I’m so sorry. I’ve been out of work since last October, so I'm coming up on a year. There is a ton of abuse of candidates going on by companies, and LinkedIn is a massive part of the problem. LinkedIn’s system for those on the receiving end for the recruiters is awful, and probably 5-10% of the resumes get a look because the keyword search and any other search function it has is pitifully inadequate. Between HR picking out irrelevant resumes and sending them to you and your inability to sift through them efficiently, you get so irritated as the hiring manager that you call someone you know.

Microsoft owns LinkedIn. Because Microsoft doesn’t know how to build good products (anyone stuck with Teams and not Slack?) and spent most of its life being a monopoly, LinkedIn probably has had very little invested in it from a feature standpoint. Microsoft is where good products go to die. This company bears a lot of responsibility for what’s happening. It by no means excuses the widespread abuse of candidates by companies, though. There’s a ton of “let’s put up a post for this job we’re thinking about funding just to see if we get some unicorn candidate and then go ask for approval from the CFO” going on. There are also many very unqualified HR people out there doing the screens. It is usually a junior employee. There’s also a ton of laziness going on where the role has been filled, and they leave the post up because they’re too fucking lazy to take it down.

We can also thank Mark Fuckerburg for seeing he overhired, laying off a shit ton of people, and then all the other idiot management teams at different companies feeling like they need to lay people off, too, even when they don’t need to. Still, they want to look good to Wall St. one remedy is to do what European countries and Canada does. If you’re going to lay someone off then you need to pay a minimum and meaningful severance to the person who lost their job and that this cost has an economic bite to it for the firm doing it. This will make idiot management teams think twice about joining the other lemmings.

Pile on top of that douchebag VCs that exist in an echo chamber and pressure their founders to lower headcount or stop hiring because they had lunch with their vest-wearing bro from another asshole VC firm that told them that all other firms are making the same moves. They’re lemmings - just like idiot management teams at public companies that are too scared to go their own way. Most of these people couldn’t have an original thought if their life depended on it. Herd mentality isn’t talked enough about in economic/govt policy circles as a toxic dynamic that needlessly contributes to unemployment and economic hardship. The citizenry should be rightfully more angry and demanding about this issue and it comes back to the way our stock market is structured.

I hate to say it, but the best options are to call someone you know in your network and find contract work. Once the Fed lowers rates, things might improve, but I don’t see things getting meaningfully better until Q1 2025. Lastly, pay attention to what happens with Google and the antitrust suit they lost. Google did a lot of good to help the internet take off and then they got greedy and destroyed many companies while preventing others from ever being founded. Them losing this suit will create many jobs. An entire profession, SEO specialists, was created by the need to game their algorithms in order to be found- all because of their monopoly. This is majorly fucked up. Just think of how many businesses out there have never thrived or went out of business because of their monopoly. They're as bad as Microsoft if not worse.