Disdain

Applied: The Earle Uptown (line cook), Borders (book seller)
Rejected: Kaplan

Applying for jobs affords you the strange experience of judging and being judged at the same time.

Clearly, employers are judging me. They are interviewing me, going through my application materials, and rejecting me (or, more often, not calling back at all).

But I am also judging them and I've come to the conclusion that most of them are idiots. Almost every job ad on craiglist is peppered with childlike spelling and grammar errors, even the ones for jobs at supposedly reputable businesses. Most of them also seem to have no idea of what they ought to include in their ad, and many have apparently resorted to cribbing off of other ads. Thus meaningless words and phrases like "detail-oriented" and "self-starter" appear, gain traction, propagate in nearly every ad for a few weeks, then fade back into obscurity.

And yet I need one of these people to hire me and they won't. What does it mean to be rejected by people you don't respect? To be rejected by those with low standards would be the lowest of the low. But to be rejected by someone with faulty standards must mean you're doing something right. So each time I'm rejected I feel humiliated, but also a little vindicated.

Does my disdain for the job market as a whole have something to do with why I keep getting rejected? I guess that's possible.