The reason job hunting isn't going well isn't a lack of self-analysis

Job hunting is a system that forces people who have never worked—in other words, people who have never once observed their own output—to make one of the biggest decisions of their lives. It is fundamentally flawed, akin to being told to fix a malfunction in a machine that has no logs. That is why everyone answers based on desire, and because they answer with desire, they miss the mark.

When deciding on a company, people usually research based on facts. They gather numbers and testimonies—annual salary, overtime hours, employee reviews. However, when it comes to themselves, the materials at hand suddenly become flimsy: a vague impression that “I might like talking to people,” four letters from a personality test, or a polished “what I focused on during college” story tailored for interviews. One side is filled with facts, while the other is filled with desires and fabrications.

I chose the company based on facts, yet I chose my own fit based on subjectivity—most job-hunting deals are struck upon this asymmetry. While we meticulously research the party we are buying from, we declare our own value—the side offering years of our time—without having properly observed ourselves. This is, in many cases, the true identity of what is called a “mismatch.”

Therefore, the reason job hunting isn’t going well is not because of a lack of self-analysis. It is because the materials for analysis (the records) were structurally non-existent. This is not your negligence. The order is simply reversed—you cannot think and then work; you can only think based on the records of having worked.

And for those who have worked, they already have hundreds of times more material at their fingertips. What was sustainable and what wasn’t. What they grew accustomed to and what they couldn’t get used to. These are all facts that have already occurred, waiting to be read. You simply haven’t read them yet.