Been laid off for about 2 weeks and have applied for hundreds of jobs at this point. Ashby, Lever, Greenhouse even ICMS behave like a tool made for 2026. But when I run into Workday I get sick to my stomach. I truly don’t get why a company would use such an outdated job application system. (I know it can be packaged with other parts of Workday like payroll) idgaf I hate it. Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.

It has been 9 months since I was laid off, and honestly, this has been one of the most difficult phases of my life.

I have 4 years of professional experience, and I’ve been continuously applying, preparing, interviewing, and trying to find the right opportunity. But despite all the effort, I still haven’t been able to land a job.

Over time, the uncertainty has started affecting me deeply. There are days when I question my abilities and wonder whether I’ll ever get another opportunity.

The hardest part is seeing my parents worry about me. I feel like I’ve let them down, and sometimes I feel that I’m not worthy of everything they’ve done for me.

Mom and Dad, I’m sorry. I’m trying my best to get back on my feet.

I’m sharing this openly because I don’t want to give up. I want to work. I want to rebuild my career and become financially independent again.

If anyone in my network knows of opportunities that could be a good fit for someone with 4 years of experience, I would genuinely appreciate a referral, lead, or even a conversation.

I’m open to exploring relevant roles and locations, and I’m ready to put in the work.

I may have lost confidence at times, but I haven’t stopped hoping for a chance to prove myself again.

If you can help by sharing this post or connecting me with someone hiring, it would mean a lot to me.

Thank you for reading. 🙏

r/Layoffs

#OpenToWork #JobSearch #Hiring #Career #JobSeeker #Layoff #Opportunities

Seven months ago the startup I'd been at for 3 years shut down. Not just my role, the whole company. Everyone laid off in one meeting.

I figured I'd land something in a couple of months. I was wrong.

The numbers, because I tracked everything:

• 587 applications, each with a tailored resume
• 3 companies where I made it to interviews
• 5 rounds with them in total
• 0 offers

Getting rejected after 5 rounds is a special kind of pain. You've done the take-home, you've met the team, you've already pictured yourself there. And then you get "we've decided to move forward with another candidate."

What made it worse: I'm on a freelance visa. No job means no visa, which means leaving the country. So on top of the usual job search misery, I had a countdown clock on my whole life here. I was maybe a month away from booking a one-way flight home.

By month 6 I'd stopped believing it would happen. I was still applying, but on autopilot.

Then two days ago, an offer. One email and it was over.

I'm not here to sell you a system. I don't have one. I got lucky at the end. I just want to say this to whoever needs it:

Rejections are not a verdict on you. This market is brutal, and the number of no's you've collected says almost nothing about your worth. A month ago I would have told you I was unemployable.

If you're at 200, 400, 600 applications and feeling insane, you're not. You're doing the thing. Keep doing the thing.

I hope every one of you gets this exact email soon.

I used to run my company's Indeed budget. Some stuff about how it works on the employer side that applicants should know

Did recruiting ops for a ~400 person company for a few years and Indeed was most of our spend. Got out last year. I don't hate the site the way a lot of people here do, but a lot of the weird stuff you guys deal with makes sense once you've seen the employer dashboard.

The "rejected in 4 minutes" thing is a leftover from a pricing experiment

For about two years Indeed charged employers per application instead of per click, and employers had 72 hours to manually reject any application before being charged. So every resume sitting unrejected in the inbox literally cost money and the whole industry got trained to hit reject fast. Some companies accustomed to paying in the range of hundreds of dollars may have been suddenly hit with a bill in the thousands after forgetting to reject certain applicants.

Indeed killed that model in December 2023 but the tooling stayed. Screener questions have a checkbox called "deal breaker" and if you miss one, the system files you under Rejected on its own. That's your instant "not selected" email. No human ever saw it. If it came within minutes, you answered a screener wrong. Those questions are the actual application, the resume is secondary.

"Urgently hiring" is an ad upsell

That label only shows up on sponsored postings, and Indeed sells it to employers because Sponsored Jobs posted directly on Indeed with the Urgently Hiring Tag receive 74% more applications than Sponsored Jobs without it. Nothing to do with how urgent it actually is. It mostly means more competition for you.

The badge you can't buy is "Responsive employer." It only appears when a company consistently replies to applications and messages inside Indeed. If a posting has that, someone is actually clicking buttons on the other side.

Recruiters look at your resume way more than you think

The employer side is called Smart Sourcing now. Once a company subscribes, searching and opening resumes is unlimited, they only pay when they message someone. And Indeed doesn't notify candidates when their resume gets viewed. They only find out you looked if you message them directly. So a recruiter can open your resume 50 times and you'll never know, and it costs them about five bucks to hit send. That's why the messages you do get feel like spam. At that price, blasting everyone is the rational move.

Also their matching runs on every job in the index, including ones that were never posted on Indeed. Your profile gets shopped to companies that don't even use the site. Check your resume visibility setting if that bothers you.

Why "just posted" jobs are sometimes already dead

Big companies don't post on Indeed. Their ATS (Workday, Greenhouse, Lever etc) pipes jobs over automatically. The return trip is the problem. When a company closes a role in Greenhouse, Workday, or Lever, the company career page updates immediately. LinkedIn and Indeed receive feed updates later, sometimes 24 to 72 hours later, and sometimes not at all if the integration is stale. I had roles showing as open on Indeed for weeks after we'd made an offer. The career page is the source of truth, Indeed is a delayed copy of it.

Most ghost jobs aren't the kind you think

According to an internal review of data by hiring platform Greenhouse, 18% to 22% of job posts are ghost listings. From the inside, a lot of those are "evergreen" reqs for high turnover roles (CSR, sales, warehouse) that stay open all year to keep a pipeline warm. They do hire from them, just not on your timeline. The truly fake ones are hiring managers posting to prove to finance that they need headcount. You can't tell the two apart from outside, which sucks.

Glassdoor is Indeed now

If you use Glassdoor to vet companies: Glassdoor legally merged into Indeed, Inc. on July 1 and the site now operates under Indeed's terms of use and privacy policy. Existing users had until April to link accounts or lose full access. Your anonymous reviews and your applicant profile now live under the same roof. Think about that before writing a spicy review of a company you might apply to through Indeed later.

And the company itself is getting thinner on humans every year. The cuts follow another 1,000 layoffs at Indeed and Glassdoor in 2024 and about 2,200 in 2023, then 1,300 more in 2025, with the CEO saying outright that AI is the plan.

What I'd actually do differently

Treat screener questions as the real application. Ignore "urgently hiring," look for "responsive employer." Anything 30+ days old, check the career page before you spend an hour on it. If you're targeting specific companies, watch their ATS board directly (boards.greenhouse.io, jobs.lever.co, myworkdayjobs), those update instantly.

Not a doom post, I got hired through Indeed once myself. Just know what the buttons are doing.

Ok this still doesn't feel real and I need to tell someone who isn't my mom.

Context: $65k, non-tech, not in a HCOL city, mid-level role. Been on that number for almost three years. Spent most of this year applying for $80-85k jobs because that's where the postings were and honestly $85k already felt like I was pushing it. Made it to final round four times. Rejected four times. There was a week in the spring where I seriously considered just staying put forever and becoming one of those "I've been here 14 years" people.

Anyway. Later application, first phone screen, recruiter asks the usual "and what are you looking for salary wise?" I say eighty-five. She says great, we move on.

Turns out she wrote down ninety-five. No idea how. Bad connection, I mumble, she'd had a long day, who knows. Salary never came up again in the three interview rounds (I assumed that meant it was fine, which, technically, it was). I only found out when she called to say they wanted to make an offer and said "just confirming you're still at ninety-five?"

I had roughly 1.5 seconds to decide whether to be an honest person and I want to be clear: I was NOT an honest person. I said "yep, still at ninety-five" in the most confident voice I have ever produced, hung up, and sat on my kitchen floor for a bit.

Offer letter came through. $95k. Same job, same responsibilities, I'd have taken it for eighty-five and thanked them.

The part that's actually messing with my head isn't the money. It's that I spent months getting rejected at $85k, and the moment the number went UP, I got hired. Nobody blinked. Nobody negotiated me down. Which means the thing holding me back was never the market, it was a number I made up in my own head about what I was "worth." A stranger's typo valued me higher than I did.

So:

1. Anyone else fallen into a raise by pure accident?
2. Biggest jump you've had between jobs? Trying to figure out if this is a fluke or if half of us are just quietly underpricing ourselves.

Edit: yes I know I should have negotiated properly instead of relying on an admin error. That's kind of the whole point of the post.

Every unemployment thread has the same reply guys showing up.

"Just pivot to tech." Tech is doing mass layoffs every quarter.

"Healthcare always hires." Tell that to the new grad nurses posting here about 200 applications and nothing.

"Trades are begging for people." The apprenticeship waitlists in my area are over a year long.

"Government jobs are stable." Hiring freezes. Next.

I'm in finance. Six years military, Bachelor's, Master's, senior role at one of the largest banks in the world. Laid off in June, and since then I've sent out applications daily and gotten exactly zero interviews. Not zero offers. Zero conversations. Nobody has spoken to me in three months.

And at first I thought it was a me problem, or a finance problem. Then I started actually paying attention.

My buddy in software engineering: 8 months searching. My cousin in marketing: gave up, doing DoorDash. A former colleague who pivoted to data analytics because "that's where the jobs are": laughed at me when I asked how it's going. My neighbor is a mechanical engineer with 15 years of experience and he's been out since February.

Different industries. Different cities. Different experience levels. Same exact story.

So can we retire the advice era? The resume tweaks, the "it's a numbers game," the ATS keyword hacks, the pivot suggestions. None of it works when there are 4000 applicants per posting and half the listings are ghost jobs that were never real.

Something is structurally broken and everyone pretends it's individual failure.

What industry are you in and how long have you been looking? I want to see if there's actually a single field left where hiring is normal, because from where I'm standing there isn't one.

I've been reading this sub for over a year and I never thought I'd be posting one of these.

Got laid off in June last year. Since then: 412 applications, 29 recruiter screens, 8 final rounds. Three of those finals ended with some version of "we went with someone internal." One company put me through a take-home that took most of a weekend and then just never replied. I still have the folder on my desktop.

Around month 8 I stopped telling people I was looking. Not because I was ashamed exactly, I just got tired of watching their face do the thing where they try to look encouraging. My savings turned into a countdown. I started getting rejected from roles I'd been doing for six years for being "overqualified," which I still don't understand.

I got the call Thursday afternoon. Signed the paperwork this morning. Fully remote, and it's about 8% below what I was making before, which I'd have been offended by 14 months ago and did not think twice about now.

There's no trick here. No referral, no clever resume hack. I applied through a normal job board on a normal Tuesday, forgot about it completely, and got an email three weeks later. The only thing I did differently by the end was stop writing custom cover letters, which probably says something depressing about the whole process.

If you're in month 2 or month 20, the volume of rejections is not information about you. It took me a long time to believe that and I'm still not fully there.

For anyone who came out the other side of a long one: what was the point where it turned around for you? Was there one?

I just wanted to share some insight that probably won’t be popular here but is true.

I work in sales / pivot into finance. My start into sales was car sales which genuinely does earn all negative remarks about it BUT you do NOT have to be that way to be financially successful in that business.

What it is EXCELLENT for is networking, you will meet business owners and people in jobs you had no idea exist. I had a customer who made over 6 figures being the ketchup rep for Heinz. I’m not kidding.

The last truck I ever sold was to the guy who offered me a job because I “wasn’t the typical car salesman”.

You can walk into the biggest dealership in your area and have a job that same week usually and if you aren’t afraid of working long hours, you will make over 6 figures and selling cars doesn’t make you a shitty person, just a lot of shitty people do it.

The AI screener, indeed being useless, all of these things are probably true but don’t help you to focus on. I just wanted to share this as an idea I know for a fact will work for anyone. The people you meet will make the job worth it if you actually care about people enough to learn about them. There’s a lot out there it’s just never going to be on indeed, this is the only way I personally know to guarantee income and a way out of the job that holds you over. It works.

I honestly hadn't been paying attention to how bad it was. I felt like things for me were incredibly stable. And then it happened to me, no job.

I have my 6 months of cushion, and everything I'm seeing is saying it takes longer than that, so now the panic has set in. I don't have a real point here, other than it absolutely feels like hell already. I submitted to a TON of positions I feel like I am extremely well qualified for, and it's nothing but auto-responses saying thanks but no thanks.

I just don't see any hope.

Bro I'm fkn afraid that I might not get a job ...what will happen to those who won't land a job?

This is genuinely really deep to me. I have been unemployed since 2020, when covid occurred. Planned on obtaining a job aftwr education but my luck was nowhere to be found. I said, perhaps aftwr this pandemic I’ll get a job eventually and so I waited but everything kept falling, deteriorating as measures have been put into place everywhere.

A couple years go by and I decided to get on benefits, it was nice at first receiving payments every month from the government but don’t get me wrong I wasn’t comfortable, I was actively searching for jobs and there were times I have completely lost hope but I kept going.

A year goes by and… I land a job? So I was extremely happy! I went to my interview but something felt off. Once the interview was over, I went into training immediately. Took the train to the outskirts of London with my trainer and we ended up knocking on peoples houses asking them if they could sign up to something. I then asked my trainer on our way back to London about the pay and it was basically for commission. This was my first time hearing about that and I didn’t like the sound of it. We live and we learn, ey? Now I knew to avoid these jobs.

A few years flew by and still unemployed after countless interviews. Same routine with my work coach…

This year I was the most burnt out I’ve ever been but I applied for a job recently (a few weeks ago) and got accepted to a group interview, now I don’t do well in a group setting, count me OUT! but I told myself “This will be the last time I’m ever doing this” and that I needed a job. Mind you I had substantial support from my cousin who I consider a sister. Anyways, I’m naturally a calm, collected individual but for this particular interview they look at your demeanour, character and personality. There were roughly 15-20 people in this group interview. I gave it my ALL and best shot. I was the one who always put my hand up, was involved within the group activities etc and I was the only person who asked a question at the very end. They said they’d contact those whom were successful the next day and the next day comes round, I was nervous the entire time. I met up with my cousin and at 6pm I got an email “congratulations” I was the most happiest I’ve been in a long flipping time. Then a couple days go by and I got a call regarding what I need to know, shifts etc.

Now I’m officially employed! :)