I don’t even want a god damn job. My career should be 10th on my priority list.
I’ve got …
— two kids wasting away their summer mostly indoors on devices so we can stay on a budget
— a wife that’s trying to save us money by feeding us home-cooked meals 90% of the time
— a bunch of relatives over 80 with dementia
— a father who only got 63 years on Earth
— a grandfather that only got 47
I’m 46 next month.
There just isn’t time to …
— endlessly fuck around with format and phrasing on my resume
— produce cover letter after cover letter
— search for my certifications in the drop-down on Workday (hint: they’re not there)
— network by awkwardly cold-DM’ing strangers on LinkedIn
— enrich someone else’s business at half-rate with no benefits
— figure out how AI can benefit me rather than further obscure me
But I do it all.
Because without a job, there is no money, and without money there is …
— no house
— no clothes
— no food
— no doctors
— no vacations
— no advantages for my children
The plan was to write positive blog posts this time. To market myself not by complaining and recounting career horror stories but by serving as an altruistic beacon of knowledge … or some shit. Then I hit the third month of unemployment with 226 applications sent, 142 unresponsive, and one — ONE! — interview with a hiring manager. That single, solitary company was for the exact same job at a company in the same space as my last. I couldn’t even get to the next round of interviews. One-and-done.
I’ve chosen the low road — to whine and complain about my situation — because that’s where my heart is today. I’m not alone. I’ve read over and over from other job seekers that they’ve never seen the market like this before. Friends and acquaintances have gone months, over a year without sniffing new work.
I have come up with some (completely speculative, non-scientific) theories.
Newton’s Law of a fucked-up job market
Sir Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion is that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Well, four years ago there was a big action: the pandemic. Society went on lockdown, people lost their jobs (including yours truly, twice), some chose a permanent offramp from The Grind (insert Eric Nies joke here), and others quietly quit. A lot of people pivoted to curbside pickup and played a shit-ton of Animal Crossing (I was on MLB: The Show 20). Tech companies saw huge upticks and went HAM hiring to meet demand.
While initially I suffered the loss of two jobs to pandemic reductions, I later benefited. First, I landed a job with a brand commerce tech platform. The product was a cog in the booming digital commerce machine. A year later, I was solicited for a new opportunity with a mobile game advertising platform, and they paid very handsomely. But as the paint dried on that first job, there were signs that the new consumer habits formed by the pandemic were wearing off. A couple of years later, I felt like a target in a shooting gallery: hundreds of layoffs at Google, Microsoft, eBay, Zoom, Meta, and on and on. My number was finally called in April 2024.
And now here we are, in the middle of the “equal-and-opposite reaction.” Intuit just trimmed a whopping 1,800 jobs from its payroll. Do I feel sorry for all those people just trying to survive? Yes. Is my larger concern that 1,800 more people are flooding the market while I’m in my second quarter of finding a new job? Hell yes.
Intuit says the decision had a lot to do with leaning into AI, which brings me to my next theory.
Why try when you’ve got AI?
Let me just preface this by being the first to praise our new AI overlords and their fine, fine work.
But seriously, I don’t see AI as an existential threat to the human race. I love technology. I think AI is helpful in a lot of ways. My worry as a content marketer is that business people view free/low-cost tech that can accomplish 60% of the job as a greater value than expensive humans that deliver high-quality work but slower. That’s probably fair. At some point the utter lack of imagination and human connection will swing the pendulum the other way, and creatives will come back in fashion, at least to some degree. Think of a future content marketer like you would an artisanal craft brewer. I’m working on my beard and twisty mustache.
Initially I worried about hirers leaning heavily on AI to filter through stacks and stacks of resumes. So how do you beat the AI filter? You feed your resume into an AI resume builder. I tried that. I quickly found the AI unreliable, hallucinating metrics and skills that I don’t have. Feeding my resume into the AI was costing more time instead of saving it. The results felt unremarkable. I quickly cancelled that service. Next I was recommended an AI job finder. It was after I leaned on AI to help prepare answers for a screening interview that I realized it was all pretty ridiculous. The screener probably asked AI to help her prepare questions for our call.
So I’ve concluded that AI is now likely responsible for writing the job description, finding the job, writing the resume and cover letter, filling out the ATS, and prepping questions and answers for interviews. AI can even record, transcribe, and evaluate how the meeting went. At that point, AI is doing everything and we’re watching the ball go back and forth like a tennis match. Where does it end? Will “AI communism” lead The Great AI Leader to predetermine where we work and how much we earn? Granted, I don’t know a lot about how communism works, but I think that’s the gist.
I don’t mean to be an AI alarmist. It isn’t Skynet and Miles Dyson that scare me. I fear the loss of creativity and originality at the hands of velocity at all costs.
I should have been a farmer
If you follow me, you know I’m fond of this quote. In the movie The Natural, Pop Fisher is the unlucky manager of the sad sack New York Knights baseball team. When the team is at its low point, he laments to his bench coach, “I should have been a farmer,” rather than a baseball coach. I walked into content marketing by accident. I earned a BA in English, didn’t want to be a teacher or lawyer, and fell into magazine publishing, and later marketing. The skills I acquired along the way were based around writing and editing, so content marketing has been a good fit. But what kind of company spends so much on its marketing program that it can hire someone to specialize in the writing part? The answer: companies with deep pockets. In other words, a limited portion of the market. Further, because writing, editing, and content strategy aren’t always core functions of a marketing team, a lot of executives simplify the role into marketing writer. In other words, anything that requires text: web copy, social, ads, blogs, speeches, slide decks, video scripts, T-shirts — “Get it in front of that writer person.” Content marketing is so much bigger than that. And I’m not sure I’ve ever been on a team that fully appreciates it. I get it though, a business must make a really big resource commitment and think outside of the box to get the most out of content marketing.
In other words, a fraction of the jobs I’ve had and apply to are seriously hiring for a content marketer. Most are just looking for someone who’s good with words. So when I’m out there applying, these jobs are scarce and the ambition feels misunderstood.
Welp, that’s all the tin-foil job market conspiracy theories I’ve got on me right now. I’m sure I’ll cook up some more in a few months. Until then …
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