Applying for jobs is so fucking embarrassing

The rituals, the portals, the silence, the begging, the shame.

There’s often this moment when the whole grotesque theater of modern employment narrows into a single rectangular box labeled “Cover letter (optional).” Optional my ass. Optional like dignity. You stare at the white square and feel the camera red light of your laptop watching your pupil dilate. Somewhere off-screen an algorithm weighs your life’s worth against keywords. A robot shepherd herds you across an electrified grid. It smells like burned plastic.

Applying to jobs is dehumanizing not because rejection hurts, or because you need money, or because you have a dream, but because the process itself teaches you that your existence is a bad user interface. You are an edge case. You are a compatibility bug. You are raw, unformatted input to a system that prefers CSVs to actual humans. Your life must fit on one page, and one page only. Never unemployed, never non-linear, just… neat.

Kafka wouldn’t write this because it’s too on the nose. You cannot parody a process that already parodied itself. You upload your CV as a PDF; the portal demands you re-enter each line by hand, as if confessing your employment from memory will make it true. You correct the machine’s hallucination of your own history and thank it for the opportunity. You tick mandatory boxes you don’t understand. You drag sliders labeled “proficiency” and solemnly declare that you are exactly 4 out of 5 at conflict resolution. At the end you’re offered a tiny blue button that says “submit,” like a medieval scroll saying “kneel.”

The fake jobs only there to signal growth. Hah you applied, but we’re not hiring dumbass! LinkedIn a scourge upon humanity. Fuck you, Indeed. The submission, the begging, the embarrassment.

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Every portal is a little shrine to corporate metaphysics. “We are an equal opportunity employer,” it intones, while the code underneath filters for the same graduating years, the same comfortable names, the same narrows of class and geography. “We are a family,” it whispers, asking you to upload a video response by Friday evening explaining what “working” means to you. Families don’t ask you to record fucking elevator pitches under bathroom lighting. Cults do.

Then the ghosting. Ghosting is not just silence; it’s a pedagogy. It instructs you in your smallness. It trains you to accept non-answers as answers, to interpret absence as feedback. Silence is the new “we’ll keep your resume on file.” After a while, you stop applying for jobs. You apply for absolution: please tell me I’m not insane. Please tell me there’s still a place at the table for a human who thinks, who hesitates, who sometimes says the wrong thing and then corrects it with a laugh. The silence explains that there isn’t, but very politely. It’s always very polite, the whole affair.

This is efficient. Efficiency used to mean doing something with less waste; now it means never touching a person if a script can touch them first. Somewhere in the timeline, management fell in love with dashboards and never came back. The pipeline is measurable, therefore real; the people inside it are noisy, therefore suspect. Many years ago, when I worked in HR (bad times) I once watched a hiring manager reject a candidate because their resume had “too much personality,” as if personality were a contaminant. He said the quiet part out loud: the perfect worker is a perfectly clean dataset. No edges, no deviations—a circle. We only employ circles with specific diameters.

In interviews, they ask for your “story.” They want a narrative arc that ends with “so naturally I want to do marketing analytics for a B2B cloud synergy platform.” They want the hero’s journey with the dragon swapped for a product roadmap. You start performing your life back to them, editing yourself in real time. The funny jobs disappear. The failed projects vanish. The strange detours—caregiving, burnout, bad love, real life—are cauterized into “periods of strategic reflection.” There’s a moment when you hear your own voice and think: I sound like a Goddamn FAQ. You hate it, and you keep going.

There’s an aristocratic cruelty to it all. Imagine announcing, in any other sphere, “prove you are worth basic subsistence and the right to wake without panic.” We hand over entire biographies to strangers because we would like to keep eating. We beg for a chance to trade our time, which is the only thing that is ours, for their money, which is only briefly ours. They teach you to call this begging “networking.” Smile, but not too much. Be confident but humble, like a domesticated… eagle? I don’t know, eagles are cool. Mention your “passion” for spreadsheets. Talk about “impact” until the word collapses into a puddle. You leave the MS Teams room with your face aching from lying, even if you told the truth.

And then there is the comedy. The recruiters who ask for ten years of experience in a software that’s existed for six. The founders seeking a “rockstar generalist who thrives in ambiguity,” a sentence that means “someone who will do six jobs for one salary and thank us for the privilege.” The personality tests that solemnly conclude you are, in fact, a person—maybe. The gamified assessments that turn your job prospects into a mobile app where you pop balloons of attention and pray that your reaction time correlates with “team fit.”

In older times, the humiliation was at least honest. You stood in a line with other supplicants and the foreman looked you over like a horse. Now we have softened the edges with UX and HR disclaimers, but the core transaction remains: prove your utility or go hungry. “That’s just the world.” Yeah, but a world can be arranged differently. We invented this theater.

The portal is not the real problem. The portal is the dress code. The problem is the sacred economy that can only imagine meaning as a resource to be mined. It rubs that resource out of you and calls the dust “experience.” You apply to be rubbed. You promise you won’t complain about the rubbing. You like the rubbing. You are very passionate about rubbing. You insist you were meant for it. You record a short video describing your passion for being rubbed in a dynamic environment.

People tell you to just “play the game,” by which they mean play dead. Learn the tricks. Seed your resume with the right nouns. Crop your life to the safe ratio. And yes, if you need the job—and most of us do—play. I’m not judging survival. I do it all the time. I’m saying the game chews the player. You can win the round and still lose your outline. You start forgetting what your actual voice sounds like, so when they say “who are you?” you give them a list of KPIs pinned to a smile. The worst part is that, after a few years inside the machine, you genuinely don’t know anymore. I know I don’t.

We are told to “bring our whole self to work,” and then reprimanded for showing the half that doesn’t fit the brand. Show your curiosity, not your doubt. Show your energy, not your fatigue. Show your values, if they align perfectly with the company’s LinkedIn post from last Tuesday. Whole selves make noise. Noise ruins metrics. So the whole self arrives at reception in a nice shirt, waits politely on the ergonomic couch, and never makes it past the turnstile.

I suspect the cruelty of job applications is not accidental but constitutive. Capital needs you pliable. Nothing renders you more pliable than the anxiety of indefinite evaluation. The application season never ends now; even when employed you must be “always open to opportunities,” which is code for “always open to anxiety.” Keep your profile fresh. Keep your head down. Keep your brand immaculate. When you are always a candidate, you are never a citizen. You cannot organize when you are endlessly pitching your own worth.

What is the alternative? Don’t ask me for guidance, I’m not a consultant. Maybe shorten the distance between the one deciding and the one doing. Remove rituals that humiliate with no signal. Choose processes that treat time like a commons. If you must use the filter, open it to the weird, the not obvious. If you write job posts, speak like a human and pay like an adult. If you reject someone, send words, not silence. If you are inside the system, smuggle in decency like contraband.

And for the applicants, the walking PDFs: remember that your worth is not a conditional that returns true only when the right keywords are present. The machine will try to convince you otherwise. Do what you must to survive, but stash a part of yourself somewhere the dashboards cannot see.

Sometimes I fantasize about a portal that asks: are you alive? Are you sometimes moved to tears by a chord change? Did you ever fail in public and keep going? Do you know at least one bird by name, one neighbor by face? Can you sit in silence with a problem without converting it into a pitch deck? Have you said “I don’t know” out loud this year?

That portal won’t exist because it can’t; its outputs wouldn’t fit on a chart. But we—humans pretending to be dashboards—exist, and we still get to choose, sometimes. I once sat in a room where a single human gesture punctured the ritual, and the whole thing breathed for a minute. “Tell me the truth,” the rare human-esque manager asked, “what are you actually looking for?” And the candidate stopped performing. And the room turned from aquarium glass back into air. And we hired the person because, for one second, we remembered that work is not a videogame where you level up; it’s a set of things we do together, badly, until we learn to do them less badly. But that was the absolute exception, yeah.

Applying to jobs is dehumanizing, yes. It’s embarrassing. So if you must kneel, kneel with dignity and a knife of personality behind your back.

I know rent is due. I know the panic at 3 a.m. I know the humiliations. I’ve changed jobs so often, I’ve been on the other side. I also know that somewhere, underneath the portals and the posters and the word clouds, a simple fact remains unkillable: this will not last. Bullshit never lasts.

Thanks for reading,

Antonio Melonio

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