There are myriad articles, social media posts, and studies about what an absolute mess the job market is right now. But one recruiter seems to have missed every word of it. Her response to a worker’s struggle to find a job was so out-of-touch, not to mention insensitive, that it’s left everyone slack-jawed.
The current job search situation is a full-tilt dumpster fire, attributed to many factors, from a shortage of recruiters to so-called “ghost jobs” that aren’t even real. And don’t forget the rise of AI in hiring software, which basically assures that no one reads your resume.
But whatever the reasons actually are, the impact is clear. Take one look at any social media platform, and you’ll find countless people who have applied, in some cases, to hundreds of jobs and gotten absolutely nowhere — maybe an interview or two, at most.
So, is a resume gap of any length really that surprising? Absolutely not. However, a recruiter that a woman on Reddit encountered disagreed — and even worse, she wasn’t even interviewing for a job in her field but rather a survival job in catering.
At this point, the young woman, a member of Gen Z, is resorting to what all too many people have to do nowadays: getting a job in food service as a backup plan.
Sadly, that “backup plan” is increasingly becoming Plan A given the job market, especially as many business leaders say they refuse to hire Gen Z workers.
However, this Gen Z woman found that her difficulties in the corporate job market transferred to a simple job in catering because of the recruiter’s oblivious and judgmental attitude.
Despite her years of experience in food service, the recruiter told her, “My resume throws up a major red flag for being unemployed so long.” She then assumed the worker was only applying for the job because she was unhireable.
“I’ll be honest with you, the fact that it’s been two years and you haven’t found a job with your degree is a bit of a red flag,” the recruiter told her. “Is that why you’re applying? Why can’t you go back to your old restaurant? You’ve just been unemployed for 8 months?”
She then told the Gen Z worker that the catering company only wants to hire “good people.” The implication being, of course, that she’s not one of them because of her two-year resume gap due to the job market.
In 2023, the average time it took to hire someone for a new position reached an all-time high of 44 days — and that’s just the part of the process that’s on the business’s side. For applicants, it now takes an average of six months to find a job.
For young workers, however, it seems to be getting even harder. A recent survey found that many companies are actively avoiding Gen Z workers and plan to get rid of those they have hired in the past couple of years, in part because they believe their jobs can be done by AI.
The bottom line — if you’re struggling, it’s not just you. And if you’re an employer or a recruiter, you need to be understanding of just how big a mess this really is.
“That’s the difficult thing about being unemployed is that the longer you are unemployed the more unemployable you become,” another Redditor wrote in response to this woman’s post, and that right there is the problem.
“Lack of empathy, comprehension, and human touch is so absent in today’s world,” one Redditor wrote while commiserating with this job seeker. “It is as if you are expected to work every single second of your life nonstop and never take a break.”
Hopefully, this situation will improve, along with the rest of the economy, in time. But until then, blaming job applicants for a system they have absolutely no control over and assuming they’re just bad workers is not only cruel, but absurdly out of touch with reality. Everyone needs to do better — starting with the people gatekeeping all the jobs in the first place.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.
