What Is Even Out There Right Now?
Before there is a job opening to want, there are the hours of finding one that is even plausible.
Nobody counts this part, including me. It does not feel like work because there is nothing to show at the end of it. I have not written anything, applied to anything, or spoken to anyone; I have just been reading and scrolling. Some weeks, I spend more time searching for jobs than applying to them.
The first problem is that my work has no agreed-upon name. The same role is posted as monitoring and evaluation, as MEL, as program evaluation, as research associate, as analyst, as learning officer. It seems like each of those returns a different set of results, most of which are not the job. So, I run the same search six ways, in seven databases, on a rotation, because a posting that never surfaced is functionally a posting that did not exist.
In the early days of the search, I was inspired by the types of roles available and was excited to “shoot my shot” for opportunities where I knew that I would thrive. I advocated for myself, reached out to hiring managers, and was unapologetic about asking for referrals. I did my research, carefully framed my experience and strengths, and wrote beautifully crafted cover letters. But after months of silence and no results, I realized I had to be more careful with my energy.
First comes the filtering because over half of the job postings are not real or debatably not worth my time. Reposted for the fourth month. Listed with no salary, so I cannot tell whether it is a step up or not enough until round three. Titled “associate” and asking for eight years of experience, or titled “director” and paying like an internship. Onsite in a city I would have to move to for a wage that will not cover moving there. Remote, then suddenly not remote. I open fifty postings to find maybe two worth an afternoon.
But underneath the filtering, something more concerning is happening. I am not only sorting jobs; I am sorting myself. Slowly, I begin limiting myself to what seems permissible. Every listing is a small referendum on what I am allowed to want — too senior, don’t waste your time; too junior, you are too “risky” to consider; interesting but in the wrong country; right country, wrong work. Do this for enough weeks and you stop asking what you want and start asking what is realistic, and those become the same question so gradually that you do not notice the substitution.
And the reality is, no matter where you are in the job search or in your career, it doesn’t get easier. While people assume more work experience makes it easier, I believe there is an experience paradox. Early in a career, there seem to be infinite opportunities, but you are a risky hire without experience. Later, you become pigeonholed into a role and the opportunities shrink, and hiring managers view you as underqualified, overqualified, or unfocused if you try moving in a new direction. This makes you question your purpose and how you fit into the world, especially for motivated people who want to contribute.
That is the first thing job searching takes, and it takes it before a single person has told you no: the plain sense of what you are worth and what you are for.
The One I Let Myself Want
I finally find an opportunity that seems to fit. I read it thrice before I let myself want it.
It is the work I have spent years learning and training to do. I read the responsibilities and I can see myself doing each one. There is a moment, maybe only a second, where I am not simply reading a job posting anymore. I am looking at a possible future.
Then I catch myself, because I know better by now.
The next thing job hunting takes is my guard, and it takes it before I have done anything at all. My guard is taken from me because enthusiasm is scored. A candidate who has not pictured themselves in the role comes across flat and does not advance, so you are required to visualize it in detail. I begin imagining the version of myself who is good at this, who is contributing to the world in a meaningful way. I plan for how it would work logistically: the commute, where I would live, the clothes I would need. Not imagining it in the abstract or as a daydream, but assessing whether this is realistic and worth my time and theirs to pursue.
So I learn a kind of doublethink. Want it enough to be convincing. Do not want it enough to be hurt. Hold both. Every time.
Proving I Deserve It
I spend the afternoon writing the cover letter. The real one, not a template or AI draft, the one that proves I understood what they are actually trying to solve, which means an hour with their last three annual reports before I write a single sentence. I rewrite the opening four times. I make sure to send it within 48 hours of when the posting was published. I feel briefly good, the way you feel after any competent day of work.
Despite this, at the end of the week, I have nothing to show anyone. There is no output, nothing that compounds, nothing I can point to and say, look, I made that. Over nine months I have been essentially working full-time, and I have been paid for twelve of the hours.
I am not putting that number down as a bar. There is no threshold you have to cross before you are allowed to feel this. If you are two months in, or fifty applications in, and it is already hollowing you out — you are not overreacting. You are just earlier, but it does the same thing at every scale.
When Nothing Happens
I hear nothing. I follow-up once a week for a month and start to wonder if they are simply ignoring me out of irritation now. I question whether my approach is correct or if I would have gotten a different response, or any response, if I had followed their “process” better. I hear it is important to remain visible and that directly reaching out to the hiring manager after applying is good practice. But I have also gotten notices accusing me of trying to bypass the system or that someone is unable to engage because they are committed to a “fair and equitable hiring process.”
In the meantime, I live my life. Someone, who I know loves me, always asks how the search is going. They mean it kindly, but I don’t think they are ready for the real answer. I have a rehearsed line about effort and hope, and then I change the subject. The real answer takes forty minutes and ends with me crying at the dinner table and nobody signed up for that.
So, I perform being fine. That performance is its own job and the result is that the people closest to me sometimes have the least accurate picture of what is happening to me.
Meanwhile, the actual work of the wait is invisible even to me. I reread the message I already sent. I notice a phrase I would change. I draft a follow-up note and delete it, then draft it again four days later. I refresh my email in the way that is not really hope, just a tic. You cannot plan anything, because the answer might come Monday or might come in March or might never come, so you hold the whole calendar loosely and stop being able to say where you will be.
The longer a process stretches on, the harder it becomes to distinguish disappointment from confusion. Some opportunities end quietly. Others simply dissolve. Occasionally, I am not even sure an opportunity existed in the first place.
Twice this year, organizations scheduled virtual interviews with me and then did not show up. I blocked the time. I prepared. I sat there. Nobody came, and nobody ever responded to explain. I still do not know whether those were real jobs.
Hope Becoming Unavoidable
The interview goes well. I know it goes well because I have done enough of them now to tell the difference. The interviewer stays twenty minutes over. There is a shift where we are not doing an interview anymore, we are just two people talking about a problem we both find interesting.
This is when the dreaming stops being avoidable. I cannot leave a good interview without picturing it. Telling my family. Signing something. Working with those colleagues every day.
Then there’s a work simulation that takes three or more hours and is unpaid. I have done twelve of these this year and I was paid for three. Somewhere it stops feeling like an assessment and starts being free skilled labor. The employers can get away with this because candidates are forced to follow the process, desperate to be considered and desperate to prove what I can offer.
The Final Stage
I get close enough that hope is no longer a decision I am making.
This is the cruelest stage, because from the outside it looks like the good news. People in your life hear “final round” and get excited for you, so now you are managing their hope as well as your own, and you cannot say the true thing, which is that being here makes the fall so much harder.
I was right about this one, this position is real and is made for me. The fit is not wishful; the work is exactly what I have spent years building toward. I progressed through every stage cleanly, and I did it well.
Waiting for Permission
They tell me I will receive a decision by the end of the month.
The end of the month arrives. Nothing. I give it a couple more days, because following up too early reads as desperate and there is an entire etiquette here that only one of us is required to observe. Then I write a follow-up note that is warm, brief, rewritten three times to sound like a person who is not checking her phone at eleven at night. The reply comes back two days later. They are still in process. They appreciate my patience. There is no new date.
This is the part that tests me the most. Nothing is happening, but at the same time, my entire life is dependent on this decision. There is no movement and nothing is being done to me. I am simply being asked to hold still for a while longer, and to keep holding.
And the reasons are always real, which makes it impossible to be angry about any single one. The role is being reconsidered. The budget line has not been approved. The person leading the search left. There is a reorganization, a freeze, a director on leave until August. Every one of those is a legitimate thing that happens inside organizations. It is only when you stack them that you notice a process that consumed four months of my life was, on their side, a recurring item that got bumped down an agenda.
The asymmetry is impossible to ignore. I am given twenty-four hours to confirm a time, forty-eight to complete a task, and my responsiveness is being evaluated. They take eleven weeks and claim it is just the process.
So I wait, and while I wait, I do the hidden arithmetic. I resign myself to applying for the thing I found last week, feeling disloyal to a hope I have not been given permission to hold. I take the interview that conflicts, hoping that I will have to cancel once I get the other offer. I am negotiating with an organization that does not know it is in a negotiation, and that has not agreed to anything, and that may have already filled the role.
That is what this stage takes: the ability to be anywhere else. It takes my presence in my own life, for as many weeks as they need, on a timeline I will never be told.
The Longest Silence
“Thank you for your time and interest in working with us. After careful consideration, we regret to inform you that we have decided to offer the position to another applicant, whose experience more closely aligns with our current needs.”
I was not chosen. It was an automated email, that didn’t even include my name in the greeting, and was sent at 2 AM.
Nobody tells me why they went with someone else. Only three organizations out of more than 450 applications and 27 interview processes even gave me a response when I asked for feedback, even if the feedback was only that someone else was a better “fit.” Everyone else went quiet, including the ones where I felt something real was built in the room.
I wait weeks to months for a rejection from a dream I wish I never had. I have to tell my family, friends, professional references, and the kind people who referred me, that this one didn’t work out. They are always surprised and ask what the reason was, or tell me how awesome I am in disbelief that the organization could have gone a different direction. I have no response.
The standard is “fit,” and nobody defines it, and you cannot correct against a criterion no one will name. What happens in that vacuum is that I fill it myself. The mind does not sit patiently in not-knowing. It generates an explanation and the explanation is always about me — my answer to the third question, the way I said it, something in my face. I will never find out, so it can never be disproven, so it stays. That is the loss that does the deepest damage.
And some opportunities seem to end before I ever speak to a person. There are roles I would take that look like a step down, and I have reasons, and they are good reasons and they are mine, and I will never get to say them, because someone read the resume and decided I would leave within a year. Decisions about my life, made in rooms I am not in, on assumptions about what I want, by people who could have asked. That is not rejection. It is being pre-declined. Sometimes it feels like hiring teams are more focused on minimizing risk than actually finding the best candidate.
None of it requires anyone to be cruel, which is somehow worse. Eight hundred people apply in a week. At that volume, a hiring team does not have to recognize a good candidate, they can wait for a perfect one. At that volume, a recruiter cannot hold eight hundred resumes in their head as people. There is no villain and nobody to appeal to. The system produces this while everyone inside it behaves reasonably.
The Person Who Does Not Get to Exist
What is left is grief, and it is not for the job itself.
I understand why nobody recognizes it. Nothing was taken. Nothing was ever mine. There is no ritual for this, no one sends anything, and the honest description — I am mourning something that never happened — sounds, said out loud, like a failure of proportion.
But I had not only been imagining a job. I had been imagining a person.
She got up early because the work was worth it. She had colleagues who knew what she was like on a hard day. She was tired in the specific way of a person whose exhaustion is buying something. I knew what her mornings looked like. I knew which parts she found tedious.
That is the level of detail you produce over four months of a hiring process, and I was not indulging; I was doing what was required of me, because you cannot answer “where do you see yourself in this role” convincingly without going there and looking around.
She does not exist now. She is not delayed or postponed; there is no future in which she happens, because she was made entirely of that one job. And I am the only person who ever met her. I cannot introduce her to anyone. I cannot explain that I am grieving someone they have no way to picture, so I say the interview did not work out, and they tell me the right opportunity is coming.
That is what it takes at the end. Not the work, not the salary, not the city. A person I had already started becoming, who now never gets to be.
The Next Morning
And then you do it again. I struggle to keep up with the cycles of hope and disappointment, because despite all the unseen labor, this is actually the most exhausting part.
That is what I most need people to understand. The hardest part is the requirement to manufacture fresh hope the following morning, on schedule, indefinitely, with no evidence that any of it accumulates into anything.
I have been here too many times. I made it to ten final stage interviews out of forty-one total interviews, across twenty-seven organizations in fifteen different cities. Each one of those involved an entire life I had to imagine well enough to be convincing about, and then put down.
I am not going to tell you it made me stronger. It has made me question my judgment and my worth and whether I am seeing any of this clearly, and I am still inside it, and I do not know how it ends.
But I know this much. If you are in it too, you are not soft and you are not failing. You are doing hundreds of hours of skilled, unwitnessed, largely unpaid work into an unforgiving and impersonal process. The pain is not a flaw in you. It is evidence that you cared about the outcome.
And if you are not in it, but you love someone who is, stop asking whether there is news. Ask whether they want to talk about it or want a few hours where it does not exist. Do not tell them something will turn up. They know it might not, and hearing it from someone safe is lonelier than silence.
I still ask the question at three in the morning. If the opportunity I was right about and right for did not choose me, how will anyone else?
I do not have the answer. I am writing it down anyway, in case you are asking it too — so that at least tonight, neither of us is asking it alone.