It’s no secret that being out of a job is usually a stressful time in a person’s life, full of pressure and uncertainty. It goes without saying that there are also usually significant financial and social implications, too. But what happens when someone has to endure these circumstances for an extended period of time? What about when many people do? Long-term unemployment is when a person cannot find a job for 6 months or longer, and it’s a situation almost 25% of the 7.6 million unemployed Americans currently find themselves in, myself included. And that number is growing.

There can be signs that layoffs are coming, but even if you see them on the horizon, actually getting the news can still leave a person blindsided. As layoffs, downsizing, and restructuring surge in workplaces across the United States, more and more now-former-employees find themselves wondering what landed their name on the chopping block as they empty their desk or locker, or as they pack up their company laptop in their home office to send back. This is often where the first seed of self-doubt is sown after losing a job, especially when some parts of a team are laid off and others aren’t. This may be especially true when a person formerly labeled as a ‘top performer’ finds themselves among the newly unemployed.

The reason you’re given for why you were let go is almost immaterial; regardless of whether it was due to budget constraints, performance reasons, or something else, the effect is essentially the same: you’ve lost what may be your sole source of income. For the reportedly 61% of employees living paycheck to paycheck, this could become an emergency situation close to immediately, even if they qualify to receive unemployment insurance benefits in their state, for which it can take weeks or longer to begin receiving payments. While some people may receive a severance package upon being laid off, they are often doled out inconsistently even at an organizational level, never mind at the national level, and they have begun to be less common overall in recent years. A reported 59% of Americans can’t afford a surprise $1000 emergency (never mind having an emergency fund that could cover 6 months worth of expenses), so unsurprisingly, in the interim after being let go and beginning to receive unemployment insurance benefits, many people have to resort to putting everything on a credit card (or several).

It’s common for the newly unemployed to need to take a little bit of time to adjust to their new circumstances, but soon it’s time to start hitting the metaphorical pavement sending out resumes and applications. Unfortunately, even if your resume is up to date with your latest employment information, that’s actually no longer enough to be ready to apply somewhere. This is especially important when you’re trying to stand out among hundreds of other applications. In 2025, organizations were reporting an average of over 250 applicants per open role. It’s still early in the year, so there is not much reporting available for 2026 yet, but it’s likely that number is higher now and growing with each round of layoffs.

With the widespread adoption of keyword matching by Applicant Tracking System (ATS) software used by employers, applicants now find themselves having to tailor their resume for each and every job application. This is because ATS programs are not sophisticated enough to parse when a person is using different phrasing than what’s in the job posting to describe the same thing; this means that even if the applicant meets 100% of the job requirements, or even exceeds them, their resume may never be seen by a person if they happened to use different phrasing than what appears in the listing. Making these updates is tedious and exhausting, especially when you’re also writing cover letters for each application. Oh, and don’t forget that ATS software also typically does a poor job formatting the information it’s attempting to parse from your resume into the online job application, so applicants also usually have to spend time entering and/or correcting that information in the online job application for each job to which they apply. The end result is that job seekers are spending serious time on each job application, which becomes both physically and emotionally draining pretty quickly. It’s easy to see how this can lead to burn out when a long-term unemployed person is often spending all day doing this, day in and day out, for half a year or more.

What about using an LLM to help speed things up? After months of receiving nothing but automated job rejection emails and repeatedly being chastised by probably-not-well-meaning AI evangelists that I should be leveraging AI to help update my resume in order to get through the ATS filtering, I decided to try using Claude to help update my resume for a job posting. (Full disclosure: I do not use AI in my day-to-day or basically ever; I’d tried ChatGPT at my old job because we were asked to do so, but most of my other previous LLM interactions involve me trying to banish Co-Pilot from every application to the depths of Robot Hell.) I actually spent more time trying to get Claude to provide acceptable output than I would have spent just updating my resume myself. Claude repeatedly tried to include a degree and experience I don’t have, even after being told not to do so. It also tried to change the job titles I’d held with previous employers “to better match the job posting,” as it helpfully (“helpfully”) advised. I quickly abandoned my efforts with it, feeling both frustrated yet vindicated.

Something that is not yet really being acknowledged by the mainstream job boards is that every day, job seekers have to wade through the ocean of fake job postings in order to find legitimate ones even worth applying to. You see, before you can even begin tailoring your resume, you now need to spend time researching the job posting and the company to determine if the opportunity is legitimate. “Whatever do you mean?” you might find yourself asking. Well, dear reader, as it turns out, we happen to reside in Hell.

You see, there are approximately a gazillion fake jobs posted on all the usual job boards. Phishing scams, ghost jobs, jobs that are never intended to be filled, all kinds of things that at best waste an applicant’s time, and at worst steals the applicant’s personal information (or financial information). Fake recruiters reaching out about “a position you’d be the perfect match for!”, just to ghost you after receiving your resume, or after a phone call or two. AI companies scheduling job seekers for an “interview” with an AI agent where the applicant is actually just training the company’s AI model via the “interview.” Scammers posting fake listings for well-known and trusted brands and companies, relying on the brand recognition and offers too good to be true to lull the unsuspecting applicant into a false sense of security so that they hopefully provide personal information (or even financial information) to the scammer. They are everywhere and their tactics change often. And all of this needs to be accounted for before even considering whether the actual job description is a good match.

Let’s say you do find a job posting that passes the smell test, now you have to go through the insane wish list of “requirements” that comprise most job descriptions now. It used to be that companies hired someone when most of the boxes in a job description were checked by their favored applicant, usually leaving some room for growth. At some point in the last several years, however, that got chucked out the window in favor of companies only looking to hire unicorns; now you can only get the job if you exceed all requirements, are willing to take an entry-level salary for senior-level experience, require 0 on-the-job training, and carry a vial of fairy dust around your neck with which you can sprinkle miracles onto the company’s shareholder value.

You can see the “unicorn effect,” if you will, quite clearly in some interviews. Maybe the interviewer is asking why you only have 3 years of experience with a tool for which they are requesting 5 years of experience, except the tool is only 3 1/2 years old. It’s also pretty clear after getting a few of the same boilerplate automated rejection emails indicating that the company has decided to move forward with a candidate that “better meets [their] requirements,” despite the fact that you meet every requirement in the job description and then some.

It’s incredibly demoralizing to be told over and over again by various robots that you don’t meet the requirements enough to even warrant interviewing with a person for a job you’ve been performing for years. I’ve been out of work for over 13 months as I write this. When I tell you that I’ve received hundreds of emails in that time that are ostensibly communicating exactly that message, I’m not exaggerating. While there are still companies out there that seem to at least have a person review applications before a rejection email is sent, automated or otherwise, sometimes you might get an automated rejection email as quickly as the same day you applied. It’s not uncommon to receive an automated rejection email without ever having spoken to a person with the company, only to see the same exact job posted again later that day or week. You probably will see it again weeks or months later.

Even for the most resilient among us, these kinds of interactions (or more often, lack of interaction) start to chip away at your confidence, sometimes leading to things like imposter syndrome setting in. It’s easy to start to internalize that maybe you aren’t qualified to do the work you’ve been doing for years, because surely you would have at least gotten an interview, or if you have been lucky enough to land one or more interviews, an offer by now.

And for those of us lucky to have had one or more interviews, another new(ish) hiring trend has entered the chat: companies ghosting applicants after interviewing. I would like to draw attention to that last part, “after interviewing.” Job interviews are actually pretty costly for the applicant. They often require one or more new articles of clothing or shoes. If the interview is on-site, there are transportation costs to and from the interview, whether that be gas money or fare for public transit, etc. If the interview is remote, the applicant must find an “appropriate-looking” backdrop and quiet place in which they can take the call, which may not be readily possible for a variety of reasons, including having kids, caring for sick relatives, or a number of other circumstances. All of these things strain the budget of people who already might be scrambling to make ends meet. And that’s not taking the cost of the applicant’s actual time into account. Time spent researching the company more, preparing for the interview, practicing interview questions, physically getting ready for the interview, traveling to/from the interview, the time spent in the interview itself. And then you wait. And wait. And wait. Unfortunately, it now is becoming more and more common to just not hear back at all. Spend some time scrolling the feed on LinkedIn, and you’ll run into people from all sorts of industries complaining about being ghosted after multiple interviews and assessments, sometimes weeks or months into the interview process.

And the thing is, interviewing isn’t just costly financially, or even in time; it’s emotionally expensive. Both before and after an interview, you might start to picture what it would be like working for the company with which you’re interviewing. What your days might be like, or your coworkers. Once you’ve gone through multiple positive interviews where everything is going smoothly and well, it’s no wonder that you might start to feel not just confident that you might get the job, but the relief that comes with no longer having to wonder what will happen and how long before you’ll lose everything once you can no longer pay your rent or buy groceries or pay your bills. You start to feel hope. Except the longer you go without that call back you were promised, the more likely those feelings will start to turn into variations of self-doubt, anger, sadness, and grief.

These emotions stacked on the financial pressure of surviving with no income can easily break a person. If someone is lucky enough to have been able to accrue savings before being laid off, they often have to dip into it before any unemployment insurance benefits they are eligible for run out. It varies by state, but on average, unemployment benefits cover 40% or less of the unemployed person’s previous salary for the time they are receiving the benefits, which means even if you are receiving unemployment benefits, it very likely isn’t enough to cover your base expenses.

I was lucky to have some money in savings when I was let go in February of 2025, but I still had to cash out my (very meager) retirement savings to try to stay afloat, and now that’s just about out, too. Please believe me when I tell you that it is soul crushing to watch your life savings dwindle to nothing while you are powerless to stop it. But don’t worry! I just got an email letting me know that [Company Name] is flattered that I would consider working for them, but unfortunately, due to an overwhelming number of extraordinarily qualified applicants, at this time they will be moving forward with candidates that better align with their current business needs.