, I could get started with the rest of my life.
The Smiths sing, “I was looking for a job, and then I found a job. And heaven knows I’m miserable now.” If you know the feeling, you know. The employed envy the unemployed, and the unemployed envy the employed. With passion. So I am most definitely the latter.
Hi, I’m Tori, and I’m a LinkedIn-aholic. Ironically during my first 2-3 years of college I was a hard-core LinkedIn hater. That is still somehow putting it lightly. I thought LinkedIn was the place where free creative souls went to die. I saw it as the digital version of the Severance office. I found it super uncanny how best friends, who I knew to strictly refer to one another as “cunt” and communicate only in 2x speed incomplete sentences, would comment “Congratulations, ____Full Government Name___. Well deserved.” on one another’s posts. I felt actually angry at LinkedIn and everyone who used it. I hated the spare white user interface, I hated that it made job-searching into a corporate, competitive, advertised arena. I felt really holier-than-thou about the whole thing. I’d never have to resort to climbing through that strange sanitized jungle.
Boom, flash forward basically one year, and I’m putting hours into this goddamn charade. I’m making posts talking about my job history made up several skinny paragraphs, I’m following CEOs, I’m cleaning up my bio and header, I’m making regular trips to the job search engine. There’s nothing more disturbing to an unemployed person’s spirit than seeing an interesting prospective job listing and reading “Posted 1 week ago - Over 100 people clicked apply.” Do you apply anyway?
Business Insider published an article two weeks ago with the subject line “Applying to a job in 2025 is the statistical equivalent of hurling your resume into a black hole.” What an encouraging read! The author of this story writes about a laid-off VP of talent acquisition at a media agency who applied unsuccessfully to 300 positions in 2024 and now works as a grocer so her daughter can keep taking ice-skating lessons. “I just want to work,” she says. Business Insider calls what’s happening right now “market congestion,” which I guess has something to do with a decrease in white collar jobs, an influx of eager, highly skilled workers, and a ridiculously efficient ai-fueled resume/cover letter submission machine. The applications-to-recruiter ratio is now 500 to 1. Where people used to have to scour over the newspaper and mail-out a printed, manually written application, now we have “suggested jobs” emailed to our inboxes on a weekly basis (if not daily basis) and our computers lets us feign a personalized cover letter in two dainty clicks. Thanks Chat GPT! You’ve saved me so much time. It’s just so great when a bunch of suuuuper smart big tech people come in and drop a technological-advancement nuke on the world that supposedly makes everything way easier and comes with absolutely no user manual.
So, when faced with the black hole, do you turn away? To apply or not to apply.
“Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them.”
I don’t mean I’m going to kill myself if I don’t get employed (but hey, if saying that means you’ll hire me then shoot that’s what I mean), but when you’ve been basically unemployed for 7 months, things can get Shakespearean pretty easily. Is it nobler to quietly hurl your life force distilled in a pdf into the void over and over and consider this process to be an unfortunate but unavoidable quality of our shared current landscape, or to just throw your hands up and justifiably crash the fuck out. Hey, can the 99 other people applying to those jobs I want just like, stop? Please?
Coming back to LinkedIn. I have been repeatedly advised to connect with people whose work I’m interested in and ask for informational phone calls. Not only do you learn useful insider-info but if their company has an open position down the line, you can request a referral. A sweet side-outcome is I’ve actually met some really great people that now I can consider a friend.
In one of these calls, a new friend / employed peer / one of the chosen few is empathizing with me. He’s like, “Yeah, I completely understand what it’s like, I remember it very well. You’re hunting the job sites day after day, researching competitors, on the hustle like crazy, all while you’re doing what, like 50 LinkedIn reach-outs a day?” In my head I think 50??? and take a second to let that software program update install and then say “Yes, that’s exactly what I’m doing.” Then I got the LinkedIn Premium trial to have unlimited cold-messaging approval and if you’re reading this and you’ve received a brown-nosey dm from me I apologize, but I wouldn’t be surprised because statistically speaking I’d estimate that I have reached out to about 1/5 of the people in the entire world.
So, it goes. I just want to work!
“I was looking for a job… and then I found a job. And heaven knows I’m miserable now!”
