'Job market is a JOKE': Redditor expresses frustration with the broken hiring cycle
A post on Reddit’s r/GetEmployed has captured one of the most maddening features of the current job market. It’s not just that it’s hard to get hired, but that the process itself has become so dysfunctional that it barely resembles a functioning system anymore.
The original poster noted that they are applying to more than 100 jobs a week on LinkedIn. The companies repost the same roles the following week. No rejection email. No acknowledgement. Just silence, and then the same listing appearing again as if the previous week’s applications never happened.
“WHAT IS THE POINT?!?!" they wrote, clearly infuriated and frustrated over the whole situation.
It’s not just your industry
The first and perhaps most important response in the thread came from someone who preempted the usual instinct to blame a specific sector.
“What’s even crazier is that this applies across all industries. It’s not just a financial thing, or a data analyst thing. It applies to tech support, recruiting, automotive, logistics, education. Pick a segment, pick a seniority level and you’ll see the same thing,” their comment stated.
The universality of the complaint is itself significant. When the problem cuts across industries, experience levels, and job types, it stops being a story about one sector’s specific dynamics and starts being a story about how hiring works (or, frankly, how it doesn’t work) as a system.
The numbers people are putting up
Several commenters shared their own application counts, and the volume is staggering relative to the results.
“I’ve applied to 50-60 a week for about a month now, not one follow-up,” one user wrote. Another described years of similar experiences: “It’s been like this for me since even back in 2019. I have a job right now but I want better pay. I’ve gotten nothing but rejections and I don’t even know what I’m doing wrong.”
One commenter pointed out what might be the most absurd thing in the thread: “I got a ‘We are not interested’ email this morning from a job I applied to six months ago. Maybe they just haven’t gotten around to sending it yet. That's not a comfort at all, but a reality of this [expletive] we’re in.”
Six months to send a rejection. For a job that was presumably filled, or reposted, long ago.
Some commenters kept it short. “The job market is abysmal.” “Absolute truth. Unprecedented market. An unprecedented way companies do hiring.” “Even sales jobs are hard to get. Rare.”
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The motivation drain
The original poster also mentioned something beyond the practical frustration: the experience has drained their motivation for their current job. It’s something that connects the job search problem to a broader workplace psychology issue. Spending hours every week on applications that go nowhere, while watching the same listings recycle, erodes the sense of professional agency and forward momentum that tends to make current work feel meaningful too.
For other jobseekers navigating similar dynamics, i.e. LinkedIn full of familiar listings, application silence, the same roles appearing week after week, the Reddit thread is a useful reminder that the experience is not a personal failure. It is a structural feature of a hiring system that, in its current form, is not working well for the people who depend on it most.
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