The Job Search Has Become a Humiliation Ritual
Back in the fall of 2024 I began to sense from a variety of people — from my closest loved ones to strangers I encountered — that something seemed … wrong. Despite the universal proclamations of a roaring economy — minus ole gal inflation — almost everyone’s job searches were proving notably hellish, dragging out to four or eight or 14 months. Particularly if they weren’t tapping a cast-iron network and sometimes even if they were. “Humiliation ritual,” a friend texted me, attaching a screenshot of a demeaning email from an HR rep addressing her by another candidate’s name. Another sent a voice note featuring elements increasingly familiar to me: hiring processes that lasted four or five months with five-plus rounds of Zoom interviews by committee and spaced multiple weeks apart, chaotic instructions, uncompensated skills tests that would take a whole day’s work to complete.
AI tools appear to be on the rise on both sides of the job search, creating uncanny automations like getting a rejection email message 40 seconds after submitting a labor-intensive application. It has grown easier than ever for a person to apply, in a desultory, semi-automated way, to a job, whether by having Claude write their cover letters or hitting EasyApply on LinkedIn, which means that within 24 hours any job posting online might already have 100 applicants. LinkedIn reports applications went up 45 percent annually, averaging 11,000 a minute. Employers, overwhelmed, returned fire with their own automations. The result: a maelstrom of AI-powered résumé screening, chatbots for early interviews, gamified skills tests, and unconventional-to-jarring behavioral interview modes that are trying to control for the likelihood that a candidate is typing prompts into Claude or ChatGPT to cheat through the interview.
I should say that I had some personal skin in the game. My partner was on the job search, and for a period, motivated in part by a health scare that made me feel worried about staying self-employed, so was I. When I wasn’t grinding through my own work or proofing cover letters of loved ones, I tried to understand what was going on. I read papers from think tanks and the Bureau of Labor Statistics and newsletters like Laid Off. Trawled through sub-Reddits and TikTok and online fora of people discussing their job searches. People shared online about getting ghosted repeatedly by recruiters, about being six months away from losing their houses, about partners leaving them because of the strain and downturn in their mental health, about struggles applying to unemployment benefits, about exchanging a life with a mortgage for one crashing with elderly parents while gazing into LinkedIn’s abyss. All the while, macroeconomic data continued to proclaim a strong economy with low unemployment.
Fast-forward a year, and roughly 7.4 million Americans are now unemployed. The unemployment rate inched up to 4.3 percent as of August 2025; still on the low side, but up from 3.4 percent in 2023. The picture looks worse for some groups: Black workers face a 7.5 percent jobless rate; youth unemployment is closer to 10.5 percent. New York City added fewer than 1,000 new jobs in the first two quarters of this year; the city added over 66,000 during the same period in 2024. Nationally, hiring has grown more lethargic: The ratio of unemployed workers to job openings has been rising, meaning fewer opportunities per job seeker. As of August 2025, approximately 1.9 million Americans have been looking for work for six months or more, the highest share of long-term unemployment since the pandemic years. And six months is typically the longest you can collect unemployment benefits in most states, including New York.
Unemployment numbers, of course, only paint part of the picture when it comes to workers. Even the employed, for a variety of reasons, may want or urgently need to acquire different jobs. People who are dog-walking and delivering Thai food in the rain while looking for full-time work technically count as employed to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but that does not mean they are happy and thriving or think of themselves as not on the search.
Ian Shapiro, professor of political science at Yale and author of the book The Wolf at the Door: The Menace of Economic Insecurity and How to Fight It, believes that there is a far more important factor at play than the unemployment rate. “What is high, and has remained high for a long time,” he says to me, “is job insecurity.” A young person today, he notes, will change jobs between 12 and 15 times in their life. Shapiro defines job insecurity as a lack of knowing you can stay and flourish in your existing place of employment. There is little stability to be had in the America of the past decade-plus. Have a job and all is good, until you lose it, and with it health care and other kinds of security.
“Look at this slide here,” he told me over Zoom. “This is wages since the 1970s. The people in the top one percent have just made out like there’s no tomorrow. But if you look at the bottom 90 percent, which is really what we’re talking about, wages have pretty much been stagnant for decades. You can see it’s going down for every age group here. It used to be mostly middle-aged workers that were job-insecure. But everybody’s job-insecure now.”
Many of the people I spoke to about their job searches are office workers and would be considered part of or on track for the PMC, or professional-managerial class. Their jobs have historically been often better-paid and relatively shielded from poor working conditions. But now, the promise of upward mobility and identity through a job is starting, slowly, to dissolve, leaving a generation of laptop workers confronting a new, hostile economic and cultural landscape.
We’ve long been sold the idea of work as identity, purpose, and social mobility. So what happens if the machine breaks down? When people are doing everything “right” — networking, optimizing, trawling LinkedIn — and still hearing nothing back? What does it feel like to search for employment now, to swim against the current in the sea of American insecurity?
Take David. David, 35, wakes up before eight every weekday morning in Brooklyn and, over a cup of coffee and some Vyvanse, starts applying for jobs. Five at a minimum. Sometimes more, because volume feels like the only weapon left. Before being laid off along with 10 percent of their department, they were working for a major New York cultural institution. They have years of experience in tech and project management. In the past two months, they have sent in 200 applications and been asked back for zero interviews.
“I will certainly not get a job I don’t apply to,” David notes wryly. “I will almost certainly not get a job I do apply to. And that ‘almost’ is why I keep applying. It’s like going to services for a religion I don’t believe in. It’s a ritual.”
Miles away from David, Mia is wading through her own tall pile of applications but from the other side of the desk. She is hiring for two open midlevel roles at a national nonprofit organization. Since the postings went up on the applicant tracking service her company uses to manage its recruitment, each one has garnered applications in the high hundreds. Forty percent of these are incomplete: missing either the cover letters, the requested writing samples, or the extra deliverable that the posting specifically asked for.
Mia has felt jarred by the collapse of formalities that she was taught were essential. Few, if any, candidates send thank-you notes after interviews. She’s been startled by the sheer number of applicants who cold-emailed her to ask to talk about the role after applying, which she simply doesn’t have the capacity to take on, given that she is managing the hiring processes in addition to her own labor-intensive role. Unlike many other application-tracking systems on the market, the one Mia’s organization uses has not integrated AI functions yet, but she suspects AI-enabled spray-and-pray and EasyApply style tools are behind the masses of generic and incomplete applications that arrive in her stack. “People are just applying to everything and throwing everything against the wall,” Mia says. “That means you have to do a lot more sorting.”
Mia is sympathetic to the pains of the job hunt; she had her own nightmarish 14-month-long search before getting to her current role. She also sees a lack of mentorship and networking and a resulting erosion of codified norms and mutually understood standards of etiquette contributing to the larger problem. “Gen Z is way less formal about everything,” Mia says, seeming at once unsettled and sympathetic. “They’re like, ‘The world is burning, so what do I want with your nice approach?’”
The trouble is, of course, that in addition to meeting candidate qualification requirements, most hiring processes reward those who appear collegial, able to work well with others, and seem assured in their own abilities. In other words, most job searches reward people who seem confident and nice, both qualities that the new American job-search process erodes the longer it has you in its grasp.
Paul, a 37-year-old New York tech worker who quit his job a year ago to pivot to events production, an industry he worked in before the pandemic, is still looking for a job. He supports himself with freelance gigs along the way. He says that the hardest thing about the process is how much it saps your confidence, how much work comes up socially, with friends or when dating.
Long-term job-searching can also magnify existing senses of vulnerability, from race — Paul is Black seeking work in a largely white field — to disability to gender. From multiple people I spoke with, it grew apparent how long-term unemployment can conflict with social scripts around masculinity in particular, where even the ostensibly feminist may expect, consciously or not, competence, success, and the ability — to use a word that is tossed around with alacrity in the womanosphere — to be a provider. It might be galling, to say the least, to struggle with the hostilities and sense of powerlessness of the job search and then go online and hear TikTok discourse around “broke boys” and “princess treatment.”
Job insecurity and unemployment can eat self-esteem, produce the drowning buzz of crippling anxiety, shorten the range of a person’s hope and belief in the system, in their future, in themselves. It can produce zero-sum, suspicious thinking, slowly and insidiously making people see other people as their competition, and wondering if their identities are a small part of the reason they are getting passed over. The mental-health impact of long unemployment is well-observed in research; people on the job search for a long time struggle with anxiety, depression, feelings of failure, and (both real and perceived) social stigma.
David described their first encounter with an AI-tool recruiter, a voice-enabled pattern-recognition software agent contacting them, talking to them, and screening them before deciding whether to pass candidates along to humans adjudicating their hiring process, as a demoralizing, gallows-humor episode. They trailed off, and added, “The whole thing feels … disrespectful. Give me a job fair. Give me something where I can interact with another human.”
When Anurima, 27, was let go from a Queens nonprofit this spring, she noted that her HR department timed the termination just days before her health insurance would renew despite knowing she had a surgery scheduled. Compared to many other people I spoke to, Anurima is emotionally steady about her job search thus far. “Honestly, I haven’t spent a lot of time being upset,” she says. “The worst part was the insurance. But unemployment benefits and gig work have given me the ability to stay here and keep doing the things I want.”
For much of Gen Z, the idea of a meritocratic labor market is something akin to a fairy tale. “I literally think you can only get a job by talking to somebody in New York,” Anurima added. “They need to know you before you send your app in … Otherwise, it’s all LinkedIn Easy Apply, piles of a hundred résumés, and no one cares.”
Anurima does not use AI at all and rarely applies to postings she has no network connection to. She believes generally that people should only apply to jobs that they want so as to not contribute to résumé overwhelm.
“At the time I got laid off, two of my roommates got laid off,” she notes. “It feels like everyone’s scrambling.” She admits that rising youth unemployment frightens her a little, but she believes her generation won’t simply retreat in isolation. Instead, she said, the people she knows are applying for jobs together with other unemployed friends, sharing resources, and helping each other out financially and otherwise.
Generally, the people I spoke to about their job searches suggested trying to not job search alone. They recommended trying to remember that the bad news and rejections are typically structural, not personal. Trying to internalize that all you need is one single yes. Trying to do things that make you feel good about yourself that are unconnected to the job search. Trying to remember to lean on people who care about you and ask for help. Paul has found a sense of esteem and meaning in working out hard; David has started a photography side project with a friend; Anurima has a burgeoning side hustle as a DJ.
Getting shredded, networking well, pursuing side projects, playing the long game, not taking it personally, keeping it positive, asking for help — these are all good orientations. But they are also individual approaches to enormous structural problems.
COVID-19’s paradigm shift and strengthened economic safety net gave a stupendous mass of (surviving, non-disabled, non-blue-collar) workers sudden sway in the workplace of a kind not seen in decades. It produced the Great Resignation, with its signing bonuses, counteroffers, and leverage around working remotely. And, alongside the explosion of moral reckoning around race and gender, alongside the proliferation of platforms like Slack and Twitter that allowed mass speech and critique, the pandemic years created a powerful, unsteady, fermenting cultural brew: worker power, often-unfocused internal “activism,” and ambivalent hostility toward bosses and owners.
But it was short-lived. The mid-2020s, with their backdrop of economic and political volatility, have been about reasserting the bosses’ power.
That reassertion, with its lack of soft landing place, has been meted out unevenly in ways that are familiar to those of us who came of age during the Great Recession or its long recovery. The unemployment rate for people ages 22–27 is 7.4 percent. Black women are among the fastest-rising groups among the unemployed. A July 2025 survey by a financial platform found that 41 percent of Gen Z runs out of money nearly every month, and only 22 percent consider themselves financially stable. AI, while not yet a significant driver of job loss, is beginning to displace entry-level positions, especially in law, finance, and tech. Insecurity and precarity have started to come for office jobs, tech workers, the formerly protected, the professional managerial class. The sinkhole into the American underclass has now expanded.
What sets this downturn apart from the panics and busts of the past is that now every layer of labor, from hiring to firing, is increasingly mediated by automations and algorithms that cannot hold the irreducible realities of human life. The person-based relational constellation that once transmitted skill, mentorship, and mutual obligation, however imperfect, has now been replaced by a digital loop: workers feeding prompts into the same systems that eventually gatekeep, surveil, and smoothly replace them. When David talks about the job search as a ritual without belief, or Mia describes the erosion of even small gestures of connection, they’re naming something deeper than frustration. It is the feeling that the relation between worker and employer — never benevolent but ideally cooperative — may without a course correction be whittled down to the point of rupture.
As the writer Kyla Scanlon recently pointed out in her economic-analysis newsletter, the macro-data itself has begun to split into two contradictory narratives. The Carlyle Group’s proprietary labor index, for example, now shows a flatlining job market and recessionary headwinds, while the stock market keeps levitating, heavily fueled by — you guessed it — AI companies. It’s as if the real economy, the one that people work and pay their bills and eke out life in, has increasingly decoupled from the reported one.
The current administration understands that bad job numbers could be a significant Achilles’ heel. One response to this has been a politically motivated firing by Donald Trump of the nonpartisan BLS administrator in August, in response to the agency’s recent anemic economic reports. As I write this, the government is in shutdown. No new official data is forthcoming.
But in a September White House press release, I encountered a phrase I’d not seen before, claiming massive job gains for “native-born Americans.” The implication, which is untrue in any case, is that the numbers overall might be bad, but for the people who actually matter, they’re not.
“It feels like I’m just trying to make my robots talk to their robots,” David, a so-called native-born American, told me of their job search when we spoke last, a note of desperation in their voice. “Like, it feels like I’m trying to pick the stupidest lock on Earth.”
Anurima, who has cycled through the same humiliations as many others, put it this way: “We accept so much less than we should be getting. My last job tricked me into believing it was stable, but no job is stable. If more of us stop accepting bad terms, we might see the strength we actually have, instead of being pitted against each other.”
Large cohorts of economically stranded young people have been fertile ground for radical solidarity movements and reactionary politics alike. That’s not hopecore, just historical comprehension. The Gilded Age, the Depression, the waves of deindustrialization in the late 20th century — each period produced its own hybrid of worker despair and immiseration, followed by reform and reinvention. The worker gains of the 20th century — including unions, Social Security, civil-service protections, and the weekend — were all wrested into being by people who refused to see themselves as failures in isolation and instead recognized themselves as part of a mass that were being failed. It is fashionable among elites now to frame the majority of people as “NPCs,” or non-player characters, in the parlance of video games: unthinking, sheeplike, atomized automatons. But deny a vast multitude what they need for long enough and you’d be surprised at how many decide to play.