A lot of younger people are legit shit at applying for jobs, like they don’t even read the job description and put the the position title… they just throw up a wall of buzzwords and copy-paste it and call it a day, showing the application reviewers they have no legit interest in the job.

Often the jobs being offered are opaque, confusing, or outright scammy. Often the people doing the applications are just bots testing the HR system for vulnerabilities or marketing reps looking to sell independent contractors.

I've lived on both sides of the hiring game, and in my experience just about the only way to get a job (outside of a job fair at a college or other meet-and-greet event) is via referral. The process of searching for and apply for jobs has become such a disorienting mess that simply spamming responses without bothering to read the job offer seems as reasonable a response as the HR method of throwing out hiring requests that nobody intended to read or respond to.

Just having basic social skills to like, demonstrate that you know what the company does and that you’d be interested in it’s mission, as basic as that is, sets your application above like 95% of the rest of them.

In a face-to-face interview, sure.

But in an entirely digital marketplace for labor, you're legit better off just throwing shit at the wall until you actually make contact with another human being.

You can't custom Taylor every job application, chances are it's fake anyways and you have to apply for a lot

the application reviewers

What, you mean the LLM that filters out everything without the bullshit and buzzwords before it ever gets to a human? 'Cause that's the only "reviewer" a carefully-written but not machine-optimized application is ever gonna see.

Edit: Going to just bold 'vast majority' since people seem eager to ignore that part of what I wrote.

I strongly disagree.

Unless you're born into a wealthy zip code (and your zip code of birth correlates strongly with whether or not you become successful), you have four choices as far as I can see it: Crime, a lifetime of debt for a college degree, risk death in the military, or work a dead-end job until you inevitably can't afford to live.

That is what the vast majority of young people are facing. They want to work, but even if they get a job, it doesn't keep up with the cost of living and neither ruling party is going to lift a finger to help them.

The downvotes are misplaced. I have seen this job seeking lack of skill first hand. Job wants a cover letter, work history, and notes about looking for a person with past volunteer experience to show that they are a community driven individual; since the employer donates profit to the community. Resume comes in and instead of cover letter, it has a long rant about they felt their upbringing was badly done by parents. No awareness about what was requested as the application process, and no self awareness about oversharing at a job interview.

And it's not isolated.

Had one guy answer all good answers to questions claiming to know this software package. 2 weeks in its looking odd that he hasn't finished the training package, turns out he was just on Instagram all day. Found out he had no clue about the software and why he was also canned at previous job. We have no issues training a good candidate, but if you just lie and hope to coast without doing anything...well there is the door.

The interest is in getting paid, not the work itself.

Why are you booing him? He's (kind of) right!

Lot of young idiots out there because of terrible parenting.

sets your application above like 95% of the rest of them

Bro if everyone does this there's still 95% of people who wouldn't get a job, like it's good advice for an individual, try to be elite, but ultimately it's advice we ALL got in school(i.e. youre not telling anybody anything they dont already know) and we ALL try that and 95% have to be left out of that top 5% by definition.

Which the interesting thing about your comment is that you demonstrate a huge flaw of all conservative rhetoric actually -- what's good personal advice for an individual CANNOT be any kind of coherent social policy. It's confusing the micro and macro, it's nonsense, like confusing general relativity and quantum mechanics. Yes heisenberg uncertainty principle is absolutely real but you cannot use that to talk about planets and stars. Yes, being personally financially responsible and saving more than you earn is great advice for any individual but you cannot use that as general economic advice, it would literally crash the economy.

Back to your example, what happens when a company is looking to hire three people and they get 3000 excellent applicants? They're gonna reject 2997 excellent personalized amazing applications.