Surviving job hunting hell

This Is Uncomfortable January 15, 2026 Transcript

Note: Marketplace podcasts are meant to be heard, with emphasis, tone and audio elements a transcript can’t capture. Transcripts are generated using a combination of automated software and human transcribers, and may contain errors. Please check the corresponding audio before quoting.

Reema Khrais: Hey everyone, I'm Reema Khrais and welcome to This Is Uncomfortable.

I’m very excited to be back in your feeds, it’s been a while, and before we get into this week’s episode, I just want to share, in case you haven’t heard already that we’re starting something new with the show. We are now weekly. So each week we’re going to bring you a new episode, pretty much all year round. More conversations, more stories about money and how it shapes our lives and our relationships.

You know, with everything going on right now, I just want this to be a place where we can be in conversation more often, and try to learn from each other and make sense of our financial lives together.  

We’re still going to share intimate personal stories, but we’re also going to bring on more experts, people who can help us think through our relationship with money and what’s happening in the economy.

To hear more of this new version of This is Uncomfortable, be sure to check out the other episode we released today that’s in your  feed. It’s called “How much money is enough?”

But for this episode…I want to get into something that you’ve been sending us messages about, which is job hunting and just how hellish it feels right now. 

Darcy: Hi this is Darcy, I’m calling about job hunting and my complaints. Most of the job postings seem to be fake. I also have been very frustrated by how long it takes people to get back to you if they get back to you at all. I just feel like there’s like a general lack of respect for applicants.

Aitza: Hi my name is Aitza. I have been quite frustrated for almost 6 months now that I have been actively looking. And I haven’t had any luck. It’s quite frustrating to see something that matches your profile, you can get the interview and still be told no. “Oh you’d be such a great fit,” but someone’s always a greater fit.

Caleb: Hi my name is Caleb Traxler. I graduated recently, and I’m now trying to find a job in the current job market. Overall, I've applied to 350 jobs in the past month and received nothing. My student loan grace period is going to end in about 6 months. 

Adriel: Hey I’m Adriel. January 3rd is when I got let go, 2025. And financially it’s been ridiculous. After getting evicted, I stayed in a hotel for two weeks, then I went to a friend’s house and I stayed there for like a month or two. Emotionally it feels like the end, like I’ve reached my limit.

Amy: Hi I’m Amy. I’ve been ghosted between rounds of interviews and finding that even multiple personal referrals aren’t a shoe-in like they used to be. So to my fellow job seekers out there, keep going. We’ll get there.

Khrais: Those calls came to us through our TIU hotline: 347-RING-TIU.

It’s brutal out there. Hundreds of people applying for the same role, interviews with AI chatbots, scam postings left and right. But I think something we don’t always talk about when we talk about the job search is how the process can worm its way into your head. 

How weeks or months of rejection, or just flat-out silence can shake your confidence or make you question who you are without a title attached to your name. 

So today we’re talking about how to get through job hunting without losing your dignity or your sense of self in the process. 

To that, I’m joined by career coach Phoebe Gavin. Phoebe is a pro at helping people refine their job hunts and figure out what they actually want out of their next gig. Hey, Phoebe!

Phoebe Gavin: Hey, Reema.

Khrais: And I'm joined by writer Rachel Meade Smith. Rachel edited the book Search Work: a Collective Inquiry into the Job Hunt. She also runs the popular job opportunity newsletter, Words of Mouth. Hey Rachel!

Rachel Meade Smith: Hi, Reema!

Khrais: So first off, how do you make sense of all the bleak things you’re hearing right now about the job market?

Gavin: I, I think the contract between workers and employers has been broken. It's been in decline and been degraded significantly over the last 60 years, pretty much in line with the decline of unions. And the ability for employers to use the power they have in the dynamic to exploit candidates has gotten more and more and more and more as it has become easier to swap one person out with another, and it is natural for people to feel like they are less than human if it is so easy for employers to treat them as if they are.

Khrais: Yeah, as if they're disposable.

Gavin: Mm-hmm.

Khrais: Rachel, in your book you talk about how like, hard numbers, like unemployment rate or the new job creation rate don't really capture the reality of job hunting right now. What are those numbers missing?

Smith: Well, I think the ground is really shifting under our feet right now. So people who may have been looking for a job two years ago, um, and were getting interviews, getting responses, were maybe able to choose between a few offers are now confronting something totally different, which is that there's this sense that there's really not the kind of opportunity that there was before. So there are fewer and fewer listings. There are more and more and more people applying to those fewer listings. So you're hearing back less and less. There's also this, this sense of kind of inhumanity that now is just threaded throughout the process. So you mentioned scams. There's ghost jobs, which are jobs that don't exist really, but are posted anyway.

Khrais: Well, why wait, real quick? Why does that happen? Ghost jobs?

Smith: Oh, Phoebe, do you know more about this?

Gavin: I am like the one person who doesn’t believe that this is real.

Smith: Really?! There's, there's been…

Gavin: I have had, I, I have had so many conversations with actual recruiters, hiring managers, HR directors, like, people who have no reason to lie to me, like we're friends, and I cannot get a single human being to say, “yes, we have done that.” There was this one survey that was done by a, uh, I wanna say that it's like ZipRecruiter or something like that. 

Khrais: Yeah.

Smith: That’s what I was reading.

Gavin: And when I looked at the actual methodology for the survey, it was terrible. And it is unsurprising to me that it got as much traction as it does, as it did and as it still does because it's enraging, the idea of it. Um, but one of the findings in the survey was that the reasons why they were doing it were to increase employee engagement, to make the company look more profitable than it actually was. But those are not actually effective ways to do those things. But they are things that cost recruiters and hiring managers and HR teams lots of time. And so it costs money to put those jobs out there. And so I don't actually think the Ghost Jobs thing is real, but what is real is jobs that get posted that are real, but are kind of, they already kind of have somebody in mind. That happens all the time. 

Smith: First of all, this is why you always have to read the methodology section. But second of all, the fact that it's not real doesn't help the people who think it is real… 

Gavin: Exactly.

Smith: …and are getting more and more distraught, being like, why would I even bother?

Gavin: When people end up in my virtual office as a career coach asking me like, how can I tell if there's an internal candidate, or how can I tell if there's a ghost job – it's this desire to have some sort of agency over the process so that we can feel some level of control over this thing that is huge! Not being able to pay your bills because you've been laid off and you've been grinding at this application process for six months and you still haven't gotten there. Anything that will make you feel like you have a semblance of control is worth trying to grab onto, even if it is not real.

Khrais: Yeah. Well, Phoebe, when people are coming to your office and they're saying like, your virtual office, and are saying, “I've been applying for months. I keep getting rejections, I feel dejected,” what advice do you give them?

Gavin: So I go at it from two levels. I go from the emotional identity level. Like how does this interact with how you see yourself and how, what emotions are showing up for you in this process? Is any of that interfering with the process? And then from a very, very tactical perspective, we do an audit of the job search to understand how they are approaching every single stage. Because often I'll find that people have diagnosed the problem incorrectly. That “Uh, I need your help. Phoebe, can you help me redo my resume? I'm getting to the, you know, the mid stages and then I just like, lose out on these opportunities.” That's not a resume problem. The only job the resume has is to get you a callback. If you are losing out in the middle of the process, then we actually need to look at your interview process. So a lot of folks are not prepared to look at all of the moving pieces in a job search and figure out where they actually do have agency, where they might be able to actually do something a little bit differently and move the needle. And so that's why it is so important to not do this alone because someone who's outside of you, especially if they have some higher experience hiring experience, is gonna be able to do a better job than you might be because of the identity things and emotional things that are tied up, helping you understand where you actually do have control. But there are still going to be a lot of things that are outside of your control.

Khrais: I wanna dig a little bit more into the loneliness aspect of it. Rachel, in your work you've called job hunting, “one of life's loneliest activities.” Which is very real. How have you seen that isolation and the shame show up in the stories that you've collected?

Smith: Yeah. Well, I think for one thing, there's this huge stigma with job hunting, despite the fact that we know that most people are doing it on some level at all times. It's like this universal thing that is somehow incredibly stigmatized. But I think that, you know, one reason why this is so isolating is because we're doing it alone. For the most part, most of us are doing it alone. And in doing it, we are trying to distinguish ourselves from everyone else. Why are we are different, why we should be, um, held up above the rest, instead of acknowledging that we're all actually in the same cohort that we are peers, we come to see people as our competition. Then we either get rejected or we get ignored, so obviously we're feeling incredibly separate, incredibly alone, and also unworthy. 

Khrais: Yeah.

Smith: But there hasn't been any kind of community built around this process, and there are no ways for us to really do it with each other. That's, you know, part of the, the normal way of doing this. And so I think like one salve that I think about with this is, not just getting a new job that's gonna fix the pain, because oftentimes that does not make us feel less alone actually, um, but it's to build community in and around the job hunt itself, so that even if it does take a year, we can come out of it and say, “my God, it took a year to find that job. Or it's a been a year and I don't have that job, but I have these three new friends who I met in, you know, a job search group or an unemployment walking club, or something like that.” You can take something away from it that might not be the job, but that is community and that's what really can kind of bolster us when we don’t have anything else.

Gavin: My first layoff, I was laid off with a group of people, and we had a WhatsApp where we were talking to each other about sending each other opportunities and checking in on each other and taking care of each other, 'cause we were all in the same boat together. There was no shame because we all knew that company treated us like trash. And so we were all angry about it. And so we had a place where we could be angry about it. There was shared vocabulary around it. Um, and one, the only good thing about these mass layoffs that has been happening so far is that over the last couple of years is that people are able to have community in this experience with people who really understand, because we're, you know, all 10,000 of us are in the same boat. And so, you know, the entire team got laid off. And so we're all in this together. Um, a lot of people don't have, I was about to say the “benefit.” 

Khrais: Aww.

Gavin: A lot of people have the, the built in, uh, community when, uh, if something like that happens on their own, or if they're still in a role and they have that fear of, you know, my employer, I can't have my employer find out that I'm looking, um, that they, the idea of finding community feels inherently risky, not just to their identity, but actually to their livelihood. But it is, we solve problems better as humans when we solve them together.

Khrais: Mm-hmm. You're right. We, I feel like we've turned job hunting into a private crisis, even though it's very common, as both of y'all have said, and yet it's one of the least shared phenomenons, I think, of people actually expressing what that process is like for them. And then I, you know, I wanna also underline something you said, Rachel, that I think about a lot, which is that, you get rejected and I feel like so often what hurts even more is like the story you tell yourself afterward. Like it's not just, I wasn't fit for that role. It's like, oh, I don't have what it takes. Or like maybe something about me is unimpressive. I feel like job hunting could become a referendum on your identity, and I'm curious how often y'all hear that sentiment.

Gavin: I hear that every single day in my virtual office. 

Smith: I was gonna use those words. Exactly. Yeah. 

Gavin: Literally earlier today, I had someone crying about that.

Khrais: Oh, because they just got rejected and they were like, what does this say about me?

Gavin: Yeah, she was a very experienced, uh, person working in the beauty industry, had a lot of really great experience, got laid off by a major beauty company, and then, um, has been looking for six months and has had a ton of interviews and gotten to the final round on bunch of them, and then, which is almost worse, to get to the final round and then not get chosen over and over and over again. Uh, and we started talking about that a little bit, and she burst into tears like, what does this mean about me? That I'm never actually good enough for the offer. And we had to work really hard to help her reframe that these are things that are actually, is actually the opposite. It means the opposite thing. The fact that you have gotten this many interviews and you've gotten this far means that you're actually applying for the right jobs and you are qualified for them. We happen to be in a difficult market where there are a lot of people who are also competing for those same roles. That doesn't mean that you're not good enough. If you weren't air quotes “good enough,” you wouldn't be getting those callbacks at all, and we would be looking for ways to change the way that you're showing up to the job market or changing some of your job targets. Like you're doing everything right.

Khrais: Right, right. But I get how, like, going through that process and basically commodifying, condensing yourself into a list of bullet points into a resume, and then being told that it's not good enough when you've… 'cause I think we're not conditioned to market ourselves in those ways. Right?

Gavin: Especially women, people of color, neurodiverse people, like the more, the more marginalized identities you occupy, the less likely you are to have a significant experience and or comfort level with pushing your own narrative about how great you are, even if you're really, really, really great.

Smith: So the book that I just edited, put together, it was composed from pitches and we got 1100 pitches for, from people who wanted to write about the job hunting experience because it was something that, you know, they didn't feel like they had had venues to talk about before. And one person just spoke really simply about imagining everyone who had read her resume or her cover letter and decided she wasn't good enough. Like how vulnerable that was to just think about these people like reading about her on a piece of paper or more likely a screen and just saying “no,” and like what they must have thought of her. And you know, of course it's, it's so not personal in that way, but how can you not consider it to be personal when you're putting like, all of the details that you consider important about you on the page and someone is saying no. I mean, it's like, Phoebe, you're absolutely right, like, it's so not a referendum on your worth, but it absolutely feels that way when you're, you know, putting it all out there on the page and then being like, you know, we don't want you. That's the response.

Gavin: I mean, there is an answer to that question, and there's two answers to it. First is that you practice not thinking about that. You… If you find that your inner critic has decided that today's narrative is going to be that you're not good enough, then practicing very intentionally saying: “This is not how I wanna see myself. This is not how I want to think about myself. I have value, I am valuable.” Really, actively in your brain, challenging those thoughts is a way of training your, literally training your brain to think differently. 

Khrais: So hard but so real!

Gavin: The first few times you do it is gonna feel ridiculous and it's not gonna work. But the more you do it, the more it becomes a natural instinct where you don't even have to choose to do it. That voice shows up and you immediately give that counter narrative, and then that voice gets softer and softer and softer. Now it's still a difficult situation, and so the voice is still going to come, go up, but we don't want it to be where you are at an absolute captive to all of the horrible things that your inner critic is saying to you.

The other thing that helps you get out of that is developing a personality outside of your profession. If the all you do is work, if the only people you spend time with are people that you are coworkers or former coworkers or other people in your industry, then it's gonna be very difficult for you to feel like you have value if something's going on with your career. Now, for a lot of women, the other thing that they go to to find value is some sort of caregiving. And so if that's you, you still need to develop a personality, get a hobby, don't monetize it. Just do something for fun that is just for your own enjoyment and that is going to help you see yourself more broadly than just your profession or just your caregiving responsibilities.  

Smith: I actually have something to add, which I feel like, I feel like it feels really obvious and almost trite, but it is so important, and I know that from experience, you know, my hobbies have thrived during my job hunts, yes, because I have sometimes more time, although the job hunt is incredibly time intensive, but also because I need that: I need to be able to see something that, again, I'm in control of that can make me feel good, that's giving me positive feedback when I'm either getting bad feedback or no feedback from the rest of the world.

Khrais: Yeah. 

Gavin: It’s super important. And it's important to remember that the only entity that benefits from your entire identity being built around your job or your profession are the companies that profit off of your labor. No one else benefits from you defining yourself that way. Whatever is underneath the passion or the mission or the, or the values, or the curiosity, or the delight that comes from the work that you do, that is the part that is you. The profession is not you. The profession is the thing that capitalism asks you to do, so that somebody with a lot of money can make more money.

Khrais: After the break… Advice on how to deal with everything from nosy loved ones…

Gavin: These sorts of questions are actually very difficult emotionally, and I don't want our relationship to suffer because we have difficult conversations.

Khrais: To venting on LinkedIn…

Smith: You have to know what's gonna play and what's not on that platform. There are rules.

[mid roll]

Khrais: Welcome back to This Is Uncomfortable. I’m talking with career coach Phoebe Gavin and writer Rachel Meade Smith. And for the second half of our show, we’re going to do something a little different. Producer Alice Wilder is joining us to share some hypothetical scenarios.

Alice Wilder: Hey y’all. Okay, we’ve got some scenarios, and we want to hear your advice. So here’s the first one: Say you were fired from your last job, and you're hunting for a new one, and a lot of people in your life just keep asking you why you're unemployed. What do you tell them?

Gavin: I have an entire lesson in my course library that is specifically about unhelpful loved ones. It's like 30 minutes long. Um, but the shortest version that I can give you is to say, “I appreciate your interest and your care about me and wanting to know what's going on with my job hunt, but these sorts of questions are actually very difficult emotionally, and I don't want our relationship to suffer because we have difficult conversations. Would you mind if we don't talk about this anymore and at all? Uh, and if we do, just know that I'm gonna change the subject.”

Khrais: Dang, straightforward. I love that. Yeah, I have a friend who is job hunting right now, and the other day we were hanging out and I was like, do you, what's going on? Like, what's the latest? Do you wanna talk about it? And she was like, no, I don't wanna be in a bad mood today. And then it was great. We just shifted the topic. How about you, Rachel? What advice would you give to someone?

Smith: Well, I'm not sure I could improve upon Phoebe's. Um, but I would say there are times when people who are unemployed and struggling are gonna wanna talk about that probably. You know, there's, sometimes people just need a release. They need to vent, they need to talk about this crappy thing that happened in an interview. And then there are times where, like your friend, like they just really don't wanna talk about it. So I think just setting boundaries is really important and knowing who you can turn to for which kind of conversation.

Khrais: Mm-hmm.

Gavin: You made a really good point though, that sometimes people do want to talk about it, and it kind of goes back to what we talked about at the top, that there's so much shame about this. And so if someone in your life, someone that you know and care about is between opportunities, you can proactively reach out to them and say, “I am available if you want to talk about stuff, if you want to send me a, a resume or a cover letter,” And that is a very different thing from randomly at brunch: “So, how's your job search? Can you afford this mimosa?”

Khrais: Right, right, Oh God.

Gavin: Be the person who reaches out to those folks, and just letting them know that you are available so that if that is something that they want, whether it's in the moment or in the future, they know they have your consent to receive that.

Wilder: Okay, so here's our next hypothetical. Say that you learn a friend is applying to the same job that you really, really want. How do you handle that? Like do you tell them? Do you not? How do you keep that from hurting a friendship?

Smith: Oh yeah. You tell them.

Gavin: What kind of friendship are we talking about?

Khrais: How close are we?

Smith: You guys should gamify it, you know, see who can get farthest. I think this is where you have to put relationships above the job. And as long as you can agree to be supportive of each other no matter what happens, um, I think both people should, you know, support the other in pursuing the opportunity. And if not, then I, I'm not sure what kind of friendship it is.

Khrais: Yeah. That's fair.

Gavin: Yeah, that's definitely why I ask what kind of friendship are we talking about here? Because your instincts around that relationship are gonna tell you whether that is safe to do or not, 'cause it might not be. And if it is, then go super hard on it. Like, here's, I had the interview on this day and I talked to this person.

Khrais: Oh, interesting! 

Gavin: And these are the things that we talked about, like make it to where you are doing everything you can to make sure that one of you get that job.

Khrais: But what if it makes the other person feel bad to share all those details?

Gavin: That's why you gotta kind of check in on the relationship.

Khrais: Yeah.

Smith: You set expectations ahead of time. Up front.

Khrais: Read the room. 

Gavin: Yeah. So, you know, if I think about sort of one of my very best friends, if we ended up in that situation, there's no question that that's exactly how it would go down. That there we would have a shared Google Doc. 

Khrais: Comparing notes!

Gavin: Um, but there are other people in my life that I can think of right now where I care about them. I think they care about me, but I could see that situation playing out in a less supportive way. And so calculate it based on, you know, how much is in the relationship bank and what kind of track record that you have. But if this is somebody who you're really close to, if this is somebody that you can trust, try to turn it into something where you're both trying to make sure one of you gets that job.

And the, one of the biggest challenges in the job search is the asymmetry of information. The employer has all of this information. They have their big spreadsheet with their budgets. They know what everybody has made in that job ever since the beginning of time. They know what all the other candidates are doing. They know what their process is, they know what everybody's thinking. They have all of this information, and you're just hanging out there with your little job description that maybe disappeared off the internet and you didn't put it in a separate document. And you're trying to remember like… 

That's terrible, right? And so at least if there's the two of you. You're pulling information and reducing how much asymmetry there is, but there has to be enough trust there for that to feel like something you feel safe to do.

Khrais: Right. Love that.  

Smith: Always save your job descriptions, copy paste into a Word doc and save.

Gavin: Please, please.

Khrais: Wait, people don't do that, and then it becomes messy?

Smith: Oh yeah. Maybe they get the interview, but the job post is taken down and now they don't know how to prep for the interview because they don't have the job description anymore. It's very basic, but people were not taught to do that.

Khrais: Yeah. But it's also like when you're applying to jobs, right? You're not taught, but when you're applying to jobs, it's just, you have so many tabs open and there are so many things that you're, you know, looking at and digging through on a daily basis. So I can see why it'd be easy to lose track of that. 

Smith: Yeah. You have a hundred versions of your resume to sort through.

Khrais: Version one, version two, version three, version…

Smith: Yeah.

Wilder: Here's the next hypothetical: So say you are super frustrated with your job search and you feel really tempted to make a post on LinkedIn about the disrespect you've received from recruiters. Is this a good move for like, transparency purposes, or would it just make you look messy?

Gavin: I think it depends on how good of a writer you are!

Khrais: That’s true.

Gavin: I mean, if you can turn it into a really compelling story where it draws people in and you're able to get both, um, you know, support and solidarity, but you are also presenting yourself as giving your best to the process, not in like a sort of salty, resentful way unless you're funny. There are ways for that to work. I wouldn't recommend it for everyone. If you, if writing and or standup is not like part of your repertoire of skills, I would not recommend it. Uh, I would do it, but I feel really confident… 

Khrais: You’re like, I can do it! I have those skills!

Gavin: … in my ability to like, make that into a funny story. And when I got laid off, actually both times I got laid off, I did a, uh, a salty but dignified, uh, post about it and they absolutely took off. And the amount of, um, support that I received from those posts, including from complete strangers. And those sorts of things can happen, but the, the post itself has to be really well calibrated. I, I would not say that this is like a beginner level social media post. 

Khrais: Right, right. Because I think job hunting in of itself is a vulnerable process, and I think you even wrote this in, or I read it in your book, Rachel, which is that it requires you to be more visible and to put yourself out there in ways that might feel very unfamiliar and revealing. Obviously this takes it to a whole different level, to write a post like that on LinkedIn, but what do you, what do you think?

Smith: We have a whole piece in the book about LinkedIn and about how it's this space where you can, you are, you can be rewarded for your honesty and vulnerability if you maintain the rules. If you play within the bounds of, you know, professionalism and the rules, the status quo of LinkedIn. There's a line, you know. If you're willing to tow the line and say, I'm gonna use this opportunity to tell my story, but also somehow, you know, make it reflect well on me as someone who is employable, then that is gonna work within the bounds of LinkedIn. You have to know what's gonna play and what's not on that platform. There are rules there.

Khrais: Yeah. 

Wilder: Alright, here’s one more hypothetical: say you've been unemployed for a while and your partner is carrying more of the financial load. And you start to feel like maybe they're becoming resentful. How do you talk about this with them? 

Khrais: Do you get these kind of clients in your office, Phoebe?

Gavin: Yes. However, I am not a therapist.

Khrais: I know it's a tricky one.

Gavin: I definitely end up in situations where part of the career problem, whether it is unemployment or something like that, it is also a relationship problem. Um, and when that's the case, the thing that I encourage them to do is to address the situation directly. And so actually ask your person, I am noticing this feeling and these thoughts within myself. I am noticing that these questions in my mind are not going away. I would like to hear how you feel about it, and I would really appreciate it if you could just be honest and straightforward with me about it.

It will still be better for you to get some information, even if it's just some information about whether that person is right for you than to be have one more thing that you're staring up at the ceiling every night worrying about: I need to get a job. And also, I think my spouse hates me because I'm not doing enough cleaning, even though I'm applying for jobs all day. And, and also making, making your job search efforts visible to your spouse without inviting them into the process.

Khrais: That seems like a fine balance. Yeah. How about you, Rachel?

Smith: I think our spouses, our partners, they're gonna sometimes act just like everyone else. Like, you know, if you're looking for work for a long time and you can't find something in your field, so you decide to take a service job, like, they might judge you for that too, just like, you know, your parent or your sibling or whoever.

I like what you said, Phoebe, about making your job searching work visible. Like that's, this is labor you're doing, if you're looking for a job full-time, like you're working full-time, you're just not getting paid for it, and you're not getting any of the, you know, other stuff that comes along with having a job like respect and, um, benefits and community.

So I think having to, obviously you shouldn't have to explain to your, to your partner why you're working so hard or what that work looks like, but if there are ways to share that in a, you know, in some way that makes you feel good about it, instead of like having to put together a presentation at the end of every day.

Khrais: Yeah, like proving yourself, right?

Smith: Yeah, yeah.

Khrais: Yeah. Um, okay. Let's say a hiring manager, a recruiter is listening to this episode right now. What would you wanna tell them about how to make this process more humane?

Smith: I certainly don't want to assume that hiring managers and recruiters don't remember that there are humans on the other side, because I talk to hiring managers all the time, and of course they do, and they wanna find the best people and they want folks to have a good experience. Um, I think the problem is that the forces that are, you know, swirling together right now are making it hard for everyone. So folks who are hiring are dealing with their own resource shortages. If you can not leave people hanging, that is, that goes a really, really long way. So even if it's honestly an automated rejection is better than no rejection, I think. 

Um, on the other side of things, talking about like, best case scenario, um, I know some folks who run a small design studio called Frog House, and they have done something totally incredible, which is they were hiring for a role. They're a small studio. They could only hire one person. They got so many applications for this designer job. But they decided to have, like, follow up calls with folks that they had rejected because they wanted to learn about them and kind of keep them in their orbit and. And I mean, look, we can't all do that. This is a, they're, they're very special people. But, as much as you can communicate with people, you know, at the very least just saying, you know, you can close this door for yourself now instead of keeping it open, imagining it, waiting, checking the inbox, waiting for the email, just taking that one thing off of someone's plate, um, at the very least I think is a, is a kindness.

Khrais: Totally. How about you, Phoebe?

Gavin: My list is so long.

Khrais: You're like writing notes over there. What's going on?

Gavin: I, I really am, I'm trying to decide like, which, what's the one that I really, really want them to do? I, so the first is put the entire process in the job description. Tell people what the process is in the job description. It costs you nothing and it makes such a huge difference in the, the quality of the applications that you're gonna get 'cause people aren't gonna feel like it's a waste of time. They have more visibility in it. So you're gonna get better candidates and you're gonna get better application materials from those candidates. 

Uh, be specific about what you want to get and what you want to receive in people's cover letters. What questions are you hoping that they answer? Writing cover letters more than anything else is the thing that people complain about when they come and talk to me about their job searches. And so giving people guidance about this is what we're looking for. It's like this doesn't need to be a gotcha. Test work is an open book test, and so if you tell people this is what we're looking for, you are going to get higher quality applications, and that is a huge… 

Khrais: And it holds the employer accountable.

Gavin: It does. And so it, which is part of the reason why they don't do it. Um, but that is a huge thing. Another one is don't ask people to do unpaid homework if there is a sales presentation or a a writing test, or it makes sense to have those things in the process because it is very easy for somebody who has good storytelling skills, good, uh, persuasion skills to BS their way into a job, and so those assessments where they have to do something practical to demonstrate their skill, it makes sense to have that. However you are asking someone to work for free, pay them.

Khrais: Yeah, so, so you can require that, but then you have to compensate them. I like that.

Smith: I mean, this is just considered like standard practice. So many, I think now more people are demanding better, but for so many years, especially in creative fields, it's like put together a deck, like put together a campaign.

Khrais: Do a little song and dance for us!

Smith: They are doing their job, they're doing what they are paid to do, but for free and for no guarantee of any outcome. Yeah, it’s ridiculous.

Gavin: And if you have, if you can't afford it, 'cause I can understand a certain type of organization at a certain size, not being able to pay a lot of money, like the actual, like deserved rate for that kind of work. No matter what, everybody who does homework for you, paid or unpaid, regardless of whether you hire them, give them feedback on what they did. They spent hours on that, they spent days on that, they spent weekends on that. And then I had to look at it, so make sure that you are actually giving them something in return for what they are giving you.

Khrais: Yep. Love it. Before we go, one last sentiment that you would give a job seeker right now?

Gavin: If you've been at it for three months or more and you're not making progress in the way that you want, get help from an expert. It does not have to be a career coach. It does not have to… It can be a mentor, it can be someone else in your career life. If you've been at it for three months or more, the thing that you have been doing is not going to get you where you want to go.

Khrais: How about you, Rachel?

Smith: Get together with other people who are looking for work. And this doesn't have to be because you want them to give you a referral, uh, through someone they know. It's just to feel like you can do this. You can just sit next to each other on your laptops and apply for jobs together, and it's so much better than doing it by yourself.

Khrais: Yeah. I love that. Rachel and Phoebe, thank you so much for all of your wisdom and time. This was great.

Gavin: Thank you.

Smith: Thank you.

Khrais: Alright. That is all for our show this week. You can find more about Phoebe Gavin’s career coaching at “better with phoebe dot com” and her hot takes? You can always find them on LinkedIn. Rachel’s book Search Work: a Collective Inquiry into Job Hunting is out on April 7th of this year and her newsletter Words of Mouth is full of job opportunities and community. So be sure to check that out.

And let us know, do you have a job hunting horror story you want to share with us? Or general work drama that you’d want advice on? Give us a call at 347-RING-TIU. That’s 347-746-4848. Or you can send us an email uncomfortable@marketplace.org. We’d love to hear from you. 

Also, connect with us on social media on Tik Tok or Instagram. Our handle is @ThisIsUncomfortablePod.

This episode was lead-produced by Alice Wilder. And I’m your host, Reema Khrais. Zoë Saunders is our Senior Producer. Audio engineering by Drew Jostad. Bridget Bodnar is Marketplace’s Director of Podcasts. Marketplace’s Chief Content Officer is Joanne Griffith. Neal Scarbrough is Vice President and general manager of Marketplace. And our theme music is by Wonderly. 

Alright, we’ll catch you all next week.