Stop diagnosing job seekers, start interrogating the market
The fastest way to make a broken system look healthy is to turn it into a psychology problem for the people stuck inside it. Describe ghost jobs, fake hiring pipelines, AI filters that never let a human see your name, companies that refuse to train but still want you doing senior level work for mid level pay, and watch what happens. Instead of asking what kind of labor market produces all that, the response usually lands on you. You are overgeneralizing. You are biased. You are being too emotional.
In other words, the market is rational. Your perception is the flaw.
That move is not neutral. It is how a dysfunctional job market keeps its self image intact.
Think about the current script around job hunting. The official story says you are probably misunderstanding things. Your experience is “just anecdotal.” You should look at the data, recognize the complexity, zoom out. Companies, we are told, operate under tough constraints, tight budgets, intense competition. You, on the other hand, are urged to regulate your emotions, correct your thinking, adopt a “growth mindset.”
Notice who is framed as understandable and who is framed as irrational.
Because if you strip away the polite language and just look at the pattern, what you are describing is not a mood, it is a structure. Jobs posted for months that are never really open. Roles recycled to signal growth to investors or to build a cheap CV reservoir for “future needs.” Recruiting processes carried by keyword matching scripts that reject you because you wrote “managed” instead of “led.” “Hit the ground running” used as shorthand for “we will not train you, we want you immediately productive, covering two roles for the cost of one.”
If people across different countries, industries, and seniority levels keep describing the same architecture, at some point it stops being “overgeneralization” and starts looking like recognition.
Labeling that recognition as emotional overreaction is convenient because it keeps us from discussing incentives. It is cheaper not to train people. It is cheaper to automate screening. It is cheaper to simulate a fair hiring process while promoting the person who was always going to get the job. Each of those choices optimizes for cost and speed. Each of them slowly corrodes the human experience of looking for work. That is not accidental collateral damage. It is the tradeoff.
A lot of job seekers describe companies as “lazy.” That is not quite right, but it is not as far off as some would like to pretend. The more precise word is calculating. Training is labeled a cost rather than an investment. Time spent mentoring a junior is time that does not show up as immediate output. So companies look for fantasy candidates, perfectly pre assembled workers who already know the stack, the process, the culture, and who can start tomorrow with no ramp up. When they cannot find that mythical person, they blame the “talent shortage” rather than their refusal to invest in potential.
Zoom out to LinkedIn and you see the same logic on a global scale. A flood of international candidates, often with advanced degrees and long experience, chasing underpaid roles. Behind every profile there is a specific story; a weak local economy, a collapsing currency, a hostile political environment. But the platform compresses all that into one thing: supply. A massive, global oversupply of labor that companies can tap into to hold wages down.
The polite term is “access to global talent.” The accurate one is closer to “cheaper humans.”
You will often be told not to “generalize about users from X or Y country,” and that is fair at the individual level. People are not stereotypes. But the structural fact remains. Platforms and employers are not passively observing this desperation. They are using it. Salary bands are quietly adjusted under the assumption that “someone offshore will accept this.” Relocation support is dangled like a lottery ticket. If you refuse, someone else will not.
Against that backdrop, your anger and exhaustion are not cognitive flaws. They are sane reactions to a market that keeps signaling that you are interchangeable.
Yet the advice machine keeps telling you to manage your emotions. Seek broader data. Be more nuanced. Recognize the positives of platforms. Be strategic. All of that can be useful at the personal level. But look closely at what is missing from that conversation. Where is the call for companies to stop posting roles they have no intention of filling. To be transparent about salary ranges and training commitments. To disclose when a position is an internal hire in disguise. To limit the use of automated filters so that at least one human pair of eyes reads each application.
The burden of adjustment is almost always placed on the job seeker. The system, apparently, is too complex to criticize in simple terms.
That “complexity” often functions like a fog machine. Of course there are many factors at play, from interest rates to investor expectations to industry cycles. But complexity should not be used to hide the direction of travel. The direction has been clear for years. Less obligation to workers, more volatility, more risk shifted onto individuals, more pressure to be instantly productive, less patience for learning curves.
There is a whole industry of tools and consultants dedicated to squeezing friction out of hiring. “Friction” in this context often means “spending time understanding a human being.” Automated assessments, pre recorded video interviews, psychometric scores, salary history checks, background bots. None of this appears by accident. It is marketed, sold, and implemented.
So when you feel like you are auditioning for a machine that has already decided it does not want you, that is not a personal delusion. That is more or less what is happening.
This does not mean every company is predatory or that there are no good jobs left. There are still places that train, places that value potential, places that do not treat people as disposable firmware. But the existence of exceptions does not erase the trend. The trend is toward a job market that behaves like an automated sorting facility, optimized for output and convenience, indifferent to the inner lives of the people moving through it.
The narrative that tells you to calm down and “see both sides” becomes dangerous when it only ever flows in one direction. Where is the demand that executives regulate their emotional responses to slightly lower quarterly growth. Where is the encouragement for boards to broaden their data and question their confirmation bias about “lean” teams and “rightsized” workforces. Where is the suggestion that maybe investors are oversimplifying complex realities when they blow up at a minor miss on earnings.
It is striking how quickly psychological language appears when it is time to soften worker anger, and how rarely it appears when it would apply upward.
A healthier conversation about work would not start with “what is wrong with how you think about the market.” It would start with a blunt question. What kind of labor market do we want. One where training is a normal cost of doing business. One where platforms are not rewarded for amplifying desperation. One where companies cannot hide behind software when they choose not to seriously consider most of their applicants.
Nuance and data matter. But they should sharpen accountability, not erase it.
You are not misinterpreting a healthy system. You are feeling the edges of a system that has been redesigned to treat human potential as a liability unless it arrives pre packaged and instantly monetizable. The answer is not to gaslight yourself into calling that normal. The answer is to keep insisting that the problem is not your perception, it is the structure, and to aim your criticism at the people who have the power to redesign it and prefer not to.
