And with AI written job listings, or management that knows fuck all you can get some hilarious requirements.
I saw a post on LinkedIn a while back basically saying "if youre going to make a requirement, make sure its a legit requirement" and proceeds to tell the tale of a company asking for 10+ years experience in a specific program. The problem was, at that point in time, the guy who had invented the program had only written it about 5-6 years previously. So, if the original creator doesn't have "10+ years" experience in a thing, because said thing didnt even exist 10 years ago, how the fuck is a company going to hire someone on that metric? (And, we all know someone in management positions who shouldve retired ages ago will key in on that one requirement, reject everyone then bitch that "no one wants to work these days" to all their fellow workplace dinosaur friends)
I can't track down the original story, but there was a case where hundreds of applicants were being rejected solely because the job description used an old name for a software program.
The company that made the software had rebranded it a few years ago. As a result, everyone who had the new name for the software was being filtered out by HR.
This position had been open for nearly a year, and every time the department manager asked HR why he wasn't being sent candidates, they kept telling him that no one was a match.
Meanwhile, someone who had applied and gotten rejected on the same day decided to bitch about it on LinkedIn. That post was seen by the manager, who got in touch with the applicant. The manager compared the resume to the job description, saw it was a pretty good match, and went to HR, which blew the whole life off of everything.
IIRC, the new and old software names were very similar, so it was a serious case of nobody rubbing two brain cells together.
Pretty much the whole HR team got tossed after that.
Place I currently work at didn't want ro hire me because I have some college credits. Meaning I was way over qualified to do a job I've never done before, or even knew existed.
I didn't even apply for the job. I got a phone called and was told to come in and see how it went. Someone else I knew, knew I really needed a job, so they talked me up I guess.
I was rejected from a software job for being overqualified because of my engineering degree. With zero work experience I was literally just trying to get my foot in the door, but I was too experienced for the starting positions because of a higher degree, and not experienced enough to get anything resembling the degree I had.
I guess we’ve worked at very different retail and food service places 🤣 college graduates are rare. And becoming rarer as ordinary degrees mean less and less. They only really become important in specialized fields
College graduates of what age group? Millennials? Or younger? We were sold something very different than the generations after us. They got to watch us and see what went wrong. Also, what level of employment are we talking? Retail and food service are industries. Not every position is entry level or done by solely 18 year olds (who wouldn't be millennials anyway).
In fast food you hire someone as long as they don't have an active warrant out for their arrest or something and then you hope you'll actually see them again lol
Everyone at that job is ready to bolt the second something goes wrong enough or they get a real offer
I agree and likely the person with a degree would be pretty structured and organized. I also think it’s low key, “we don’t want anyone with an education that might teach the high school graduates about unions, striking, and employment laws.”
They can deal with idiots cycling in and out, they can’t deal with a long term group of educated staffers that can call them on their bullshit anytime they try to take tips away from them
I was turned down for a job when I was 21 for going to college (UK so more like community college) when I was 18 and getting a basic qualification in media as they said they were worried i'd leave within a year or two to get a better job or go back to college.
There’s the problem with you bachelor having people, the milkshake machine is broken and will remain broken for the foreseeable future, why would you clean something that is broken, and even if it works it will be broken shortly
1) "everyone must go to college or you'll be homeless." changed the landscape over the last 20-30 years. when everyone is super, no one will be. its the baseline. it means nothing.
2) the quality of education over the last 10ish years has PLUMMETED. Even at historically respectable colleges. Colleges/universities (at least in the US) want to churn kids through as fast as possible. I know college professors at GOOD schools who were told they were not allowed to fail students who did literally nothing. students who straight up never went to class, did an assignment, and maaaaybe showed up for the final and got like a 10/100 were forced through. Professors all over the country will tell you it goes beyond "kids these days are dumber than my generation." they are legitimately helpless when it comes to even very basic tasks. My friends in academia have said 50-80% of them should never have graduated high school. The one teaches med students and has had several that can't use scissors. Again...med students. kids that already finished pre-med. And they're getting degrees.
So yep. The system did them dirty. You can't really blame the companies either. There's a very very good chance this 26 year old applicant with a bachelor's degree can't do basic long division.... The onus is not on employers to "just give them a chance." It isn't fair to the other employees they already have who may have to pick up the slack for a person that can barely read, let alone use excel.
Yes, corporations are largely evil and the greed is ruining us. But for stuff like this the blame isn't really on them. It's on the policy makers and the colleges for fucking over these recent generations and making them borderline unemployable.
I wasn't blaming the corps, though they do have their problems. As someone from the EU, and who's been to several countries, I can say - the decline in education quality has dropped worldwide, at least according to what I've noticed. In my home country, it went from having to redo junior grades because of failed exams, to practically what you described. Functioning illiterates being pulled through, no matter how well they do in their studies.
Imo, it's more of a societal issue. If the school system is too strict and too many kids are failing, the parents will demand softening it. When it's softened too much, you get whatever we've had for the past at least 10 years. Now we're (at least in my country) turning it around again, making it more difficult. It's fun to watch from the sidelines, but trying to survive in that mess must not be so fun.
They'll probably have to, and much sooner than that. Just having a degree means nothing if the "student" has no knowledge and/or skills to back it up after gaining said degree. That's why higher education means little in the job market now. Not counting the fact that the competition is through the roof - it just isn't anything to go by anymore, if you're an employer. People have always complained that "school" doesn't prepare them for real life, but now that's especially glaring. If primary and middle school doesn't at least prepare its students for further studies, it's a fundamental failure at a systemic level.
lol sorry. yeah, its been obvious we MUST do something for a long time. but we're good at identifying what needs fixing then ignoring it forever and convincing a few million backwoods rednecks that its in their best interest that theyre poor and dying.
On the upside, the US has what, 300M population? If there are issues on the federal level, that's a ton of people not to ignore. In my tiny country, we're less than 2M total. I lost count how many "reforms" we've had in recent years, including education. Everyone knows there are problems, there's just either no political will - or power to solve them.
Lol I worked back of house at buffalo wild wings in 2011 with a degree. They let me spin the wings in the bucket. I was glad they trusted me not to confuse the spicy garlic bucket with the hot buffalo.
Well back when I briefly worked at potbelly I told people I had a masters in technical sandwich engineering but I think they unironically started saying that themselves.
But in all seriousness, I was working on one at the time 😂
Listening to our Baby Boomer parents' bad job advice and following through on it only to get told by a visibly uncomfortable manager to fill out an app online is basically a core Millennial experience.
It's not bad advice per se, it was just outdated by the 00s/10s. In the late 90s, I got my starting jobs just by showing up and not visibly looking like a creep. Granted that worked for minimum wage stuff moreso than actual career positions.
I was talking to an elderly neighbor of mine about what things were like back when they still had the (now closed) factories up & running.
He talked about how friends would go on a bender, miss work or get fired cuz they were drunk, or whatever & when their bender would end a few days later, their friend at some other factory would put on a good word for them, and they’d go start a new job there. And if they fucked that up, there was another factory always looking for more people.
I did low-income work for years and one of the volunteer activities I’d do is help struggling people with the bureaucracy of getting jobs or signing up for assistance programs.
A lot of people, esp those w/ issues (substance abuse, mental health, etc.) have a really hard time with this kind of application paperwork, and even if they can do it, they look terrible on paper. Too many gaps, lack of qualifications, criminal record, etc.
And so you have people trying to get their life back on track, but getting hired is so hard.
It made me think that a big flaw in the current system is we just don’t have a well-functioning job market for the marginally attached worker.
Some people just aren’t stable & good long-term workers. But that doesn’t mean they can’t work period.
You kinda need a bit of that old-school flexible & non-committal work arrangement where someone takes the truck to the Home Depot parking lot and says, “I need 5 guys” and the first five who hop on are working that day.
I heard a story on the radio about a factory in the South that was forced to do something like that during the pandemic & found it worked well & has continued with it.
They just announce how many people/hours they need and there’s an app where people sign up, so if you’ve got time and need money, you can pick up some shifts, but if you’ve got other stuff going on in life, you can take a break from working.
I think you need a bit of that in a labor market.
But my guess is that the more regulations you have about workplace safety & training, or laws about treating gig-workers like true employees, or whatever, the harder it is to make this sort of less formal “show up & work and we’ll give you some dollars, or don’t show up and don’t make any money” arrangements work in the modern era.
I got hired for a role in late 2025 with 3 Teams calls. Most of my roles over the past decade were like that. Actually one place wanted me to work on a sample project, I just said no lol.
775
u/Beginning-Head-4006 Aug 18 '26
Applying for a job in 1975: you have jobs? Yeah, can you start tomorrow? Pay is double if you have a bachelor