Late Stage Capitalism

A lot of younger people are legit shit at applying for jobs, like they don’t even read the job description and put the the position title… they just throw up a wall of buzzwords and copy-paste it and call it a day, showing the application reviewers they have no legit interest in the job.

Often the jobs being offered are opaque, confusing, or outright scammy. Often the people doing the applications are just bots testing the HR system for vulnerabilities or marketing reps looking to sell independent contractors.

I've lived on both sides of the hiring game, and in my experience just about the only way to get a job (outside of a job fair at a college or other meet-and-greet event) is via referral. The process of searching for and apply for jobs has become such a disorienting mess that simply spamming responses without bothering to read the job offer seems as reasonable a response as the HR method of throwing out hiring requests that nobody intended to read or respond to.

Just having basic social skills to like, demonstrate that you know what the company does and that you’d be interested in it’s mission, as basic as that is, sets your application above like 95% of the rest of them.

In a face-to-face interview, sure.

But in an entirely digital marketplace for labor, you're legit better off just throwing shit at the wall until you actually make contact with another human being.