Friday, March 06, 2026
This is the present situation.
I am still jobless as on 6th March 2026. It's been more than 8 months.
I have spent hundreds of hours scrolling through job postings. I spent around fifty hours learning how HRs use job portals to scout potential hires and post jobs online, and the monetary policies and offers that job portals provide for HRs to understand how everything worked, hoping I'd be able to find a way to navigate this maze.
It is possible I have mowed through a lakh of job postings, mainly filtering past sales, marketing and customer support jobs. I had two interview opportunities - one, I was called for a specific position, but then I was asked to instead join as a sales engineer, which I politely refused, and another, I applied for a position out of panic, and later asked to join for another position - Design cum Quality Engineer - two roles in one position for a salary of Rs. 18000 per month and bonded for 3 years. I rejected the offer, hoping for a better and less enslaving opportunity.
My stats so far: 20 applications, 5 callbacks. 20 applications in 8 months would average at 2 to 3 applications per month. Ideally this should be a weekly target, not monthly. Some invisible and overwhelming barrier stops me from actually doing anything most of the time there. So far, I notice the barrier, I realize I should do something about it, but I never took an active effort in understanding what is happening, and what I could do about it, because clearly whatever I had been doing for the past 8 months has only made my life worse.
This is how I start.
I open a job portal.
I login.
I apply necessary filters, for example, in Naukri: my location, 0 to 1 years of experience (I have 4 but I recognize that my experience does not matter much), qualifications - any graduate, B.Tech., and I specify freshness as last 7 days.
I start to scroll.
I use uBlock Origin to color code some keywords that I would gladly skip without having to read: sales, marketing, voice, night shift, etc. I have also blocked many companies that are actually third party manpower suppliers. Sometimes, it is not possible for me to figure out whether a company is legitimate or not. Indian scammers can be very thorough.
I stop at a job ad that catches my attention.
I open it.
I check out the number of applicants - if I see 100+ I feel discouraged, but that rarely prevents me from applying. Initially, it was discouraging, but I noticed a few times that 60 to 80% of the applicants are abusing the apply button and their profile is barely matching the requirements.
Sometimes the 100+ applicants would turn out to be 3000+ applicants, which I can only see after clicking apply, and I can't withdraw my application.
I read the job description.
I observe the salary. Most of the jobs do not disclose this information, but if they do, and if it is too low (less than 2.5 LPA), I hesitate to apply.
I notice the name of the company. Some companies don't have AmbitionBox ratings next to it. I notice a low rating (less than 3 stars) but that does not stop me from closing the tab.
If a company has ratings next to it, I open it, and I sort reviews by Critically Rated and I go through it, identifying traits of toxic work culture like psychopathic CEOs, wage theft, holding original certificates hostage, and general abusive work culture. Of course, all companies have negative reviews but there are some serious red flags that stop me from applying and I move on if that happens.
If a company does not have ratings next to it, I then spend my time searching for their official website (which often look like shit for some reason and I have to ignore it), LinkedIn profile, tax filings, etc. This scares me because there is no way for me to properly conclude that I can ignore and move on to the next posting, so I try to reach that conclusion and try to dig more.
Not only do I have to worry if the company is safe or not, I also have to worry if the company is even legitimate or the job posting is a data harvesting siphon or I will receive a call from a MLM that will offer me a Team Lead position and that I just have to attend a meeting and register for it by paying Rs. 200.
At some point, I notice the time and I would have spent hours doing all this, and see that I barely made it through 10 (out of 40) pages.
Other job portals, unlike Naukri or LinkedIn, like Indeed allow free job postings. This means companies that are so cheap to even afford Rs. 500 to hire a future employee would use that. These companies don't have reviews, proper websites, online profile or anything, or they're just fake job advertisements posted to harvest resume and scam vulnerable and desperate unemployed people out there. I have stopped using Indeed for this reason. I think the risk of getting trapped in a job fraud is not worth the quality or availability of jobs there.
Sometimes I struggle to follow the sequence and skip important steps. I accidentally applied for a toxic company and had to withdraw the application after the recruiter saw my profile.
In a day, I would say approximately 5000 entry level jobs are posted across major job portals, and around 1000 in Naukri. There are 25 job postings per page, so this means there are 40 or so pages of shit that I have to shovel through.
Let's say 80% of the total jobs are sales, marketing and voice, which means I can skim through it thanks to the color filtering in 3 to 5 seconds. That's 800 * 5 = 4000 seconds, or approximately an hour.
Similarly, 10% of the rest of the jobs are companies that has a rating next to it, and say I can reach a reasonable conclusion after 5 minutes. That's 100 * 5 = 500 minutes, or approximately 8 hours.
The rest 10%, let's say 10 minutes trying to investigate their website, check out their GSTIN, company registration, etc. That's 100 * 10 = 1000 minutes, or approximately 16 hours.
Total time: 16 (64%) + 8 (32%) + 1 (4%) = 25 hours.
I have turned job hunting into a forensic investigation.
If I spent 2 hours a day for this purpose, I'd have investigated approximately 80 minutes, or 8 unlisted jobs, 4 listed jobs, and scrolled past 60 chaffs. That's 3 pages.
This has to stop.
Other than this, Naukri has a feature where recruiters can search the database and send invitations. So far, out of 50 invitations, nothing of quality has reached me.
It is possible that my profile is not SEO optimised, because it lists "Assistant Professor" and I don't think anyone would want to hire an assistant professor for a back office role.
Having only 5 recruiter actions out of 20 applications is also a problem, which means one, my application never floated to the top, or two, the job posting was a fraud.
I hope that the job search process is like this: you apply for a vacancy, your profile gets screened, and the HR invites you for a test or an interview, and you go through a single interview, or multiple interviews, then they decide whether to select you or not, then you decide whether to accept the offer or not, and then the onboarding happens, and you finally start working. That's around 5 to 10 steps, and I haven't even initiated the first step.
It's easier to reject a company and never apply for it than to apply for it and wait patiently, and hope that the company turns out to be a non-toxic entity, but I am not sure.
Now I have to keep my phone with me all the time, and every time my phone rings, my heart throws up.
I wait for my caller ID (True Caller, which is shit) to show a name that would make sense, and most of the time it doesn't.
I let the phone stop ringing.
I try to figure out who had called me by trying to find information about the number online. It doesn't work most of the time, but once it did.
I try to search my application history and check out if anyone had viewed my resume.
So far, I agreed for interview only twice, one of which was from a HR who decided to call me after a whole month of applying for it. I should have treated this as a red flag, as companies don't waste a whole month to fill a vacancy, and on top of that, I was also getting my interview date postponed for silly reasons, like the GM being on leave.
These are the traits that reinforce the barrier to apply for jobs.
It doesn't stop there.
These are the basic conditions for the stars to align.
I have to find a job posting which match with my qualifications and skills that I can apply to (20%).
The company should have a competent digital footprint. It can have negative reviews but it should not have red flags (20%).
My profile should be satisfying enough to climb above the jobless horde (20%).
The HR should take an interest in my profile and call me (20%).
I have to clear the interview (50%).
Aproximately, the odds: 0.08% or 8 in 100 applications, or 8 in 10000 job postings.
These are the things I could do other than relying completely on job portals.
It looks like the main source of reinforcement for the barrier is anxiety and paranoia - ending up at a toxic workplace that I can't get out of, or getting trapped in an employment fraud.
I will never be able to find this. Every company would try their best (such as spamming AmbitionBox with 5 star ratings) to save their reputation. The lazy ones that don't care about it, I can avoid them easily, but the ones that are too small or too psychopathic, I can't.