The “soul-sucking” process of applying to a single job
To hunt or not to hunt, that is the question.
I absolutely hate applying to jobs.
Everything about it feels like a soul-sucking chore, a mental prison that you want to escape the moment you lock yourself into it. I’m sure I’m not the only one that feels this way. I’ve noticed anytime I don’t want to do something, I get the same thought patterns that sound like: “I really don’t want to be here/I really don’t want to do this/I’d rather be doing anything else.”
I’d honestly rather be doing anything else, like playing video games, watching my favourite TV shows, or going for a walk while listening to my favourite music. But as the saying goes, if you want nice things, you need money, and to get money, you have to trade your time working away. Before you can even think about making the money, you have to go through the dreaded “job-hunt” process.
Does this process, sound familiar?
You’re looking for a job, so you open up Indeed and LinkedIn, the latter distracting you because you see all these people you went to high-school with. You take a sneak peek at these people you hardly interacted with, are up to, just because you’re curious. You start seeing how well off they are in their careers, while you don’t even have one, forcing you to do some mental gymnastics to make yourself feel better. You remind yourself, “comparison is the theft of joy” and move on with your job hunt, feeling your ego deflate a little. But the more you scroll through LinkedIn’s cesspool of “career advice,” and fake posts, either kissing the ass of the company that pays them, or their own, you start to realize something. You realize that LinkedIn is just Facebook, but for people that pretend they like their jobs.
You start to rummage through a lot of shit job posts, those that fall in the category of low wages, high expectations, bad company reviews, and downright scams. Eventually, you come across a company and a job posting that doesn’t sound like they will steal your soul every day, like Shang Tsung in Mortal Kombat. Or maybe they will steal your soul, but hey, they pay well! You tell yourself, “ok, this job posting and company, actually look like a place I can dedicate 8+ hours of my weekdays to and maybe my weekends.” You read the job description and requirements and…
“…we require both a cover letter and resume.”
“Cover letter…oh, crap…” You haven’t even started applying, and you’re sensing defeat.
So, the dread sets, yet again, the mental prison feeling more confining now than previous. You think to yourself, “ok, this should be a snap, I will just open a previous cover letter that I wrote for a job, that I’ve never heard back from and change it around a bit.” So you open the previously curated cover letter for another job, and then you flicker. You flicker between the job description and the cover letter, open windows, at least 10 times. Due to the fact that you don’t want to be here and rather be doing anything else, you find any convenient excuse to not complete your cover letter. You check your phone for any notifications, contribute to a VERY important Reddit discourse, go downstairs in the name of stretching your legs. The point is, you do everything but apply to the job you had opened up on LinkedIn, 30 or so minutes ago. Your mouse cursor continues to silently blink, secretly judging you for not taking any action.
Before you know it, an hour has gone, and you’ve absolutely gone nowhere, got nothing done. This just tightens the mental pressure on you to do finish applying to the job you have open.
After the 1-hour mark:
The job application and the cover letter, much like your mouse cursor, are silently judging you on being a failure. You tell yourself, “ok, let’s just freaking get this one job application done, so I can go reward myself with too many hours of Pokémon Unite, mixed in with another nightly episode of Manifest.”
Having read the job description and the requirements required by the company to be successful, far too many times for your own liking, you begrudgingly go back to the dreaded cover letter. This time you finally give it some thought, in the form of “how the hell do I sell myself for this role?”
That’s what applying for a job really comes down to, “selling yourself, your skill set, your personality, to the hiring manager and her staff. But for people like myself, who aren’t used to propping themselves up in their daily life, rather the opposite, it becomes a rather extreme chore to have to sell yourself within the very specific guidelines of the job description. I know what my value is and what I can bring to an organization, that’s not the issue. The issue is that I just don’t know how to convey it in cover letter words, one that can sell me as a worker, to the hiring manager and their respective organization. I don’t know how to sell my skill set in a way that makes the hiring manager and her staff think, “well, maybe we shouldn’t ghost this applicant, the way teenagers do to each other.”
Finally, getting it done!
So you read the job description and the requirements for one final time, and this time you have a better understanding of what type of worker the organization, in question, is looking for. You go back to your cover letter, and you begin the process of a curating a specific cover letter for the job you have opened up. You already have the template cover letter you used for another job that’s been sitting open for more than an hour. Now it’s simply a matter of slicing and dicing parts and pieces to make it match the description and requirements of the posted job.
There comes a point in this process, that you actually manage to make a daring escape from your mental prison of the thought patterns, mentioned in the beginning. You eventually write a cover letter that is not half bad (good job)! You check it for spelling mistakes and tell yourself “well, this is good enough, and I really just want to finish this as I’ve already spent way too much time on it, and you email it.”
Waiting for a phone that (probably) won’t ring
You (about damn time) send your now completed cover letter and your generic resume, off into the void that is the H.R. Manager’s email inbox, seemingly never to be heard from again. Hey, at least now you have an updated cover letter that you can spend more than an hour, cutting and changing, for the next job you apply to! Positive thoughts, like LinkedIn always says.
As for what I would think would be the ideal job hunting process, that will be another article, for another time. I just wanted to get this article done.
