This will be quite a long post, but I have some steam to offload to a community that hopefully understands and shares my experience. I am currently in university and about to graduate. I have been applying for jobs back to back and the jobs that did call me back, told me that I was unfit for the role. Let me give you some background.
I am currently a marketing student and I applied for a role as a Communications Analyst at a nice company in the City. I had the interview a few days ago, and they emailed me yesterday morning to inform me that while I was engaging and I knew my subject well and I was a great contender, they felt that I was better suited to marketing than communications because they wanted to hear me talk about other content outside of social media – which I would've done if the question was clear to me. When I read that sentence, I must admit I definitely wanted to cackle. Communications is an underlying body of marketing literature – literally the study of business-consumer communications, as well as other things of course (as marketing science is interdisciplinary). They are integrated for a reason, so reading that sentence made me feel as though they needed to find something they weren't comfortable with about me and that they wanted someone who fit the paper bill to the letter. I am tired because, I think somewhere deep inside, I was expecting this as I've been to engaging, fun interviews only to be told later “Oh, your interview was great but we don't think you'd be good for xyz…”. I was genuinely shocked when I realised they decided I wasn't fit for the role because…I didn't answer one question to their liking. One. Like, am I incapable of simply, learning an answer? They always say stuff like “we like someone will willingness to learn” or some shit then do this! I literally feel like I am in the twilight zone.
I have taken so, so many courses, internships and employability classes and added to resume and cover, and actively worked on making myself more employable along with being predicted for a First. I really thought it was me, that maybe I had been doing something wrong. So I messaged my friend and asked her about how she got her role as a marketer in a global company, and she told me that she applied for hundreds over the course of a few weeks and only one responded – where the interviewer was aggressive (and admitted to me that she thought she'd bungled it) only to have him call her half an hour later to inform her she got the job. This story is similar to most people I've asked in my life.
I am so exhausted, I literally don't know what to do next. The whole process of interviewing is where I fall, but it's about me and my personality and I feel like I have to put on a performance or Stanislavsky-level method acting to impress. There are people who are so extroverted, who know how to game the system and play up the character the hiring managers are looking for. I don't know if I'm wrong, but I get the feeling that many HR people want someone who fits the bill on paper and don't actually give a fuck about who the person is. How many people have HR managers turned away only to realise (or not) that they turned away someone who could've been amazing at the job? The role I applied for requires in depth knowledge of current affairs and politics – which I most certainly have and they knew that – that's the reason they responded to my application at first. I knew I would've loved the role and would've been excellent at it, but because I didn't answer one question for them how they'd wanted it – they turned me away. I have many stories like this one. As I get older, I realise that life isn't as simple as it was to me when I was a teenager. I had such a streamlined view of my way to a good post-graduate job, and now I am unsure and shaky. There was a recruitment person that turned me away because they said the examples of 4 characteristics they were looking for that I gave weren't as strong as others – and that was when I realised that the real test of this interviewing process is confidence. Confidence enough that if you were lying, they'd believe it. They get the role and are worse at it but someone they turned away with the skills to actually do the job because they're too anxious and stutter when they're put on the spot. I feel so resentful when I see people I know are less qualified than me get the role and makes me feel that recruitment don't actually care about picking the best candidates, they simply look for great talkers who answer all their questions in the way they've imagined in their heads and if they don't like your answer you're gone – as if people are incapable of learning. Maybe, that's some unconscious thing, maybe it is conscious – but regardless, no one can say with a straight face that recruitment like this is the best and most efficient way of picking people. Even when searching for job roles, you filter the search to entry-level roles specifically, and you'll still get roles that say “1-3 years of experience required/preferred”, like huh? I know I'm not fucking stupid, that is not an entry level role! I even had to google this and I read somewhere that they do this to increase the exposure of the listing. They want you to have 3 years of work experience under your belt just to empty bins of banana peels and microwaveable oatmeal and run coffee errands for senior team members. The recruitment process is already so dehumanising, having to perform for these strangers that examine you like a piece of cardboard, reducing you to letters on a page and answers in an interview, for the job at which you get taxed half your fucking income and still come to work to put out more value in productivity than they pay you. Selling my labour and having to go above and beyond for so fucking little. I have dreams of reading poetry in the Italian countryside and writing in a French provincial cottage, or reading Korean folklore and myths in seclusion. It's very sad, when I see how much people work for so little and are expected to grateful for it – and at this point, I'm not even sure what it's all for. I am 21 now, retirement age in the UK is around 65 (and the government are looking to increase it) – am I supposed to work my entire life like this? That is 44 years I am expected to work (assuming I do retire at that age and stop working), and still I am expected by society to raise a family and have kids? We are all being robbed blind of our individual purposes and the right to explore them, right under noses, with our eyes still wide open and no wool over them. The idea that I will be working for someone else to stew in wealth most people will never see until I take my last breath is soul crushing and I would never wish such a lack of purpose on anyone. That's the main thing, isn't it? All this, just for some investor somewhere to buy a painting so tremendously ugly that you wonder how it's even considered art, for more money in my entire road of properties, using the art to stash money in some shell company in the Cayman or Panama. All so that some rich person somewhere can eat caviar and buy fine wines, or even purchase all the drugs and sex workers they want, so that they can live in luxury paid for by the labour of their workers. This subreddit is very profound for me, to see that there are people out there who aren't brainwashed into believing in this treacherous late-stage capitalist dystopia is amazing. To acquire wealth so mammoth, that you face chronic disillusionment and on the verge of an existential crisis because of the sheer fact that you can do nothing forever. All this, so that someone somewhere can pretend to be cultured and gloat to their equally shallow social circle about sending their kids to the best schools, while donating to the school for charitable causes cough cough*.*
I think I might pursue post-grad studies as I am a scholar at heart, because the job recruitment process is set up to ensure that the people they hire aren't hiring the best, only the most confident and verbally self-assured. It shouldn't take this much effort – so people have spent so much money, put themselves in life-long debt they will never pay off, time and effort to make themselves more employable only to be told they aren't good enough for a role they would happily train someone else in. I wonder sometimes what employers even want from candidates. Pigs to fly? “Tell me about yourself”, will that help me do my role better? (This question in particular makes me nervous because I don't really understand what the purpose of this is supposed to mean.) Do they expect some robotic, concise answer or some free flowing conversation? I have social anxiety, and my words get stuck and my throat closes up, sometimes to the point I can't breathe properly and I have to stop to compose myself. Then I start worrying and playing all these questions in my head because I don't know what they expect from me. That is not fair, nor is it right. I think I will end this post here, or else I might never finish it. I would like to hear everyone's responses.