You are a job seeker and have probably used a CV designing website, or perhaps an app on your phone that helped you put one together. You probably did not take any lessons or course on how to write a CV. I mean, how difficult can it be to write a two-page document, right?

So you went on LinkedIn and submitted a bunch of applications for all the positions that are either similar to your desired role or do things that are distantly related, using the same CV for all of them. You applied to jobs on many other platforms like Jobberman, Indeed, Wellfound, and whatnot. Making sure you submitted at least 50 applications without remembering even 2% of the jobs you applied for. You kept no record and never tracked them in case you got called for an interview.

Then you were met with a long silence. None of the jobs responded. Or maybe two responded after seven months of applying (not that you remember), asking you to pick from two available interview dates. Unfortunately, both fell during your working hours and you could not make it.

You informed them of your unavailability, and they responded that they would be moving on to other candidates. Only for you to see the exact same job posted again two months later.

You managed to land one interview, and the interviewer told you she was having internet/device issues and would not be able to turn on her video. But do you dare tell her that it would be difficult to hold an interview without seeing her face? You awkwardly answered her questions, staring at a blank screen, feeling like someone talking to themselves in an empty room. There was no rapport between you two, and honestly, how could there be? Afterwards, silence again. When you followed up by email, they told you that you were not what they were looking for. Perhaps they needed someone who could hold a conversation with a faceless screen without feeling insane. A truly valuable skill for a job, one would imagine.

So you decided on your own that applying online was a waste of time. You had genuinely tried and it had not worked. You started networking instead. You began connecting with strangers on LinkedIn to grow your network, because your network is your net worth, right? So they say.

Then another reality hit you. A lot of people will not accept your connection request on LinkedIn, especially if your profile does not look impressive or if it appears that you are just starting out. You hit the weekly connection limit and over 80% of those requests were ghosted. You did it anyway. Eventually, you gave up entirely on finding a job online and shifted focus to physical locations around you.

That was not easy either. You had to walk long distances or spend money on transportation, moving from one establishment to another, dropping off printed CVs and hoping someone would call. And then you realised you were burning through both physical and financial resources just to land something. To make matters worse, your immediate social circle offered little help. Some have known you too long and for whatever reason do not trust you to perform well in a professional setting. Others may feel that helping you succeed would somehow threaten their own position. Who knows their reasons? But the support simply was not there.

You can see how the story grows bleaker and bleaker as the job search evolves through different strategies.

Now let me offer another perspective, this time from the employer’s side.

Mr. Jude decides to start his own company after working for years, saving enough money or taking out a loan, confident the business will generate revenue. He has limited funds, which he has been keeping in a mutual fund to earn some interest while he figures out the best strategy for running things on a tight budget. He is well aware that if he does not manage his new company carefully, he will go bankrupt. And he has seen the statistics: over 95% of startups in his chosen industry fail within two years of operation.

He also quickly learns that most employees do not care about his business the way he does. They need food on the table and a roof over their heads, which is fair. But many will leave the moment a better offer comes along, regardless of whatever investment the company made in developing their skills. Their loyalty follows the money, and that is simply the reality.

Jude spends $1,000 hiring a web developer to build his company’s website, then another $200 on a legal practitioner to handle registration and draft the necessary documents. His first few hires turn out to be poor decisions because Jude does not know how to hire well. He based everything on years of experience, college education, and a few credentials. That should be enough to qualify someone, right?

His team included an HR manager, a legal officer, an accountant, a graphic designer, and a marketer. The HR manager was corrupt, hiring her friends and family for roles while rejecting better-qualified candidates. The lawyer had outdated knowledge and implemented corporate policies that had long since been superseded. The graphic designer had a CV that was 80% fictional and had no real grasp of professional design principles, which caused visitors to bounce off the website almost immediately. By the time Jude looked at his financial statements, he had spent enough on operations alone to have bought himself a new car.

He also realised that offering cheap salaries would filter out the quality candidates he actually needed. He had to find the balance between paying enough to attract genuinely capable people without stretching his already thin budget. He even considered recruiting unpaid interns, but that came with its own risks: slower output, the time cost of training them, and the very real possibility that inexperienced interns would inadvertently expose confidential company information simply because they did not fully understand what was at stake.

So, who is under more pressure, the employee or the employer? That depends entirely on who you ask. It is genuinely difficult to understand what the other is going through unless you have lived it yourself.

The point of all this is that both of these stories are real, and they are happening to a lot of people right now.

Both employees and employers are trying to survive and keep a roof over their heads. But that is rarely how it looks from the outside. From the employee’s perspective, the company appears to have materialised out of thin air, as though no one struggled to build it. From the employer’s perspective, employees can seem disengaged, nonchalant, and entitled for doing relatively little. The employer has not experienced the accumulation of rejections and the psychological damage it does to a person’s self-confidence, so they struggle to appreciate what that feels like.

If you are a job seeker, it is worth genuinely putting yourself in the employer’s position and recognising that they are in a precarious situation, capable of losing everything if they make the wrong calls. They are human beings trying to survive, carrying more financial and operational responsibility than most employees ever see.

If you are an employer, it is worth understanding that repeated rejection takes a real toll on a person’s mental health and can push them into behaviours that, from the outside, seem irrational or off-putting.

No one is exempt from the struggle. The struggle simply looks different depending on where you are standing. And some people have simply learned to hide it better than others.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​