If, like me, you've been actively seeking a job recently, you will likely be aware of the impact Ai has had on the job market. Virtually every other day is a msm news story about qualified and/or experienced people making hundreds of applications without getting anywhere.

Personally, although I've had a few interviews that didn't quite land (one I didn't really have enough experience, the others were pulled or lost funding), I've now applied for over 300 jobs over the past year. At this stage I'm quite philosophical about it and recognise it's not a reflection of my value.

Along with all the other current crises, there is now a looming employment and skills crisis. This is being framed as a benefits culture led by overdiagnosis of neurodivergence. Which makes me so very very cross it's difficult to put into words. I know that's not true. You know that's not true. *They* know that's not true. It's just a convenient demographic to throw under the bus to detract from the catastrophic damage being wrought by this new gold rush.

Urgh.

I've started typing this out a few times recently and always deleted. It's not something I feel very comfortable talking about. But I am really struggling with this and I figure that if I am there might be others. And I believe in visibility and not suffering in silence - been there and it was awful.

I know things will change at some point. And I know I've spoken to some of you separately irl about this (and thank you so much for your support), but just wanted to fire a beam out across Fedi to anyone else in this shitty situation. You are not alone. Always happy to chat offline if this is kicking your ass as much as it is mine! X

#jobs
#employment

@TheBreadmonkey "making hundreds of applications without getting anywhere"

First came the job board scraping web sites. You could search, find a hundred vaguely matching jobs, then hit the "apply to all" button. Add to that you can now tell your AI to write a tailored covering letter for each. (Which you don't actually read before sending the applications, of course, you don't have time for that.)

Now, what about the other side?

A recruiter might in the past have received half a dozen CVs, back in the days when they had to be individually posted in an envelope with a stamp on it. Great, it's entirely possible to read them all, and pick out the two that are worth interviewing (if you're lucky!), and hire one of them.

Now you get hundreds of CVs. WTF are you supposed to do with those? You can't even read them all, at least not and spend any time on your day job. We know that buzzword filtering is a crap way of sifting through them, and we strongly suspect that getting an AI to tell you which ones are any good is also useless. So what do you do?

(I'm recently retired so I don't have to worry about it any more.)