The Skilled Work Discount

Job search rejection has a way of breaking you down, even when you’ve been told you’re the strong candidate they have been waiting for. I’ve been told I’m shortlisted because I’m fantastic. I’ve been told an interview would be set up in two weeks, and to expect a case study in the meantime. Then nothing. No case study. No interview. No follow-up. Just silence, from a process I was told I had already impressed.

That’s not a one-off. Since the start of July, I’ve had versions of the same experience more than once, and I’ve been told, in so many words, that I have a strong background but I’m just not the right fit. I still don’t know what that’s supposed to mean, and I have stopped expecting anyone to tell me.

I’m bitter about it, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I have spent weeks applying for roles, tailoring my CV, preparing properly for interviews, and putting real effort into a portfolio I’m proud of, and on the other end of most of that effort is nothing. Not even a rejection. Just nothing. And going through that has given me a far rawer, more personal understanding of unemployment than I ever had before, and a lot more sympathy for anyone living inside it right now.

Because this isn’t only about being ghosted, as maddening as that is on its own. It’s about what’s actually happening underneath it, which is companies advertising entry-level titles with job descriptions that read like three separate roles stitched together – strategy and systems and operations and people management all bundled into one listing with a salary that covers one junior hire. At the same time, genuinely senior, high-level work gets underpaid because someone desperate enough will say yes to it. Then you have talent acquisition teams run candidates through screening calls, full interview loops and take-home assessments, then go quiet. No rejection, no closure, because it costs them nothing to leave someone hanging.

I saw an example recently that summed it up better than I could. A candidate had been through three rounds of interviews, then got asked to prepare a full presentation on top of it, and decided she had given enough of her time already and withdrew her application. The recruiter posted about it afterwards, not as a fair boundary, but as something that revealed a bad attitude, a warning sign about the kind of person she must be. Nobody stopped to ask what it revealed about a process that asks for three interviews and a presentation before it’s even decided if someone’s worth hiring.

That’s the thing about scrolling through LinkedIn while you’re unemployed: you end up watching the exact people deciding your future talk about people like you in public, and it’s disheartening in a way that’s hard to explain to anyone who isn’t living it. You’ve worked for years to build something, and then you read a comment like that, and it makes you feel small, like an idiot, like everything you thought counted for something doesn’t. It took me a while to see that arrogance is just arrogance, nothing more complicated than that. Maybe it’s fair enough that what a company’s willing to pay makes them stringent about who they hire, but that only holds up if the pay is actually worth what they’re asking that person to bring to the table. Being selective and being cruel about it in public are two different things anyway, and no version of being selective requires making someone feel small on a platform where anyone can watch it happen.

None of this is a shortage of good candidates. It’s a system that’s worked out that it doesn’t have to treat people well to get their labour, their time, or their applications.

I’m at the point now where I’m ready to walk away from the career I built in CX and operations. Not because I’ve lost the skill for it, but because there doesn’t seem to be a place in that world willing to make room for me. Every job ad asks for something I don’t quite have, even when what I do have is more than enough to do the work well, and I’ve stopped believing that persistence alone is going to change that. I’ve been swimming upstream for weeks, chasing after roles that ask for everything and offer back too little, and I’m done doing it. I’m not interested anymore in stretching myself thinner just to be considered for work that was never going to value me properly anyway. If I’m going to put in that kind of effort, I would rather put it into teaching online and working hours that are actually mine or building something of my own, even if it’s harder and slower and entirely on me if it fails. At least then whatever I’m worth goes toward something I chose, instead of being handed to someone else to decide whether it was enough.

None of that changes the fact that money still runs out while I figure this out, and I’ve had to get honest with myself about what surviving this actually costs, not just what it takes emotionally.

And then some days I wonder if that’s just what giving up sounds like when you dress it up as clarity. Maybe I’m reading a pattern into eight weeks of bad luck that isn’t really there. I don’t know which of those is true, and if I’m honest, I felt just as unsure a month and a half in as I do now, and moving forward without knowing is uncomfortable in a way I haven’t fully made peace with. But staying where I’ve been hasn’t worked either, so I would rather be wrong moving than wrong standing still.

---

If this one landed with you and you’re rebuilding your own finances on one income right now, The Honest Reset might be worth a look. It’s R249, and it’s the guide I wish I had had before all of this started.