Dear Google, I Get The Hint
But I still think you're wrong
One of the biggest challenges in my post-academic life has been navigating this brutal labor market, which only gets harder the older you get (though no one tells you that). And while it’s true that I have two part-time 1099 gigs in academic consulting and human resources that help me pay my bills and continue contributing to my personal retirement portfolio, I would ditch those in a heartbeat to work as a full-time employee for a company I admired that offered a 401k/403b with matching employer contributions and/or employee stock equity. That’s why I applied to IT jobs in the first place: I appreciate their corporate culture and collective governance, our politics are aligned, and I’ve been using their products for a long time so I have an intimate understanding of their respective benefits and limitations. Additionally, being able to participate and affect the democratization of technology as an IT employee is a thrilling concept to me. Besides, I have a personal fascination in digital advertising and I think working for a tech company would have been the perfect place to cross-apply my cultivated skill set as a former academic that includes research, analytical, multitasking, task management, leadership, organization, conflict management, facilitating/delegation, & consummate communication and narrative skills. Not to mention a top-shelf work ethic and organic collegiality too. But as it turns out, I’m too old for Google. And though legally they’re not allowed to admit that out loud, I know it’s true because the proof is in the data. I’ll stick to my anecdotal perspective for the time being though.
My journey to nowhere began soon after I finished teaching my final semester at Bowling Green remotely in LA. I knew even then that I wouldn’t miss academia because I’d never worked so much for such a compressed salary before but I also knew that I would miss my BFA/MFA students and colleagues first and foremost. And miss them I did. But after I’d stumbled on one of Google’s ads on YouTube, I decided to enroll in its online Career Certificate Program in Project Management. I blazed through it in a month in a half and that was after taking a 2-week break in between. At the time, I figured that if I was going to make a clean break from academia and make a smooth professional transition to IT or professional writing or corporate leadership or finance or copywriting, then being a certified project manager would be useful, possibly even crucial, to help me get my first non-academic job. Among the many modules I studied and tests I passed along the way in my certification trajectory, I found myself not only enjoying learning about project management since I’m a literary scholar and literary writer at heart, but I also found myself crushing a tiny bit on the company that made the certificate program. At some point, I realized I wanted to work for this company that had given me and so many other people new hope for my future. I wanted to work for this company that had created a series of smart, accessible, engaging, & multimodal certificate programs in UX design, data analytics, cybersecurity, digital marketing and e-commerce, IT support, IT automation, business intelligence (whatever the hell that is), & project management that were improving and redefining people’s lives. And so I started applying to jobs at Google, Meta, Tesla, Nintendo, Microsoft in addition to the usual suspects in finance, copywriting, editing, journalism, writing. And that’s where my disillusionment really took off.
What I discovered is that tech companies don’t want to hire you for entry level positions in your forties. If you didn’t get hired at that company in your twenties or god forbid, your thirties, which is already too late in the game for the IT corporate ladder, then they definitely won’t hire you in your forties. In the erroneous corporate mindset:
You couldn’t possibly be the same age as (or even worse, older than) management
Forty-year-olds have at most twenty to thirty years to give a company, which isn’t as much potential value. And even though though the average employee in 2024 doesn’t stick around the same company for even a decade, theoretically, younger employees could work there for another thirty to forty years even though they almost never do
Older employees are out of touch with reality, their skill set and technical degrees are either obsolete or dated, they have a harder time adapting to the physical, emotional, & psychological demands of the workplace, & they probably work more slowly than 20-something employees
Employees in their 40s have a much longer work history and/or they’re more likely to have one or several degrees, all of which necessitate a higher salary structure, making them some of the highest paid employees at a company that is always trying to slash its overhead and improve its margins
I’m not a naive person. I am a pragmatic optimist who tends to see the silver lining in almost all things and people. I welcome new challenges. I rarely complain. I believe in working hard for the things I want in my life and I take nothing for granted. I don’t expect anything to be given to me and I have worked my ass off for everything I have and everything that matters to me. As a Midwestern mixed-race Asian American, I expect nothing less.
But it’s one thing for my mid-career journey to be difficult and it’s another for it to be silently impossible.
The crux of the problem is this: companies don’t wanna hire new employees in their forties for entry level positions because they would be twice as old as the average new hires and those jobs are given almost exclusively to former interns and new college graduates. Of course, a company will hire new employees in their forties for mid-career and upper management positions, but not apprentice or entry-level positions because that would be a cultural and workplace anomaly for the company.
But for anyone who has changed careers knows, an entry level position is the only way to make a professional transition from one career to another since no company is going to hire them for a higher ranking position without 2-5 years of relevant job experience.
And while interns, technically, don’t have two years of experience when they apply to jobs after graduation, what they do have are professional referrals and internships from that fit into their resumes perfectly. They have a work history at a comparable company. So it’s very easy for HR to envision them as future employees because former interns were already on their or a competitor’s payroll. And what I know now is that I won’t ever get hired at Google et al. because I’m too old, I have too many advanced degrees in the humanities, I don’t have any IT internships under my belt, & most tragically, their HR department cannot see how my previous work experience as a former academic and professional writer and editor and content creator might cross-apply to an entry level advertising or marketing or AI position. Even with one of their own project management certificates under my belt. Of course, I could easily connect the dots for them in an interview, but the point is, I won’t get that chance because their AI resume scanner doesn’t see the right words. I won’t get that chance because their own HR department doesn’t see the connection between a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing and advertising campaigns, product narratives, digital storytelling, & e-commerce, but I do a mile away and so does anyone else with half a brain.
The issue here is that HR departments aren’t for creative people, they’re for employees who need to follow rules, check boxes, schedule interviews, reduce/eliminate waste, & protect the company above all else. That’s their job, just like mine is to tell stories. That’s why they’re not looking for my narrative ability even though they should. They’re looking for a 22-year-old with pink cheeks who is just beginning their voyage into adulthood and the storytelling of advertising despite the fact that I’ve dedicated the past twenty years of my life and career to mastering that narrative skill set.
This is not to peg all of my frustrations on HR departments because I know they’re often understaffed and overwhelmed by the sheer number of online applications, which have increased their workload by a thousand percent. That’s precisely why HR departments over-rely on weeding out applications based on keyword searches and hard-and-fast cutoffs for minimum years of experience. That’s also why HR departments quietly punish resumes that aren’t fresh (i.e., that come from applicants with graduation and work dates that go farther back than ten years). Furthermore, almost every company in and outside the Magical 7 has been downsizing its payrolls for years now while pretending to be hiring again for the simple reason that it’s incredibly unpopular to fire people and it looks better when companies are hiring, but that doesn’t obligate companies to actually hire people. At they need to do is post new jobs and claim they’re hiring again.
Of course, when companies gets five thousand applications for two jobs, they can be incredibly picky in a way they couldn’t afford to be during moments of scarcity in the labor market. But it’s an employer’s market now and has been since the pandemic became a tourist trap in our rearview mirror. At the same time, there is something ludicrous about the current labor market that’s particularly sadistic to applicants over forty. Suddenly, no one wants to hire us even though Gen Xers have probably the best work ethic and are least likely to complain and the most self-reliant out of every other generation. And it still doesn’t matter. I have applied to jobs that I had no business applying to but knew I could rock if given the chance, I’ve applied to jobs that I was absolutely overqualified for (e.g., jobs that required two or less years of work experience), I’ve applied to jobs that I was overqualified for if recruitment supervisors were willing to treat my teaching experience as previous project management experience (which it absolutely is except they don’t see it that way), I’ve applied to jobs that only required a GED, I’ve applied to jobs where I met every single work requirement, I’ve applied to jobs where I only met one of them, I’ve applied to summer internships for college students with little or no work history, I’ve applied to jobs for professionals looking to make a major career change, I’ve applied to jobs that were two hours away from LA, & I’ve applied to jobs I absolutely didn’t want but was willing to suck it up because I knew how qualified I was. And each time I was either completely ghosted or sent a form rejection once that company had hired someone.
In fact, the two jobs I have now I got either because they contacted me via LinkedIn or because I knew someone who knew someone who’s hiring. This is what it’s come to.
There is no meritocracy in the labor market. There never was. There are just HR employees randomly hiring one of a thousand qualified applicants who seem most likely to follow the rules, accept a lower salary than they deserve, cause no problems for the company, & tick the most boxes for them.
Much like reading ten thousand submissions for a literary journal, there’s no legitimate way to narrow down a slush pile of that immense size to two or three manuscripts. There just isn’t. So, instead, editors contact other writers they know first and then if there’s any space left over, they publish a couple pieces picked almost arbitrarily from the slush pile to prove that they’re open to the general public. And referrals, internships, & connections are the way that applicants get past the first line of defense that is the HR department and become instant finalists because they’re already the product of curation. Not all of them will get hired, of course, but almost every applicant who gets hired will come from that shortlist. Everyone else gets the form rejection. At this point, even that has become exceptional in an industry that prides itself in thinking outside the box but hires people who are very much inside of it. And this is why I still keep applying to jobs in finance and IT and advertising with absolutely zero faith in the process now. I know it’s impossible, but then again, so was publishing my first three books and getting my last agent and getting hired for a tenure track job without a book at the time. I don’t expect to get hired at this point by companies that I love but I also have nothing to lose now. I think HR departments have forgotten how good Gen X is at grinding.