We’ve reached the end of the job market

“Well, Joe, I did it. I applied to all the jobs.”

That is exactly how “Sam” opened our conversation. It made me laugh out loud, in spite of myself.

Let me set this up real quick. 

Sam is a former vice president of product who came up through the project management ranks. She’s been out of work since being laid off at the end of last year, so about five full months now.

Sam is different. She’s not like you and me. She’s kind of a machine. She’s never been a developer, but she knows all the connective tissue between a developer’s brain and a successful production application—including infrastructure, security, Agile and Scrum, QA, and every flavor of every process that brings good code to paying customers.

Sam will tell you that she’s “not an idea gal.” She executes. With extreme prejudice.

I tell you all this to tell you that when Sam loses her job or wants another job, she immediately pulls out every stop, in an optimized and efficient manner, never for a hot second taking her eyes off the goal of “getting Sam’s butt into a new seat.” 

Yeah. She went third person there. 

Last week, to her surprise, Sam realized that in her six months of relentless execution, she had applied to all the jobs she was remotely qualified for. Every single one. There was nothing left to do. No job description she hadn’t combed through, no company she hadn’t researched and reached out to, no networking spoke left unbugged. 

So she called me and invited me out for coffee.

Hyperbole aside, Sam has applied for hundreds of positions, “maybe over 500,” she says. She has been through dozens of screens and “definitely more than 50 interview loops.”

If there’s a war for jobs underway right now, this is what Sam has learned from her stint on the front lines.

“The ATS-Friendly Résumé Thing Is Bullshit”

Her words. But I tend to agree. 

Sam got on the ATS-friendly résumé train right away, because the company that let her go had been leaning into AI résumé screening for about a year, and she had a friend helping with the tech in the HR department. 

“It took a month before I realized that I was just throwing darts,” she said. “Then I thought about all the talks I’d had with [my HR tech friend] and it hit me that there’s no single ATS-friendly format, and everyone is probably doing the screening differently.”

The responses she was getting were from companies she didn’t really want to work for anyway, usually for low-paying, low-culture jobs. Further, the next step after contact was almost always a series of “vibe check” interviews. Most of the time, these resulted in fun conversations with young HR reps followed by a brief rejection note a week later. 

“I felt like I was wasting my time and I needed to get out of that loop,” she said. “So I took a risk and just redid my résumé to speak directly to the person I would want to hire me.”

That, she said, resulted in better initial contact.

There Is Nothing in the Middle

Sam immediately decided to apply for everything she could. She has almost 20 years of experience, so she applied to everything from midlevel jobs that required five years of experience all the way to the executive-level jobs that would serve as her logical next career move. 

“Fifteen years is the max they’ll put into the JD,” she laughed. “What does that tell you?”

Each time, she tweaked her résumé and application so as “not to scare anyone off. I didn’t lie. I was just selective about what I said.”

What she noticed is that there were a lot of “just above entry level” jobs—in other words, people who were already broken in but still cheap. And there were a fair number of director and up positions, less hands-on stuff.

“They don’t say you’ll need to be out there selling for those executive jobs, but they imply it pretty heavily,” she said.

I take this to mean that there is a lot less emphasis on management. And in my own research, I’ve also found this to be the case. You’ve got labor, and you’ve got sales, and everything else is AI-driven.

And by the way . . .

“AI Jobs” Are as Dumb as You Think They Are

“At first,” Sam admits, “I wasn’t applying for AI jobs because I don’t have the tech experience there, but after reading some of the requirements I said [WTF], I can use ChatGPT, and I applied for a couple and got responses.”

Turns out, no one really knows what an “AI job” is, beyond the PhD-level math and machine learning that drive the AI platforms themselves. According to Sam, almost everything that’s not that is just hiring managers who want to make sure that “you can use ChatGPT to pretty stuff up, you know, documentation and presentations.”

I am shocked that I didn’t assume that. 

Salaries Are Coming Down

This one sucks.

She said, “I swear—I didn’t keep notes or anything on it—but, six months ago, salaries at my level were mostly $250,000 to $300,000, and now they are definitely in the $180,000 to $220,000 range, give or take.”

It makes sense. A combination of continued economic uncertainty on one side of the hiring table and growing desperation on the other side. Something had to give. 

You Need to Be Ex-BigCo

I’ve touched on this in previous posts, and Sam confirms what I’ve already been told.

“It comes up. A lot,” she said.

Many years ago, Sam spent some time at a multibillion-dollar big-name tech company. Now she was getting frustrated when interviewers would inevitably ask her about that position first.

“I did a stint,” she said. “I didn’t change the world or anything. I’m really proud of what I did at my last job, but they were under $50 million and falling, so . . .”

Money Men (and Women) Are Pulling the Strings

There’s a lot more oversight into org structure and hiring in general coming from investors and boards who traditionally don’t play as much of a role in the company makeup below the C-suite. 

This is something I asked Sam about, and her eyes lighted up. 

“Yes!” she said. “I’ve had . . . three loops that went great, and right before the offer I got set up with some rando or a private equity guy and then whammo. Is that a thing?”

Yeah. She said “whammo.” And, yeah, that’s a thing. I know this because I’ve been the rando. I’ve been asked to vet executives multiple times this year by those very venture capitalists and “private equity guys.”

There’s No Confidence

Sam and I had a long and winding conversation, and I’ve tried to put this in a format with a single cohesive thread. If I had to pick, that thread would be “no confidence.”

From a lack of confidence in résumé screening to a lack of confidence in how to put people to work to a lack of confidence in what kind of talent is needed to even a lack of confidence in executives making sound fiscal hiring decisions. 

No one knows what’s really going on or how to make it better. 

And thus, according to Sam, this malaise has spread to every corner of the job market. Outside of a few lucky breaks or local connections, there’s no good way to get from point A to point B, with point B being putting a butt in a seat.

“And then one morning last week, I went to my laptop and there was nothing to do,” she said. “It took me some time to figure it out, but every job board, all my networking tracking, everything. I was up to date. It made me a little scared.”

A few days later, Sam did text me to tell me that new jobs were coming in and chatter had picked up across her network. In my mind, this is a wave, and a necessary one, as companies continue to figure out what isn’t working, and then try to figure out what will.

Or, at least, that’s what my optimistic side says.

If you’re interested in more stories from the front lines of tech and innovation, please join my email list and we’ll commiserate and speculate together. 

—By Joe Procopio

This article originally appeared in Fast Company’s sister publication, Inc.

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