It\u2019s only when you meet a couple of people who have just landed a job that you realise how long it\u2019s been since you heard of that happening. I was chatting to two nearly-graduates last week, who both had something to go on to, and fair play, they were chemists, and I\u2019ve never met one of those before. It\u2019s possible they always saunter into work.<\/p>\n
The story you hear far more often from graduates is that it\u2019s a wasteland \u2013 that every new post has 2,000 applications, all identical because they\u2019re AI-generated anyway, and it\u2019s an AI bot that reads the damn things, so it wouldn\u2019t be able to tell a personal touch even if there was one. Applying for work is like throwing your hat into a ring that\u2019s on fire: your chances of success are mythically small and your hat \u2013 or, if you prefer, your self-esteem \u2013 will be destroyed in the process.<\/p>\n
This isn\u2019t just entry-level jobs, though it\u2019s maybe felt most keenly by recent graduates who were sold a hundred grand\u2019s worth of debt as a passport to success, only to find they\u2019ve taken out what was, effectively, a mortgage for a house that doesn\u2019t exist. And it\u2019s not new \u2013 more than 10 years ago, Steve Dalton wrote The 2-Hour Job Search, identifying exactly this: posting jobs online would result in so many applications that normal humans would start to rely on word of mouth.<\/p>\n
So the solution is just to forget the CV and work first on your personality and then on your connections. And maybe that does the trick for individuals, particularly ones with superficially nice personalities. But it\u2019s a terrible development for the world of work as a whole, privileging as it does people who already know other people, with a rapport that is likely not based on anything more profound than sub-verbal class allegiance.<\/p>\n
People bashing their heads against this wall will not be in the mood for irony, but it is ironic that technology, far from advancing human connectedness, has actually landed us back in the middle ages, where you can\u2019t get anywhere unless you know someone\u2019s uncle. Or you studied chemistry.<\/p>\n
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s only when you meet a couple of people who have just landed a job that you realise…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":15931,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[38],"tags":[28,134],"class_list":{"0":"post-15930","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-jobs","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-jobs"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15930","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15930"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15930\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/15931"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15930"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15930"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15930"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}