'If nobody wants to hire us, we'll hire ourselves': Reddit's unemployed job seekers jokingly propose starting their own company
A post on Reddit’s r/jobsearchhacks has gone viral, with nearly 2,000 upvotes and over 350 comments, for capturing the job market’s exhaustion in a darkly funny proposal: stop applying, pool everyone’s skills, and just start a company.
“At this point we should all just stop applying, pool our skills together, and start a company,” the original poster wrote. “We’ve already got marketing people, programmers, designers, accountants, HR, nurses, engineers… everything. If nobody wants to hire us, we’ll hire ourselves.”
What Reddit said
The comedic responses arrived quickly. “I call being the CEO. I have zero experience, but based on what I’ve seen to this point, neither do any of the other CEOs,” one wrote. Another offered: “I’ll carry the clipboard and look like I’m always rushing to an important meeting.” A third claimed mastery of an equally vital corporate function: “I’m good at ‘meetings.’”
The governance proposal also drew support: “Sounds amazing, I vote for skills-based hiring and no resumes!”
One commenter admitted the job market had pushed them toward an alternative path they had not planned on: “I’m considering being a content creator at this point. It’s the worst.”
The most substantive response actually considered the post as something that may have actual structural logic: “This is actually not a bad idea. We should form decentralised organisations whose sole purpose is to provide open source and cheap alternatives. We’d have to work for free or pennies because barely any capital is involved. The whole point is so that we create competition, and if they want to reduce competition, they’d have to hire us.”
One commenter noted that the joke of taking matters into their own hands had already become reality in their household: “No lie, this is why my husband and I started our own business. We were tired of getting laid off.”
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The gap between “we have all the skills to build something” and “we cannot get hired to apply those skills” is where a lot of the current job market’s dysfunction resides. That’s why the post resonated with many, because it posits that if the system won’t let you in, you build a door yourself.
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