Why Job Searching Feels Humiliating

My husband looked for a job for six months.

He’s capable. Skilled. Reliable. He did everything you’re told to do. Updated the resume. Applied broadly. Followed up. Stayed flexible. Took rejection quietly and kept going.

In the end, he accepted a job that paid less and sat far below his skill set. Not because he suddenly lost ambition or confidence, but because stability matters more than pride. He needed something that would last. He’s been there since.

That story used to sound like an exception.

Now it’s just how things work.

And that’s where the humiliation starts.

Job searching used to feel like an act of hope. You were reaching forward, imagining yourself in a different place. There was at least the illusion that if you tried hard enough, someone would see you.

Now it feels like asking a system to acknowledge that you exist.

People don’t talk about this part out loud, but they feel it in their bodies. The endless applications. The silence. The automated emails that arrive seconds after submission, already telling you no. Or worse, saying nothing at all.

The process doesn’t just reject you. It erases you.

So people adapt in ways that would have sounded absurd a decade ago. They put text in white on their resumes so humans won’t see it, but applicant tracking systems will. Not because they’re dishonest, but because they’re trying to get past a gate that no longer has a person guarding it.

That isn’t gaming the system.

That’s trying to survive it.

What’s happening now isn’t a failure of individuals. It’s the result of hiring becoming automated, optimized, and hollowed out. The goal is efficiency, not discernment. Speed, not understanding. Filtering, not recognition.

And when you don’t get through, you’re told to keep optimizing yourself. Rewrite the resume. Improve your brand. Network harder. Lower your expectations. Be more grateful. Be more flexible.

All of that advice quietly assumes the system is neutral.

It isn’t.

I have a bachelor’s degree. I’m burned out. I can’t use it.

Part of that is because of conditions I didn’t know I had at the time. Part of it is because of the cumulative weight of stress and responsibility that never fully lifted. And part of it is because of COVID.

I worked in human services. We were labeled “essential.” That word carried a lot of weight in the moment. It sounded like recognition. Like protection.

It wasn’t.

Being essential meant working through fear, scarcity, grief, and chaos while holding other people together. It meant absorbing trauma without the space to process it. It meant being praised while being stretched past capacity.

And when the crisis phase ended, the support disappeared quietly.

No decompression.

No repair.

No acknowledgement of what it cost.

Being essential didn’t mean being protected.

It meant being used until you couldn’t function the same way anymore.

That’s a pattern, not a personal failing.

But when you’re on the inside of it, it doesn’t feel structural. It feels like something went wrong with you. You start wondering why your degree didn’t save you. Why your experience doesn’t translate. Why showing up through a pandemic didn’t buy you safety.

You wonder why trying hard doesn’t feel like it counts anymore.

Here’s the part no one says plainly.

The contract changed.

There used to be an understanding, even if it was imperfect. Work hard, gain experience, stay loyal, and you’ll be okay. That contract was never fair to everyone, but it existed.

Now effort doesn’t guarantee stability.

Credentials don’t guarantee access.

Loyalty doesn’t guarantee protection.

Risk has been shifted onto individuals, and then individuals are blamed for not managing it well enough.

That’s where the humiliation comes from.

People aren’t just being rejected by jobs. They’re being rejected by systems that were never designed to see them clearly in the first place. And because the rejection is silent, automated, and impersonal, there’s nowhere to place the anger.

So it turns inward.

People internalize the silence. They assume the problem is them. They carry shame that doesn’t belong to them. They start shrinking their lives to fit what feels survivable.

That kind of damage doesn’t show up on a resume, but it’s real.

Naming this won’t magically fix the job market. It won’t bring back a broken social contract or make hiring humane overnight.

But it does something important.

It takes the humiliation off your shoulders.

It replaces “what’s wrong with me?” with “this system is failing people.”

And that shift matters.

Because dignity matters. Because people deserve language for what they’re experiencing. Because being unseen is painful, even when it happens quietly.

If job searching feels dehumanizing right now, it’s not because you’re doing it wrong.

It’s because the process stopped being human.