job searching as a neurodivergent being is a nightmare. i am not super committed to the concept of being a human, but fuck does the job search process feel so fucking dehumanizing.
After less than a year at a job it took me eight months to find, i am getting laid off. i had asked in the interview about job longevity and they up-talked all these future projects they would have for me to work on designing and running. i do not know what i expected, xtians are pros at lying.
so here i am now, browsing the classifieds most of my work day and it is a hellscape. fake jobs. jobs with hundreds of applicants who already applied. jobs with too low a pay for unrealistic requirements.
The worst of it al is how much AI has seeped into the job market at every level.
Most places do their entire first screening of applicants using an ATS. This means that you need to make sure your resume and cover letter have exact language from the job posting or their AI will toss your application out. Paraphrasing, equivalent phrasing, and personal narratives will not correctly parse in these systems. You will be rejected despite all your experience. It is so notoriously bad, the state runs workshops on how to apply so you can get past this initial screening. If a system is this broken, it should be scrapped.
i cannot help but feel that places which claim to want creativity but use ATS do not want genuine creative minds, they want some mild salsa.
What is even worse it that ATS is the reason you have to submit a resume and cover letter only to reinput all that information into text boxes. These systems cannot properly read pdfs with even the most bare bones formatting.
Then there is the pseudoscience personality tests. These are about as accurate in learning about someone as a Buzzfeed quiz (and at least a Buzzfeed quiz is fun). Arbitrary values are assigned to emotions and actions that are void of context that would help my neurodivergent brain determine if i would be feeling those emotions or not and if they are appropriate for the situation or not–no one is always “confident” or “Self-assured.” And what the fuck is “emotional” supposed to tell you. Beings are always experiencing emotions, and the level and type of emotion changes throughout the day.
If a job application makes you take one of these, they definitely use a cult-y “team / org building” system that is used in place of building genuine relationships and connections.
my soon to be former employer uses Outward Mindset, which mainly remind cis-het white dudes (it is created by mormons, barf) that empathy is important and that other people have feelings too. It also pushes principles such as “don’t gather up allies when facing a problem,” which feels like anti-union culture. It can also be use by C-suites and managers to ignore complaints and accuse staff of “thinking inward” when they have grievances.
Fuck this corporate culture shit!
At least with job applications i can just plop in the language from the job posting in my resume so that the hiring company’s AI likes it. There is no workaround the culture cult that decides your autistic ass is not a good fit because you feel emotions and need to verbally process problems with other people.
Fuck corpos, burn shit, lynch the landlord. i hope they are consumed and crushed by the systems they have created.
Do Androids Dream of Dick? Writings of a Queer Posthumanist 