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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
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Zoe Williams

Looking for a job? Who you know probably matters more than what you know

Happy businesswoman shaking hand with colleague at workplace
You have a better chance if your face fits and you can play nice. Photograph: Westend61/Getty Images (Posed by models)

It’s only when you meet a couple of people who have just landed a job that you realise how long it’s been since you heard of that happening. I was chatting to two nearly-graduates last week, who both had something to go on to, and fair play, they were chemists, and I’ve never met one of those before. It’s possible they always saunter into work.

The story you hear far more often from graduates is that it’s a wasteland – that every new post has 2,000 applications, all identical because they’re AI-generated anyway, and it’s an AI bot that reads the damn things, so it wouldn’t be able to tell a personal touch even if there was one. Applying for work is like throwing your hat into a ring that’s on fire: your chances of success are mythically small and your hat – or, if you prefer, your self-esteem – will be destroyed in the process.

This isn’t just entry-level jobs, though it’s maybe felt most keenly by recent graduates who were sold a hundred grand’s worth of debt as a passport to success, only to find they’ve taken out what was, effectively, a mortgage for a house that doesn’t exist. And it’s not new – more than 10 years ago, Steve Dalton wrote The 2-Hour Job Search, identifying exactly this: posting jobs online would result in so many applications that normal humans would start to rely on word of mouth.

So the solution is just to forget the CV and work first on your personality and then on your connections. And maybe that does the trick for individuals, particularly ones with superficially nice personalities. But it’s a terrible development for the world of work as a whole, privileging as it does people who already know other people, with a rapport that is likely not based on anything more profound than sub-verbal class allegiance.

People bashing their heads against this wall will not be in the mood for irony, but it is ironic that technology, far from advancing human connectedness, has actually landed us back in the middle ages, where you can’t get anywhere unless you know someone’s uncle. Or you studied chemistry.

• Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist

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