Job Searching: The Invisible War

Someone on LinkedIn messaged me today asking about my job search experience, given that I submit about 125 applications a month. That sparked this article.

In a healthy market, interviews are stressful and hopeful. You prepare for them, you show up with confidence, you give all the questions your best, and you move on. In a harsh market (the one happening right now), interviews start to feel like emotional triggers.

Let's put this into perspective.

You're a job seeker and you have an interview scheduled the next day. You wake up the next morning knowing you have to perform. Not just technically, but emotionally. You're in the interview and the interviewer opens with, "How's your day going?" or "How's your week been so far?" and your first impulse is brutal honesty:

It's been exhausting. It's been demoralizing. It's been rejection after rejection, ghosting after ghosting with zero accountability, and the slow realization that market participants might not care how many years of experience you have in the industry. It makes you want to quit the process, get back in, and quit the process again.

You can't say that though. You bite your tongue, you put on a neutral face, and you do your best to keep that neutral or cheerful tone—saying something like, "It's going well, how about you?" And in that moment you're not just lying to them—you're lying to yourself. You're actively suppressing your reality to keep the interview safe and professional. This gets you through the interview, but it also leaves a gut-wrenching mark—adding to your already degraded mental health from rejections that came before.

And then this process repeats itself. It happens again at your next interview, and the next, and the next. This is one of the harshest realities I think goes unseen in the hiring process.