Question
I’ve made hundreds of job applications. My wife accuses me of being depressed and full of pessimism because my 5-month-long job search has yielded nothing but frustration. I don’t like her thinking of me this way. Your website is all about what to do and what not to do to find the right job. I haven’t tried everything you espouse but I’ll try more. But I’ll be honest with you about what I cannot say to my wife: All the job search advice in the world is useless when I feel so helpless! There, I said it. You wrote somewhere that you’re not a therapist but I see you have a degree in psychology from Stanford. Is there SOMETHING you can tell me to help me out of this hell of pessimism? Sorry if this is the wrong venue for job-search depression!
Nick’s Reply
Psychologist Martin Seligman taught dogs and people to feel helpless and to be pessimistic. It explains why your job search is failing.
Learned pessimism and learned optimism
Seligman put dogs in an enclosure that delivered mild shocks through the floor. Nothing the dogs did would stop the shocks. They were helpless. A control group could stop the shocks by pressing a panel, which the control dogs did. The next day Seligman put both groups back in the shock cage (one dog at a time in all cases) but this time he installed a low partition the dogs could jump over. The first group curled up in the corner, whined and endured the shock. These dogs had learned to be helpless. The second group quickly learned to jump the partition to escape the shock.
Related experiments have been done with humans using loud noise instead of shocks. One group had access to a control switch to stop the noise, another could not stop it (the helpless group). Then both groups were given tests to assess coping behaviors. The first group demonstrated learned optimism. The second had learned to give up.
Why job hunting gets you depressed
People experience staggering rates of failure when job hunting. This teaches them that nothing they do matters, so they keep doing what doesn’t work. Helpless job seekers learn to be pessimistic and they get depressed.
They:
- compulsively apply to jobs
- get quick rejections
- feel powerless
- keep applying anyway
- become more pessimistic
- rinse and repeat.
Seem familiar?
Seligman’s book, Learned Optimism, leads us to understand that job seekers develop a pessimistic explanatory style that keeps them addicted to job boards and other repetitive and ineffective job search methods. Here’s how they explain their failures at getting a job:
- “It’s all my fault. I’m not good enough!”
- “No one wants me.”
- “I’ll never get hired.”
- “Job hunting is hopeless.”
Sound familiar? You feel defeated —> you apply to more jobs —> you get more rejections —> your pessimism deepens —> you become depressed.
Accurate optimism defeats learned pessimism
What do you do to change your deep feelings of helplessness? Well, you’re on a good start by spending time here, in a community where we dare to dispute what the job boards, HR and applicant tracking systems have taught you. Challenge those beliefs with evidence:
- “This rejection was automated.”
- “The company probably never saw my résumé.”
- “Job boards produce almost no hires.”
“This method doesn’t work!” Not “I don’t work.”
Instead of “This rejection proves I’m not good enough,” apply an accurate interpretation: “This rejection proves job boards aren’t a hiring channel. I need a different strategy.”
It’s not your fault: Take control of your job search!
Please tell your wife you’re depressed because you accepted a lie. The broken employment system has taught you to be helpless. When I teach Ask The Headhunter methods “live” to groups of people, I immediately explain why they feel so down: “Everything you know about job hunting and hiring is wrong!”
It’s not your fault!
This reframing is the psychological pivot that frees job seekers from pessimism and from compulsively applying randomly for more and more jobs. Learned optimism restores the belief that “My actions can influence outcomes.” It helps you take back control of your job search. This is the opposite of learned helplessness.
Learned optimism isn’t about proving Ask The Headhunter is right. It’s about thinking more accurately so you can act more effectively. Job seekers like you get depressed and demoralized because they blame themselves for failures caused by a broken system. Once they stop personalizing job-board rejection, their confidence returns — and so does their ability to use methods that actually work.
Of course, that’s what Ask The Headhunter is all about!
Can you think of a “job opportunity” that messed with your mind? I wanted to step away from what will get you a job to discuss what will fix your frame of mind after the employment system drives a truck through your self-confidence. Learned optimism, helplessness and learned pessimism are important topics in psychology that apply directly to job hunting. Was this helpful to you? What gems of psychology can you drop on us?
: :
“No one wants me.”
The Algorithm Doesn’t Want Experience. It Wants Compliance.
We talk endlessly about tech bias, but we rarely talk about the silent gatekeeping baked into modern HR stacks like Workday. Somewhere along the line, automated hiring filters were taught to treat decades of deep enterprise experience not as an asset, but as a liability.
When your resume spans 25+ years of system architecture, crisis management, and hard-earned operational grit, automated parsers often look at the timeline, calculate the math, and quietly drop you into the reject pile.
The irony is thick. These platforms are designed to optimize efficiency, but they systematically screen out the exact people who know how to keep complex systems from breaking in the first place because they’ve already seen every failure mode imaginable.
Experience isn’t a bug. It’s the architecture that keeps the whole enterprise running. It’s time we stop pretending automated black boxes are neutral arbiters of talent.
Call out to Martin Seligman and Positive Psychology for the win!
Think of your search as a creative challenge that bypasses the job boards. If you had an opening what would catch your interest to pursue a candidate further outside of HRs grasp. That’s your creative challenge!
I was out of work during the recession of 2001 (When I was working in telecom and the telecom industry collapsed) and again for a couple of years during the “great recession” of 2009-2011. Here’s what I did to be proactive during those periods. 1) find ways to reduce expenses to ease the financial pressure (tell the car insurance that I wasn’t commuting anymore, buy a hair trimming kit so I didn’t need the barbershop, eliminate eating out and prepared foods, etc.), 2) seek out honest headhunters like Rick instead of robocalls from foreign based body shops that couldn’t deliver, 3) I taught job-seeking skills at our state department of labor Professional Services Group (which doesn’t exist anymore), 4) took a part-time minimum wage job stocking shelves at Michaels craft store where I was thrilled to find out that despite my age and my masters degree in computer science I hadn’t lost the ability to do a job that teenagers routinely do, 5) kept note cards of every place I contacted with a note for when they said I could contact them again. So this is my advice: do anything you can to be proactive and teach your brain that there you have value and free agency, like mowing the lawn of your elderly neighbor, volunteering at a soup kitchen or senior center or hospice, taking that part-time job at minimum wage just so have a place to show up and receive a paycheck, know you can stop doing what doesn’t work and that every recession that has ever occurred was much shorter than the job boom that followed it.
One more thing. Discuss your new strategy with your family so they understand what your new strategy and can participate with the cost-saving efforts. Oh, and cut up your credit cards, to make sure you don’t incur more debt during this time.
Great practical advice, Robert! Did we ever meet at PSG?
Yes, I remember hearing you speak at PSG a few times. It’s why I was so excited to sign up for your newsletter, and recommend your site for anyone who I hear is job hunting.
@Robert: Thanks! I did a lot of pro bono presentations for NJ PSG. Didn’t know it was dissolved. It was a very valuable service to job seekers. Too bad. It was a real organization with real meetings where people made real, lasting contacts and friends that helped their job searching. Don’t get me wrong. Online and AI are great, but if they don’t quickly lead you to real people in-person, then don’t waste your time. This is all about real, live shared experiences with other people.
https://www.asktheheadhunter.com/11709/good-networking
It doesn’t take a psyche degree to figure out that elements of Stockholm Syndrome apply here.
Heck, even someone with a GED and access to the web can find out in short order about the devastating “connection” the abused can fall prey to with their abuser – leading to “it’s my fault” pessimism.
Extract yourself from job board (the “abuser” here) insanity.
Well, my comment is more of humor than advice. But, as a 69 yr old, who got let go from a teaching position, in a low population, rural area, I have had some time to think and reflect. I am, (lol) also in the “dating” market. I have applied at some places (Dollar General, a local hospital for laundry services), and get no reply. I have come to the ‘idea’ that finding a (good) date, and a decent job….and kind of “one & the same’. Ghosting, no reply to a message, breadcrumbing, non-existent jobs on a webpage, fake profiles, and other very similar tactics and comparisons. I think someone could write a decent short book about it.
Two thoughts:
1. I hope those poor dogs were rehabilitated after the experiment.
2. Reiterate advice above: Reduce expenses and find something to do, preferably paid, but consider free or trivially costly (e.g., maybe volunteer somewhere that costs $5 in gas to get there). Just prove to yourself and to others that you are useful. Under “reduce expenses”, do not be afraid to consider radical moves.
Oh, and: if there’s a temp agency nearby, connect. I’ve been hired full-time twice from temp assignments. Plus, you get paid.
All of you are sharing brilliant thoughts and I agree with most of them. However, I would also suggest playing with the algorithm and using it to your advantage. Sometimes, you just can’t bypass algorithms whereas the most important, in my view, is to get the foot in the door and get to talk to someone you want to talk to. So I had a chat with ChatGT and asked it to rewrite my CV, I did not like very much what I saw the first time, but thought that it actually reframes my thinking about myself. So I further questioned and challenged ChatGPT, and got an explanation that what I was using in my CV will not get me the jobs (or interviews0 that I am actually looking for. Chat convinced me and I have got a CV that I would have never written myself, just because it is a bit…. “pathetic” – but not for the algorithm. And I got a first interview right after sending it!
Yet another thought – I have learned from my mistakes and I would not repeat them again (and I was jobless for quite a wile on a couple of occasions). Namely – don’t wait for *that* job. Accept other, smaller and interim roles, just to stay on the market and be connected, get the opportunity to talk to people, understand how the market works, who knows whom, etc. And volunteer, time permitting – but you should be able to find that time. Volunteering can also be part of your professional accomplishments and CV, and you may get recommendations later on.
Thanks, Nick, once more, for your newsletter. It has really been reshaping my thinking about the job market and HR since over 10 years.