femboy fagdyke little meow meow

I thought I might share one of my new tattoos. A couple years ago, a dear friend and I coined the term “fish bag moment”

A fish bag moment might be sitting all alone in an empty new apartment after coming out and upending your life, or starting a new job in a brand new line of work because it’s closer to your dreams

It’s what happens when you take a leap of faith or make a hard decision for yourself, when the future is so hard to visualize and everything feels scary. You’re just a fish in a bag and you can’t see where you’re going

i search for "entry level jobs". i am shown listings for things like "military intelligence officer", "senior veterinary surgeon", and "forklift engineer".

i search for "jobs in bookselling". i am told that there are 9 bookselling jobs in my area. when i read the listings, 8 of these 9 jobs are care assistant roles and the 9th is a pyramid scheme.

i search for "jobs within 5 miles of my location". i am shown jobs that are on the other side of the country.

i type in "proofreading". i am shown listings for "ai training".

i search "creative industry jobs". half the listings are for finance companies and the other half require a degree in data science.

i receive an email. "based on your profile, indeed thought you would be a great match for this opportunity!" the linked job requires a degree that i do not have and 5 years of experience in a field that i know nothing about. the email does not explain why this opportunity would be "a great match".

i receive an email. "based on your profile, indeed thought you would be a great match for this opportunity!" in the body of the email, it warns me that i will not be able to apply for the job it has sent me because i do not meet the criteria.

i apply for a job with a temp agency. i never hear back. 2 weeks later the agency website goes down and never comes back up again.

i apply for a job. 6 months later i get a stock email telling me my application has been unsuccessful.

It's in employers searching for you.

Look at the job listings you like. Rewrite your resume to look good for the people who wrote those job listings. (Don't lie, but check their phrasing, check their skills requirements, highlight the features they're looking for, and so on.)

I don't think I've ever gotten a job by applying at Indeed. I've gotten several from having my resume there when someone was looking.'

Update your resume every two weeks. Even if you're just changing a comma or adding and removing a space at the end of a paragraph. Employers can see when the resume was updated, and they tend to assume anything that's been there longer than a month is probably not relevant anymore - you already have a job.

(You will get a regular trickle of "job offers" from real estate sales companies. Ignore these. I tended to reply with "I have no interest or skills in sale, but I'm good with document management. Do you have any jobs that focus on that and don't involve customer outreach?" I never heard back from them, which was the desired result.)

When you get contacted about a job: Ignore everything about experience & education required. Look at what the job actually does, and figure out if you think you can do that. If so, tell them you have the skills to do the job.

The skills/education requirements are set by idiots who look at "who did this job most recently, and what were their skills?" So that's "what we expect from someone who's done this job for 3+ years."

the email does not explain why this opportunity would be "a great match".

You matched a couple of keywords they're looking for. The algorithm that does these suggestions does not notice things like "I lack several things this job requires"; it just checks "ooh you have 5 words that this job wants!"

If you're consistently getting bad matches for a particular kind of job, review your resume and see if you can figure out which words are getting hit for those, and if you can reasonably remove them. (Sometimes you can't. I do document processing, which sounds close to "data processing," so... I get offers for database coding, which I can't do. I ignore them.)

Your goal for your resume is not to get you a job. It's to get you an interview. Your goal with the interview is to get you a job. Your resume is only incidentally relevant at that point. The purpose of the resume is to convince someone, "I want to talk to this person about this kind of job." That's all. The details should all be focused around "If I were hiring someone for my dream job, this is the list of details I would be looking for."

The most value you're likely to get from the job listings is "these are the currently trendy phrases."

This is fascinating, and it's not cheap. Paid monthly and charges depend on the kind of telescope you have.

I tried to recreate it it looked smth like this