Hey! Have you ever wanted to feel like all of your hard earned skills and work experience is absolutely useless? How about wanted to feel the crushing ache of rejection over and over again? Or maybe you've wanted to know exactly what it was like to bang your head against a wall repeatedly without facing the risk of a concussion? Well then maybe you should try: Finding a job in Vancouver with the current employment market!
Let's start by taking a look at this beautiful graph (so lovingly um, borrowed, from indeed.com; that is basically explaining why the job market currently feels so unforgiving.
In the graph on the left, we can see the difference in rates between population per year and amount of jobs created per year. We can see that the population appears to be going up almost twice as fast as actual employment rates, meaning that there are way more people looking for jobs than there actually are jobs being created. So even though employment rates technically are going up, the rates are not able to keep pace with how many new workers are in the mix.
Over on the right side, in our other beautiful graph, you can see how the unemployment rate is gradually creeping back up. Now let's look on the bright side, the numbers aren't as bad as they were, say, in the middle of the actual pandemic, but they are steadily climbing close to those record-low years in 2021–2022.
All this essentially means that it’s taking people longer to land work, and due to the splurge of applicants, companies now have the added benefit of being able to be way pickier with who they hire. It's a lose-lose for everybody looking for work.
You might think, coming from this blog, that surely this post is a joke or a comedy piece, alas no. This is written from the perspective of a first-time laid-off 23-year-old person, who's been trying to find a replacement job for three months.
It started a little something like this: my last job decided they were tired of having any decent people on their staff, and fired about half of the actually competent cashiers/front-end workers.
Then I reworked my resume (and would go on to do that about three times, with the aid of my parents, my friends, and finally a computer—even though I am an avid hater of AI)."
I came to think, why don't I try a hiring site? All these ads and TV commercials say how easy it is to get hired through sites like Indeed and LinkedIn. So I wrote up two profiles, one on each site, and hoped for the best.
Now, in three months—and having put out about 20+ applications a day, 2–4 days a week—how many of those applications have I heard back from, you might wonder? About six. To make that number even better: four of those replies were a no, and two were interviews that didn’t go anywhere.
Jobs be like:
Now ok, I shouldn't be so pessimistic, I'm sure that, in the common way that the universe likes to treat me, the minute that I actually finish writing this out and publish it, I'll have heard back from another opportunity that might actually pan out, but right now, it all seems very repetitive and disheartening. But all we can do is keep trying, right?
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