If you’re unemployed, it’s not your fault

Job searching has been terrible ever since Morbius came out. It typically goes something like this. You click on a post on LinkedIn, you upload your resume, then fill out your details because the resume’s just there for decoration, and then you hit submit and repeat the process a thousand more times. Congratulations, you have been rejected by ChatGPT.

So you think, “Okay, maybe it’s just my resume.” But I’m here to tell you that there are many things going on right now that are outside of your control. It’s actually worse than I thought. If you really want to know why you’re struggling, there’s only one question to ask yourself. When did I graduate?

One of the most overlooked factors when it comes to success in life is timing. In 2005, the unemployment rate was hovering around 4.9%. If you graduated around that time, you probably found a job relatively quickly. But people who graduated in 2008, unfortunately, were not so lucky.

It’s such a depressing feeling knowing that had you been born a couple years earlier, you could have easily found a career. You could have easily paid off your debt. Maybe even raised a family and bought a home and lived the American dream.

The worst thing about graduating into recession is that even after the recession is over, its impact on your life is actually long-lasting. There is a term called economic scarring, which I’m going to talk about in a bit.

But the other thing too is that as unemployment goes up in this economy, so does the rate of fraud. In June 2025, an identity verification company called Socure uh recalled a woman named Sally who applied to what she thought was an executive assistant job. The scammers used real employee names and photographs and asked her to basically purchase Apple gift cards to cover for some kind of equipment cost with the promise that the company would send her some checks to recoup that cost.

Sally went to the Apple store and bought the cards. And then when the employer told her to do it again, one of the Apple employees realized that it was a scam and immediately refused the sale. But, by that time, she had nearly lost $8,000. And the checks that employer sent her, they completely bounced.

Now, honestly, I don’t even know how you fall for such a scam because if an employer asked me to buy a bunch of gift cards, the very first thing that comes to my mind is that video from Kid Boga where he’s trolling THIS INDIAN SCAMMER. >> [screaming] >> A LOT OF PEOPLE ARE DESPERATE NOWADAYS, and they just want something to pay the bills and their rent.

In fact, the FTC reported about $500 million in losses to scam job openings. And that’s up from 90 million in 2020.

And it actually gets worse if you’re applying for a software engineering position because in March 2026, Microsoft highlighted a hacking campaign called Contagious Interview where attackers impersonated recruiters, and they sent applicants malicious coding assignments on GitHub.

These types of scams basically force you to limit your options as an applicant because, frankly, no one has the time to go and sift through all these jobs and making sure that they’re not malicious or scammy.

And even when the company is real, there may never be a job opening waiting for you at all. And that’s because roughly 20% of job postings are what’s called a ghost job. So, this is basically a position that is advertised, but the company’s not intending to fill it anytime soon.

Now, I looked at the numbers and broke it down for three main reasons. And reason number one is that companies are not hiring right now, but in case they need someone in the future, they’re just going to leave that job opening and basically collect resumes.

The second reason is some of these companies want to hire internally. And that’s because when you promote someone, you are legally required to post that job and make it public.

Lastly, some companies said they’re just doing it because they want to make it look like the company itself is actually growing. Basically, a form of securities fraud. Not only that, but it’s a a of time for the job applicant because they go through the entire interview loop, which can sometimes take a month or two, and even after that’s over, you get no feedback and just automated rejection letter.

There’s actually one company I consider the LeBron James of fake job openings, and that is Wells Fargo. See, back in 2016, an applicant by the name Don Banks went through the interview process, but then one of the managers responsible for his interview later admitted that the whole thing was fake.

Now, fast forward to 2020, Wells Fargo implemented something called DSR or diverse search requirement, which basically mandated that 50% of the job candidates were of minority backgrounds like LGBTQ members, uh women, uh people of color, and people that just main Lucario.

But then in 2022, a whistleblower revealed that Wells Fargo was actually conducting fake interviews for these diverse candidates. And because of this, they actually got sued by the shareholders for alleged securities fraud. But Wells Fargo ended up settling the case for $85 million, and they didn’t admit to do anything wrong, basically.

Another thing that’s really frustrating is just the ridiculous requirements in some of these job descriptions. Research published by the Boston Fed found that employers actually raised the education and experience requirements during the Great Recession. But the opposite is also true because between 2010 and 2014, researchers found that as the labor market improved, employers actually relaxed the job requirements.

So, if you see a job posting that is extremely picky, that, my friend, is a recession indicator. Another thing that I’m noticing right now is this K-shaped trend in the labor market. Those who have experience acquire more experience, and those without experience remain jobless.

This is especially true for companies that nowadays require AI for your day-to-day work. In order to use AI effectively, you have to be an expert in your domain. But in order to be an expert in your domain, well, you get the idea.

Oh, and by the way, if you get laid off, make sure you find a job immediately because a report that was released in 2021 by Harvard Business School found that some employers actually used ATS or application tracking systems to reject applicants automatically if they had more than a 6-month gap on their resume.

Another thing that’s making it very frustrating to find jobs is the investors themselves. And I’m talking about activist investors. In October 2022, Altimeter Capital sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg and the board of directors where they asked them to cut employment expenses by 20%. The following month, Meta actually laid off 11,000 employees. >> I take full responsibility for this decision. Um you know, I’m the founder and CEO. >>

Then in March 2023, they laid off 10,000 more and closed 5,000 unfilled roles in what Mark Zuckerberg called the year of efficiency.

If you don’t know what an activist investor is, it’s basically someone that owns a small percentage of a company to influence it in a specific direction. Whether that direction is good or bad really depends on the investor.

But one specific investor I still remember today is Chris Hohn, and he is basically a hedge fund manager that owns a minority stake in Google’s parent company Alphabet.

Now, at this point in 2023, Alphabet had already laid off 12,000 people. He was not happy. He wanted more than 38,000 people to be laid off. He wanted 20% of the company to be fired. All because Google was not profitable enough.

But really, at the time, they had already made 75 billion dollars in operating profit. And they had over 1.6 million dollars annually per employee as revenue. That is crazy. Like that is actually very good metric for a company. And he was still complaining that the 12,000 people that got laid off was not enough.

He doesn’t understand, or maybe he does understand, but just doesn’t care enough that if you lay off that many people, you’re going to impact the economy.

But this is the problem. These investors are so greedy. They genuinely don’t care. They just want to retire and let that problem be someone else’s in the future.

But these companies still need to get the work done. They have projects to complete and products to deliver to their customers. So, unfortunately, many of them resort to offshoring.

In 2016, the University of California, San Francisco, signed an IT services agreement with a company called HCL America where most of the outsourced work would happen in India.

One of the workers impacted by this was a systems architect named Audrey Hatton Milholland. Audrey had joined UCSF in 1999. And the reason why she chose that university is because they offered steadier hours with work-life balance so she can work and take care of her two children.

In 2016, she received a layoff notice. After 17 years working at the company, she had been replaced by an offshore worker.

Imagine what that call was like, just training someone who’s about to replace you. Hey, let me uh show you how the system works before I lose access to it. Sounds good? All right, let’s get started.

No, offshoring is not really a new concept. It’s been happening for the past 30 years and it’s very much cyclical.

But one thing that is different after the pandemic is that we basically got used to this remote work. And remote work was one of the best things that happened in terms of worker productivity. It’s also one of the worst things that happened because now employers realize they can just give the remote work to someone else overseas.

In a 2022 study, employers that had expanded remote work reported that it led them to offshore more of that work.

Now, keep in mind, even the offshore workers are not safe from layoffs. In July 2025, TCS, the IT services company, announced a 2% cut to its global workforce, which is about 12,000 employees.

Now, as I mentioned earlier, there’s a term that encapsulates all what’s happening right now in the market, and that is called economic scarring. And that’s because even when a recession is over, its impact on your life lasts much, much longer than you think.

There was a research that was done in the ’70s and ’80s that found that people who graduated into a recession actually made 9% less annually than their luckier counterparts. Not only did they make 9% less annually, but it also took them almost a decade to catch up to those that graduated during the better times.

And this is because long-term unemployment erases the skills and experience you’ve acquired during your studies. It also forces you to accept jobs that are less prestigious with lower pay.

Now, 9% may not seem like a lot, but if your friend makes 100k a year and you make 91k a year, depending on where you live, that’s about $500 difference a month.

Not only did they graduate earlier, but that means they probably paid off their debt much earlier than you did. They can build their emergency fund much faster.

And also, if they choose to invest that money, $500 over 20, 30, or 35 years, for example, can mean the difference of 1 to 2 million dollars extra if you invest in the stock market. And that’s assuming like average returns, by the way.

So, the timing of your graduation really does have a huge impact on your financial life. It also impacts a lot of the decisions that you make about your future. People who decide to buy a home or raise a family or find a partner, all these decisions depend on your financial stability, which is especially decided by something that is completely outside of your control.

If reading this made you feel hopeless, I promise you that was not the intention. I just want to bring awareness to all the fuckery that’s going on in the job market right now because in order to focus on the things that are in your control, you have to have awareness on all the things that are outside of your control.

We tend to judge people based on their outcomes, but we never judge our own success without looking at all the opportunities we were given.