Job hunting in this market is brutal. Painful. Dehumanizing. Everyone is struggling from new grads to venerated industry experts.
I talk to job seekers every single day, even weekends, about their current challenges, and I have to say that it’s exhausting. For all of us. Even recruiters and employers. Even currently employed people that can smell the blood of everyone else around them that has been laid off, and they know their turn at the guillotine could be next.
People job hunting are putting out hundreds of applications, they’re having to constantly go through their networks with a fine tooth comb, and pray that the right words hit the right eyes at the right time and some magic trick takes place to land them back into employeehood.
But part of that process is being rejected. Ghosted. Hurt.
And when that happens, we’re seeing an age-old phrase being used that is well-meaning, but hurtful to anyone job hunting:
“Well, you dodged a bullet!”
It’s meant to be encouraging. It’s meant to help someone see that an employer who ghosted them might have ended up being disorganized, or worse, toxic.
But when someone has run out of unemployment benefits, their savings are drained, and they’re losing their home, the last thing they want to hear is that they’ve dOdgEd a BuLLet.
What they all say to me every time they hear this is that it cuts deeply, because they don’t need 100 jobs they applied for, they just need the one. And that bullet “dodged” could have been the one that means they don’t have to move their family into a tiny apartment next month, toxic or not.
So please, I beg of you, remove “you dodged a bullet” from your vocabulary when listening to friends that are job hunting. Try “that’s awful” or “that’s terrible” or “I’m so sorry that happened to you,” but don’t say that they dodged a bullet when at this moment in time, they’d likely TAKE that bullet for themselves and/or their family.
