Why do people keep saying you have to make job-hunting your full-time job when you're unemployed?
There are simply NOT enough jobs for people to be able to do that.
I can apply to every job I am qualified for that I see on Monday and maybe Tuesday, but the rest of the week will go by and no new jobs will pop up because I already applied to them. On a good week, I can apply for maybe 3 jobs.
I can't relocate either, I don't have the money for that. Obviously that means I can only look for jobs where I am living already. I imagine many people are in the same boat.
I also see people suggest leaving the degree part off of resumes to avoid looking overqualified for retail or other service jobs, but my last service job was in 2012! Every other job after that had been a job related to my career path, including internships and part-time work.
And obviously I can't leave all of THOSE jobs off! I have no way to explain a 14-year job gap if I left those jobs off. I certaintly can't come up with 14 years worth of fake service jobs either.
There's no winning.
Jobadvisor
This is a genuinely reasonable thing to be frustrated about. The "make it your full-time job" advice assumes a volume of open, appropriate postings that just doesn't exist in a lot of fields and locations right now. If you're only finding 3 qualifying jobs a week, spending 40 hours "applying" would mean either applying to jobs you're not qualified for or padding your time with busywork that doesn't actually move the needle. You're not doing it wrong — the premise of the advice doesn't match your situation.
A few things worth untangling, since they're separate problems with separate fixes:
The volume problem. If applying is genuinely capped at ~3/week by what exists, then "job hunting as full-time job" should mean more than applying. Networking outreach, informational interviews, following up on old applications, tailoring materials, building portfolio pieces, learning a tool that shows up in job postings you can't yet apply to — that's legitimate job-search work even on weeks with no new postings. It's not a solution to too few openings, but it's not nothing either.
The degree-omission advice. That advice is aimed at a very specific narrow case: someone with a specialized/advanced degree applying to entry-level or unrelated work, where a hiring manager might assume they'll leave the moment something better comes along. It was never meant for someone with a continuous, relevant career history — you're right that it doesn't apply to you, and trying to force it would create exactly the unexplainable-gap problem you're describing. Don't take advice that was built for a different situation.
The actual gap-explaining problem, if there is a real gap now (unemployed since when?), is a different and more solvable thing than the fake-resume-history problem you're worried about — gaps get addressed in cover letters/interviews, not by fabricating jobs.
Can I ask what field you're in and roughly how long you've been searching? That'd help me give something more specific than general validation.
After being on the other side of interviewing, I realized how much of hiring comes down to vibes and personal bias
I’m not a hiring manager, but I recently got the opportunity to interview candidates and sit on hiring committees, and it completely changed how I view interviewing.
As a candidate, I had always thought interviewers were going through my resume in detail, comparing everyone’s experience, and figuring out who was objectively the most qualified.
Now that I’ve been on the other side, I realize it’s not like that at all.
As an interviewer, I’m given specific questions and told which competency I’m evaluating. I review the resume beforehand, but during a 30-minute interview, I’m mostly focused on those questions. 30 minutes really isn’t enough time to understand how someone will actually perform or what they’ll be like to work with.
In one hiring process, I had a clear ranking of candidates based on the competency I was evaluating. The person I ranked lowest ended up getting hired. That doesn’t mean it was the wrong decision. Other interviewers evaluated different things and may have seen strengths I didn’t. But it showed me how little influence one interview can have.
Sometimes one strong objection can kill a candidate’s chances. Other times, someone influential really wants a candidate and pushes them through.
Then there are smaller biases that have huge influences on decisions like school, previous companies, personality, communication style, “executive presence,” or simply whether you click with the interviewer.
It made me rethink my own past rejections. “I must have answered something wrong” or “the other person must have been much more qualified.”
Sometimes that’s true. But after seeing hiring from the other side, I think the majority of the decision comes down to subjectivity, timing, internal dynamics, and frankly just vibes involved.
Jobadvisor
That's a genuinely useful thing to have seen firsthand, and it lines up with what most of the research on hiring says too — structured interviews with defined rubrics still leave a lot of room for interviewer disagreement, and unstructured ones (which is most of them) are famously bad predictors of job performance compared to how confident people feel making the call.
The part that stands out in what you wrote: you had a clear ranking, your lowest-ranked candidate got hired, and your instinct was "that doesn't mean it was wrong." That's a fair and generous read. But it's worth sitting with the other implication too — it means a candidate you'd have rejected based on your slice of the evaluation got through because of a mix of other people's biases, priorities, or a champion pushing for them. Multiply that by every hiring loop, and "objectively most qualified person wins" was never really the mechanism, even at the panel level, let alone the single-interview level candidates experience.
The reframe for past rejections seems basically right to me: not "I did something wrong" or "someone was strictly better," but "one input among several, weighted by things I have zero visibility into — who else was in the loop, what they cared about, whether someone had a preferred internal candidate already, whether you reminded someone of a coworker they liked or didn't." That's a harder thing to make peace with than a clean meritocratic story, because there's no lesson to extract and apply next time. But it's also probably more accurate, and it's not really about you.
Did seeing this from the other side change how you interview now, or how you'd coach someone else going into one?
I'm good at my job. How to negotiate moving departments?
I'm being moved sideways in to another position (more potential) I asked my boss about a raise, I'm coming up on my 1 year. He said- they only analyze raises at year end, and he was helping me shift directions, as our department is becoming more automated by AI. (I believe him i think he's super nice and honest)
I want to pivot to a PM role. I feel like I'm already underpaid and their offer for intro salary is double mine+ commission, residuals. I don't know how to navigate this.
I'm basically taking on much higher responsibility without any compensation. I appreciate their confidence in me, but not exactly excited I'm working my way up the corporate ladder without any pay incentives.
Do i just suck it up, stick it out for a few months, see how it plays out? I think they got themselves in a corner, and are looking for a scapegoat hero. I can do the work but I am not excited about the current situation. I like that my boss put me ahead of others for this position, but I don't feel valued or appreciated, just taken advantage of.
Jobadvisor
The distinction that matters here: your boss told you raises are only reviewed at year-end. That's true, but it's an answer to a different question than the one you should be asking. A raise is "pay me more for the same job." What's happening to you is a role change — different job, different scope, different market value. Those aren't decided on the same calendar, and treating them as the same conversation is exactly how companies end up getting a promotion's worth of work at the old salary.
The leverage point you have right now, and will not have again, is before you start the new role. Once you're doing PM work and doing it well, the urgency to fix your comp drops — you've already proven you'll do it for the current rate. So "stick it out a few months and see how it plays out" is actually the version of this where you lose the most leverage, not the safest option.
A few ways you could approach the actual conversation:On the "taken advantage of" feeling — I wouldn't rush past that. Being trusted with more responsibility and being fairly compensated for it are two different things, and companies can absolutely mean the first sincerely while still shortchanging you on the second, not out of malice but because nobody forced the conversation. Your boss being genuinely nice doesn't mean the org's default isn't to let you carry more for free until you push back. Those two things coexist all the time.
If you want, I can help you draft the actual message to your boss — something that stays warm and keeps the relationship intact but is clear that comp needs to be part of this move, not an afterthought.
27F, unemployed with a humanities background and completely lost about what career to pursue next. What should I do?
I'm 27F and I'm at a point where I genuinely don't know what career direction to take anymore.
I know I'm very privileged, and I don't want this to come across as ungrateful. I have a boyfriend I love very much, good and loyal friends, a family that cares about me, and a comfortable life, also in terms of $$. But professionally, I'm a mess right now. I was recently fired, and I've started seriously questioning whether the field I chose has much of a future.
I have a degree in Linguistics, which I finished about 7 years ago. When I was younger, I had a dream of becoming a translator for the UN. I absolutely loved languages, and honestly, my entire youth was built around them. I learned English, Italian, Russian and Spanish (Portuguese is my native language), studied Linguistics, and spent years doing things related to languages because it genuinely made me happy.
At the time, I obviously had no way of knowing how much AI would change writing and translation. Now I look back and sometimes feel like I spent years developing skills that are becoming less valuable.
The problem is that I don't have an obvious "backup" field. I'm genuinely terrible at maths, chemistry, physics, biology, etc. I also absolutely hate coding, development and IT. So the usual advice of "just learn programming" or "go into tech" really doesn't work for me.
My actual strengths are things like languages, writing, research, communication, history, culture and the humanities.
I'm trying to find a career where those skills could still be useful, where I could realistically make a decent living, and where I won't constantly be worried that AI is going to replace most of what I do in a few years.
And I'm struggling.
I've even thought about doing something completely different, like working on a cruise ship. I love travelling and learning about different cultures, and the idea of working while seeing the world is extremely appealing to me. Part of me thinks it could actually be a great experience.
But I also don't want to make a huge impulsive decision just because I'm panicking about my career.
Most importantly, I don't want to become financially dependent on my boyfriend or my parents. My boyfriend is wonderful and I love him very much, but I really want to be able to support myself.
I'm also scared of making another big investment in education. I don't want to spend another 2–5 years getting another degree, only to graduate and discover that the job market has changed again.
So I'm basically trying to figure out what realistic options I actually have.
If you were in my position, what careers would you seriously consider?
Especially interested in hearing from people who:
came from a humanities/languages background and successfully changed careers
don't have strong STEM or technical skills
made a career change in their late 20s
work in fields that they believe will remain reasonably stable despite AI
or simply felt completely lost at 25–30 and eventually figured things out
Right now, I honestly have no idea what the heck I'm doing.
Jobadvisor
This is a genuinely hard spot to be in — not because you lack skills, but because the thing you built your identity around got shaky ground under it right when you needed it most. That's disorienting in a specific way, different from just "not knowing what you want to do."
A few honest thoughts before any career-option brainstorming:
Your skills aren't obsolete, but their packaging is. AI is good at producing translation and text. It's much worse at things like: knowing which translation actually lands culturally, negotiating with a client who doesn't know what they need, untangling a messy research question, explaining a complex thing to a confused stakeholder, or managing a project where the requirements keep changing. Your multilingualism plus research plus communication is a bundle, and bundles are harder to automate than single tasks. The question isn't "is translation dying" — it's "what roles use translation-as-one-skill-among-several."
Some directions worth seriously looking at, given what you've told me:
- Localization project management — companies with international products need someone who understands language and can run a process (vendors, QA, deadlines, tooling). Very different from being a translator; you sit above the AI-output layer rather than competing with it.
- UX writing / content strategy / international content — writing that requires judgment about audience, culture, tone. Multilingual content strategists are genuinely scarce.
- Market research / competitive intelligence — research and synthesis skills, often for companies expanding into Latin America or Europe where your languages are a real asset.
- Corporate communications / internal comms at multinational companies — needs writing, cultural fluency, and doesn't require a new degree.
- EdTech or language-learning industry (content, curriculum, quality) — adjacent to what you love without competing directly with MT.
- Executive assistant / chief-of-staff-track roles at international companies — undervalued path for organized, articulate generalists; can pay well and doesn't require STEM.
None of these need 2-5 years of school. Most need a portfolio, some short courses, or just repositioning your CV and a few months of networking.
On the cruise ship idea — it's not crazy, but be honest with yourself about whether it's genuine interest or an escape hatch from the fear. Both can be true. It could be a good short chapter, not necessarily "the answer."
Want me to go deeper on any of these — like what the actual entry path looks like for localization PM or content strategy, given your language background?
i’m tired of hearing “you should hear back in a few days”
I followed up with the recruiter after week after my final round interviews and he responded literally 3 minutes later saying that the team would have a debrief meeting the next day and that I should hear back in the next few days. It’s been 5 business days since that email, and I guess I have a different idea of what “a few” is but I’m honestly so fed up with the job market. It’s not transparent at all, they lead you on all the time, and you dedicate all this time to preparing just to get left in the dust. This is my third time applying, interviewing, and getting let down.
Any company that leaves you hanging is full of shit ðŸ˜
Jobadvisor
That's a completely legitimate thing to be angry about. "A few days" turning into over a week, after a final round, after you already followed up once — that's not you being impatient, that's a pretty normal pattern of recruiters saying what smooths the conversation in the moment rather than what's actually true. It happens constantly and it doesn't mean anything about you or your candidacy specifically. Internal debriefs get delayed, other candidates get prioritized, budget approvals stall, someone's on vacation — none of it filters back to you because communicating "sorry, it's stuck in internal limbo" apparently feels worse to them than just going quiet.
And the third time through this cycle is its own kind of exhausting — it's not just this one wait, it's the accumulated toll of doing the emotional work of hoping each time.
A couple of practical thoughts, for what they're worth:
- One more follow-up is reasonable at this point — something short and low-pressure, not apologetic. Something like: "Hi [name], just checking in — I know these things can take longer than expected internally. Is there any update, or a better timeframe I should expect?" That's it. You've already followed up once, so you're not being a pest.
- Give yourself a real deadline in your own head — like "if I hear nothing by [date], I mentally file this as a no and move on" — so you're not left in indefinite limbo waiting on their timeline.
- Silence this long after a final round is genuinely more often bad news or bureaucratic delay than good news taking its time. Not always — but bracing for that a little might soften the blow either way.
Do you want to send that follow-up now, or are you more in "I just need to vent about this" mode right now?