05/26/2026
Panic, frustration, exhaustion, sometimes anger.
These are the emotions I hear from people job searching right now, and they make sense. The hiring process is genuinely broken, and most of what’s hard about it is not something any one person can fix.
So here is the line I would draw. You can’t fix ghost jobs, or ATS filters, or weeks of silence after you apply. What you can control is how you run your own search inside all of it. Knowing where every role stands. Knowing your next move. It doesn’t make the market fair. It just means the part you can control is actually under control.
On a hard market, that is not nothing.