5 reasons why job hunting makes us want to drink more By Kenneth Kneher
It’s the holidays and you’re in your late 20’s so its high time your hiatus after dropping out of college 8 years ago comes to an end. You’ve already used up all the charity that any of your resentful family had for you, so it’s time to get a job. Seems simple enough, right? Falsify a resume, wear suit (that you stole from your dad), put on a happy face and join the workforce. After all, you charmed that amputee into sleeping with you, so you can surely convince some shit-for-brains Staples manager to hire you, EASY!
Not today. Unless you have some niche skill that makes you extremely marketable, or you live in a world painted by Norman Rockwell, you are in for a rude awakening, because you have:
1) No experience
If this is your first job you may have a tough enough time finding a place that will hire you. That is, unless you’re willing to participate in some indentured servitude. Internship is one of the biggest scams going. You bust your ass, bribing, threatening and plagiarizing your way through middle and high school, then sexing your way through college, only to find out that you’re forced to work for free first, in order to work for peanuts later.
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| "Dees Nuts!" |
Of course if you’re one of the millions of Americans who’ve lost their jobs to any of the myriad of things wrong with our economy, your road will be much rockier. Employers know that your skill set will quickly evaporate, which is terrifying because according to Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, 4 out of 10 unemployed Americans have not worked in over 6 months.
2) No Education
While student loans and grants are a wonderful thing, the fact that everyone is able to go to college does have an unfortunate side effect. When attending college was a rarity, a specialized education gave you a leg up on the competition. But now that an education is that anyone can get, it creates a dynamic where all specialized fields are saturated, so the overflow is forced to settle for less.
It may be a small exaggeration that you NEED a degree to be a fast food server, but you do need a degree to manage the mental patients that prepare and serve your disgusting grease burger.
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| "A hard day's rockin" |
3) No references
References are a curious thing. Naturally, employers want to call in to your old jobs to see if your uncontrollable kleptomania will be a problem for them too. But we can’t possibly imagine why they want to talk to personal references. While our close friends may be of questionable moral character, they aren’t so completely retarded that they would mess up lying for us. We just have to hope that they are smart enough to take the call outside when it does come in.
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| "Yea bro, Dave totally worked for *hic* me" |
4) No voice
In a shocking display of irony, one of the most tragic byproducts of the Internet is that while it gives everyone a voice, it also gives everyone a voice. Picture a loud guy standing in a room. You can unavoidably hear everything he wants to bark into your tender eardrum. Now picture that room filled entirely with loud guys, shoulder to shoulder, all yelling at the same time. It would be impossible to discern anything being said by anyone, thus providing a proper metaphor for job search engines and reminding you of the time you made the mistake of driving to New Jersey for Italian food.
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| Pictured - manliness |
When sites like Monster.com and CareerBuilder.com came out, they were indeed powerful job hunting tools. Then everybody figured that out. Combine that with the fact that it also allows businesses to quickly and inexpensively search a vast database of workers with imaginary qualifications that rival your own, and very quickly you realize that you’re competing against 5000 people for a minimum wage “Career Opportunity” at TJ Maxx. Plus businesses rarely accept paper applications anymore, because hey, let’s face it, who wants to personally deal with all of those chatty housewives and meth addicts. To add to the Kafka-inspired experience that is Monster.com, so many postings just lead you to another search engine, where you have the dubious pleasure of starting the process over form the beginning.
5) No hope
What takes the greatest toll on most people, is the sheer apathy that afflicts you when job hunting. When your best efforts seem to be entirely fruitless for weeks and months on end; it’s easy to resign yourself to selling weed again. Day after day, we spend our waking hours clicking links, filling out forms, and allowing ourselves up to 45 minutes to take tests that lead us to the conclusion that we have shit personalities, as we get no calls back from recruiters.
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| "We just called to alert you that you have no personality" |
It’s a process filled with deception and empty feelings. We’re forced to do it, so it qualifies as torture. On the off chance that somebody in HR does call you, you have an interview where you try to explain your imaginary qualifications and fraudulent work experience that you’ve so artfully fabricated in the preceding 7 months of free time. Put on your stolen suit and enjoy the more personalized rejection. Good Luck!
