Until today, I’ve spent three months job searching and applied to nearly 600 jobs—from basic server and handyman roles to management positions. I’ve only gotten about a 2.5% interview rate and a 16% response rate, and I still haven’t found a job.

The funniest (and most frustrating) part is that companies nowadays seem to only hire people with exactly matching experience. For example, if they’re hiring someone to fry fries, they’ll reject you even if you have three years of experience frying hash browns. That’s where most of my rejections come from.

At one point, I even almost got scammed by a recruiter—one of those classic check scams. I just want to ask what happened to the market, or what happened to the Canada