Mollie Shiflett ’26 is a double major in history and linguistics, not that she knows what to do with that. She is captain of Women’s Club Soccer Gold for the College of William and Mary and is an avid fan of most sports — except golf. Email Mollie at mrshiflett@wm.edu.
The views expressed in the article are the author’s own.
To those of us who are applying to jobs or internships — which in this college of overachievers is pretty much all of us — this opinion won’t break any new ground, it’s just what’s been on my mind lately as I scroll through LinkedIn, Indeed and job board after job board.
Given my age, I don’t have any concept of any other way people had of applying to jobs; although, my parents tell me that there was a different kind of way. Don’t get me wrong, there’s a very large part of me that is happy that I don’t need to print out resumes and go around handing them out, but a part of me feels like we might have swung too far the other way. I’m sure everyone has seen it on their TikTok pages — or their Instagram Reels, if they’re like me and not very cool — the second their algorithm picks up that they’ve even thought about applying for jobs. It’s the “I applied to 200 jobs, got ghosted by 150, interviewed at 15, got one job offer” kind of videos which make the slightly anxious senior (me, if you couldn’t guess) feel all the same hope for the future as someone watching a train derailment.
I’m not trying to speak from a place of privilege where, because I’m going to college, I expect a job to be handed to me. I don’t mind doing some hard work, but the system that has been created makes what’s supposed to be the next, most natural part of our lives and the start of our careers feel like climbing a mountain. Our parents came out of the generation where the message was “Go to school, work hard and you’ll get a good job.” And that worked for them. Now, even though the overall rate of employment of people with college degrees today is still pretty high, that’s not really what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about is just looking for a job. And in particular, the black hole that is online applications. I don’t know what it says about us as a society that we live in a world where a person can give up the most critical human resource they have — their time — and the statistically most probable outcome for that is to be ignored completely.
I’m sure there was a time when these sites made hiring managers’ jobs easier; it was streamlined, and there weren’t boxes of files, and everything was neater. But a site like LinkedIn only functions optimally when the field of people using the space is smaller. Now everything is completely overloaded. And if a hiring manager has 300 applications to read through, what does that mean? Even more of the hiring process gets automated to keep up, scanners are set to look for certain words and qualifications in resumes, so of course, potential employees find a way to adapt to that, and what are we left with? A process that used to be about a human hiring another human to work in a human job that has become so affected by technology as to be sanitized from anything remotely human that it used to possess.
If you can’t tell, I’m looking for a job right now, and it’s not going super well — although, it’s January, so I have some time — but I think that in general, we live in a world that is being overtaken far too much by technology that is supposed to be making our lives more convenient and is actually just making us move farther apart from each other. I already have an unhealthy codependency on my phone for literally every other aspect of my life: my music, my shows, knowing where I am, how I know things, how I occupy myself when I’m bored (doomscrolling). I think it would benefit us as a society to put a little more human back into some of the parts of our lives that can go on to define our lives like our careers can.
I’m not naive. I know that the way that we’ve automated our society is like letting the genie out of the bottle. Tearing it all down again and starting over would make a ton of things grind to a screeching halt, but I think that it’s worth it, especially for the generation that has to deal with one of the worst post-undergraduate hiring markets in recent memory, for us to reflect on not just the economy that is making our futures more uncertain, but the fact that our society has created a system where even getting started feels more like shouting into the void than doing anything else.
And I don’t think that there’s an answer to it for any of us. Some people are excellent at networking and have things lined up (for them, this article would have been nothing but a waste of their time), but for the rest of us, our only option seems to be to keep shouting, and eventually someone will hear us from the other side of the void. We can definitely all do that, but I think what I’m trying to get to in all of this slightly circular writing that I’ve been doing is we shouldn’t have to. We shouldn’t have to live in a job market where it seems to be about the quantity of applications sent out over the quality of the application, where qualified students have to play long odds because all of the jobs they wanted already have 200 applicants, so they know they’re already behind. When a human being is trying to make a start on a human career, it seems like the bare minimum we should expect in return is some human interaction. I don’t know how we go about getting that, but we shouldn’t have to shout into the void forever.
