7 Things No One Told Me About Job Hunting in 2023

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that getting a new job is hard, and harder than ever these days even though supposedly “no one wants to work” anymore.

I started looking for a new job in earnest in early later summer 2022. Clients were slashing budgets, which meant slashing agency headcounts, and I’d already survived three hiring frenzies and eventual layoffs in the three years, and two more layoff rounds would follow in the subsequent six months. I was grateful for the job security, but I’d also been doing the work of 2.5 people for nearly two years with no relief in sight. My job was making me physically ill and deeply impacting my previously well-managed mental health. It was the first time I’ve ever seriously considered quitting a job with no backup in place, and in hindsight, maybe I should have so I could have focused on job hunting like the full-time job it is.

The big tech company layoffs were happening by the tens of thousands right around this time too, which, I must say, was intimidating as hell as a mid-level marketing professional in flyover country. But I didn’t fully realize just how many months, resumes, interviews, ghostings, and rejections I’d have to deal with while I searched. It had never taken me more than a month or two — sometimes just weeks — to score a new gig before. This search took me six months and had me feeling demoralized, dejected and worthless after the just first six weeks.

So in an effort to help those of y’all out there strugging with your current job AND finding a new one, here’s what I learned while applying to more than 300 jobs of all kinds across a wide array of industries between August 2022 and April 2023:

1. Go For Quality Over Quantity.

LinkedIn makes it seem so simple. Just one click and — boom! — you get that dopamine rush that comes with feeling productive and proactive, in charge of your destiny. Strong resume, clear profile, can’t lose…right? I fell into this trap within the first couple of months; every day my goal was to send out five applications and I usually ended up going down a frenzied rabbit hole EasyApply-ing to any job that sounded vaguely interesting that I barely qualified for.

I say it to you now, dear reader, with my whole entire chest: don’t do that. I quickly ended up losing track of positions I’d applied to, sometimes accidentally re-applying for a role I’d already been rejected from. As tempting as it is to play the numbers game on LinkedIn, you are most definitely NOT the only person with that strategy. No matter how desperate you are, take your time and read through the entire job description, research the company (especially if it’s some random startup with a deliberately misspelled name you’ve never heard of) and then take your time to really craft your application elements. Which leads us to…

2. Customize, Personalize & Optimize…Every Time.

It’s tedious and annoying, but you can’t get away with sending the same resume and a form cover letter with a few tweaks anymore (just…trust me on this one). When you’ve found a role that sounds interesting, that fits at least some of your desired criteria, and that you can make a good case for yourself, take the time to personalize both your cover letter AND your resume for your application.

It’s okay to start with a template, but make sure your CV reflects how your experience meets the employer’s needs AND why you think you’d be the best person for the role. Utilize key phrases from the job description and requirements to help any automatic searchers or AI tools make a clearer connection to your profile and the posting. On your resume, play up your roles and accomplishments, any “extracurriculars” you had at certain jobs, volunteer work, etc. If you’ve had a lot of jobs in a lot of different industries (hi, fellow ADHD professionals!), this can be especially frustrating, but seriously — it makes a difference.

3. “Hybrid” and “Remote” Have Different Meanings Now.

In case you haven’t noticed, companies are trying to dial back on remote work, which is bonkers to me because if your business survived and/or thrived between March 2020 through the end of 2022 with remote workers, then guess what: they don’t need to come back to the office for your business to be successful. I just can’t grok the mental gymnastics it takes for CEOs (who let’s be honest, don’t do much “work” anyway) and other executives to seriously believe that people are really going to go back to offices 40 hours a week.

So be advised, job seekers, that “hybrid” on most job posts now just means “hybrid (within [blank] metro area)”. And by the same measure, “remote” now basically means “fully remote 100% of the time.” This was one of the more confusing and frustrating aspects of job searching for me — I don’t want to be fully remote and I also don’t want to be in an office 9–5 every day. If you’re not within a 30-minute drive of the area where your potential employer is located, you’ll probably get breezed right over. At my most paranoid, I believed it was because I live in Kentucky, a state that even Midwestern metropolitan organizations prefer to mock instead of hire from, unless they’re based here (and sometimes, even still). I have no concrete evidence of this, but what can I say? I was desperate.

4. You Absolutely WILL Get Ghosted.

I applied for 300+ jobs in six months, and for more than half of them, I received radio silence. Even after I wised up on quality over quantity, I’m still getting rejection emails from companies I applied to months ago. It does seem that that larger corporations are more likely to at least send you a rejection note eventually, even if applied for a job they posted back in 2022. One of the few good things about automation in hiring, I guess?

Getting through multiple rounds of interviews doesn’t guarantee that you’ll get an official rejection, either. I interviewed 4+ times for multiple positions, both remote and in-person, and often I never heard back, even after following up politely via email a week later. In one case, the recruiter I had been working with had left *their* company and no one ever let me know from the recruitment firm OR from the actual agency hiring team. Even worse, I knew and had worked closely with the agency CEO in the past, and I didn’t get past two rounds of interviews. Anyone who says that old cliché of “it’s not where you apply but who you know,” in my experience, is objectively wrong.

5. Spec Work = Wage Theft.

Louder for the folks in the back: There is No Such Thing as Free Work. This is for all my creatives out there, trying to make it in the #agencylife (which is barely a thing anymore–hasn’t been for years), getting asked to go above and beyond showcasing your existing portfolio in the name of scoring a new gig at a hot shop: you should NOT have to do free labor in order to get a job. You are not an intern, you’re a professional, but even if you ARE an intern, your time is still valuable and deserves to be respected.

Any agency that asks you to provide anything more than ideas or suggestions (especially for a project they’re currently working on) is:

A) most likely struggling to hire because…
B) they treat their actual employees just as bad (if not worse) than potential ones.

Spec work is just one of many aspects of the creative industry that needs to die, and is hopefully on its way out. If a company asks you to put together a full presentation or conduct substantive research, or anything else that will take you more than 30 minutes to work on, tell them your hourly rates and watch them disappear faster than a classified document in a Mar-a-Lago toilet. No matter how “prestigious” or cool or “big name” the company is, you deserve to get paid for your time, effort, and talents.

6. Some Job Posts Just…Aren’t Real.

If you’re job searching, and you see the same role popping that up you’re pretty sure you’ve already applied to (and have maybe even already been rejected from) but this new one might be different, odds are that it is not. In fact, it might not even be an actual open job listing, which was one of the more infuriating and demoralizing aspects of job hunting for me this time around.

Apparently, companies just post various listings in order to “collect” resumes for potential future hiring for jobs that aren’t available now, which is truly evil. This is particularly insidious on LinkedIn, I believe, because it’s so easy for companies to send you an automatic rejection after your EasyApply. They then eventually close the position you applied for, then post the exact same position again that shows up in your search feed a dozen times again. If you see the same job title popping up but with slight variations (different states, in particular), be wary.

7. Delta-8 WILL Pop on a Piss Test.

Yes, I know it’s synthetic, and yes, I know it’s federally legal, but it is a form of THC and will therefore show up on a THC urine screen because nuance is not a thing in American capitalism, in case you haven’t been listening for the last two centuries. If you are actively interviewing and there’s even a chance you might have to get drug tested, I highly recommend abstaining until you pass that test. If you have been a dumbass and are self-medicating out of deep depression and self-loathing at your apparent un-hireability, invest in a few gallons of apple cider vinegar* and get to chugging. Don’t ask me how I know this, thanks.

(*There is no scientific evidence that this actually works.)

The good news is that I did eventually get a new job; I’m coming up on three months there now and it’s going really well so far! The bad news is that as much I as believe in applying directly on company sites, I actually did end up getting this job via LinkedIn.

So take that as an indication that all the aforementioned items could still be true, or none of them could be true, especially three months later. Just know that you do not have to stay in a toxic, dead-end job or a dying industry; there are plenty of opportunities out there, it’s just a lot more competitive and a lot harder to get there these days.

The best news is that you are not alone in this. As much as CEOs and business writers want to wring their hands and clutch their pearls, US unemployment is the lowest it’s been in decades, and many companies are coming to the realization that new generations of talent demand new approaches to work. It’s not that people “don’t want to work anymore,” it’s that they don’t want to work for shitty companies anymore.