Spring. Senior year. Middle of the quarter. Graduation is imminent. Your well-intended grandparents give you a call and ask the most abhorred question in the history of queries: “Do you have a job yet?”

Shaking from anxiety and existential dread, you stumble through a half-baked answer and hurriedly end the call. But the evil can of worms is open in your mind, and you dutifully open your laptop to doom-scroll the LinkedIn job page for the rest of the night, only stopping to walk into the Puget Sound to end your woes.

College graduates are facing one of the worst job markets in recent history, complete with ghost job listings, endless demands for cover letters only AI will “read,” work experience questionnaires that are fully answered by your resume already and its very own No Man’s Land where applications are sent, receipt confirmations are discharged and no other response ever happens. A veritable standstill of automated emails and fake niceties.

As a graduating senior leaving the safety of undergrad this June, I began my endless job search in February, which is arguably too early but you live and learn. Since then, I have applied in short bursts of energy every few days, documenting each application in a spreadsheet I have lovingly called “the sheet of doom and despair.” At the time of publishing, I have applied to 168 jobs, been formally rejected from 45, gotten interviews for four and have not heard from the 118 others. If you’re paying attention, that only means four interviews and one request for writing samples

The cycle of cover letter tailoring, resume reformatting, job board scouring, “thank you for your interest in our position” and “unfortunately, we are moving forward with other candidates” becomes a Sisyphean burden. 

Obviously, I do not mean to imply that I am a perfect, infallible applicant, but I am not completely inexperienced. My resume includes: three years of direct editing experience in various publication environments such as journalism and a research journal; a communications internship with a statewide non-profit; a teaching assistant position teaching college writing with first-year students; six years spent in customer service with a supervisory role; and three years spent as a D1 collegiate rower. I am graduating summa cum laude, am a member of Alpha Sigma Nu, the only Jesuit Honors society, have a double major and a minor and a smorgasbord of extra skills. I include all this, not to brag about my accomplishments, but to show that I am not someone with a two-line resume complaining about a lack of prospects. I am, by most measures, a qualified candidate for various positions, both entry-level and higher.

It is hard not to feel bitter as rejections roll in and crickets abound and the 131st job asks you, again, what your work experience is in detail when you already submitted your resume that has all this information. Really, just go read it. Why do you need it again? It is right there in the PDF I attached to this questionnaire. It is harder still to bring yourself once more to the yawning maw of the job boards when each posting has hundreds of applicants and you just got a rejection from somewhere you applied to three months ago.

The demoralization and despair that builds as time goes on, with very little reward for all of the labor that goes into the job search, is extremely difficult to abate. Couple that with each person you speak to asking about that search, and you once again feel like crawling into a hole and assuming the fetal position. 

When I set out on this odyssey, I did not initially track where I sent applications. I quickly learned that my masochistic spreadsheet was incredibly necessary. Many of the jobs I applied to are posted across multiple websites; last month, I applied to an editorial assistant role a friend of my mother sent me, which I then saw in a LinkedIn Job Alert email four days later, then stumbled upon on Indeed the following week. Furthermore, many of these companies take months to finally send their rejection emails, and getting a job rejection when you forgot what it was even for is puzzling to say the least. Documenting this torturous journey allowed me to have a detailed record of the company, position, date of application, date of response and what that response was at the tips of my fingers. 

Despite my methodical approach to begging for employment, the very fact that this is the state of applying to jobs as a new graduate raises the question of efficacy. Is building the application ecosystem entirely on the backs of LinkedIn and the like actually sustainable? Are these third-party application websites feeding the beast of the ineffective job market by allowing employers to act like they are hiring? Can applicants and employers truly be connected if AI resume scanners and algorithmic filters run interference before any human eyes reach the responses?

At a time when the job market is barely limping along and college seniors are watching entry-level positions dry up quicker than a fish in the Sahara, the song and dance of online applications begins to feel less like planning for your future and more like filling the role of court jester for a broken kingdom. And if you are like me, who boarded the networking train too late and missed all of the stops, this waltz of websites feels like your only option, and you must jive until your feet bleed.

So I implore everyone reading this: if you know a senior or new graduate, stop asking about their post-grad plans. Stay away from talks of applications and interviews. Instead, ask how they are doing. Reach out with messages of support. And only speak of jobs if you can connect them to a hiring manager who will actually grant them the privilege of an interview or you yourself want to hire them.

To all the seniors out there: I am right there with you. Unless nepotism got you a job.. In which case, I respect it but I hate you, never speak to me.

And if anyone reading this is actively hiring: please email me at [email protected]. I am open to any positions in editing, copywriting, communications, proofreading and reporting!