Photograph © Georgia Hilmer Rachel Meade Smith is a writer, editor, and civic design worker focused on information access and the world of work. Since 2016, she's authored Words of Mouth, a free newsletter sharing opportunities for good work and creative expansion, reaching tens of thousands of readers across the globe.

Since waged work became the norm under capitalism, the process for seeking it has become both increasingly streamlined and increasingly baroque. In Chapter Two, Elizabeth Goodspeed presents a selection of twentieth-century recruitment ads, each stuffed with visual personality and euphemistic promises, that job seekers would have found peppered throughout their periodicals. The primary tool available to the twenty-first century seeker is the comparatively soulless but seemingly more efficient continuous-scroll online job board. The internet’s most popular job site, Indeed, reports fifteen jobs added to the site per second, accessible to anyone with an internet connection. A job seeker can feed a listing and their resume into ChatGPT and receive a customized, if generic, cover letter, in moments. But all this convenience does not create a shorter or less arduous road to employment. In June 2025, the New York Times reported that eleven thousand applications are now submitted on LinkedIn every minute—a 45 percent increase in the past year. Overwhelmed by the deluge, recruiters cannot attend meaningfully to each application (an increasing number of which are clearly composed by AI), leading some companies to turn to automated screening tools, which can be biased or reductive in their assessments. As applications get easier, so do rejections. Gridlock.

Today’s job seekers might encounter the formerly figurative, now literal inhumanity of the job search before, during, and after applying for a role. They could accidentally apply to ghost jobs, which intentionally advertise roles that don’t exist, and must swat away proliferating recruiting scams and spam. They’ll have to weigh the ethics of using AI to craft application materials, to “keep up” with other job seekers who’ve already embraced such tools. If candidates make it past the applicant filtering systems by copy-pasting the right keywords from the job description (something an AI-generated cover letter will, admittedly, do quite well), they might show up to virtual interviews to find a bot instead of a human. Recruiters are reporting a parallel trend, with candidates using AI personas to fake their way into positions they’re not qualified for. This is making referrals from current employees, who can vouch that an applicant actually exists, even more important—to the detriment of the under-networked. Things are getting very weird.

In a booming economy, the weirdness might feel tedious; in today’s labor market, it’s given job hunting a “dreamlike quality,” as A. Underwood describes it in one of the book’s text collages. The questions that job seekers must ask, now, are increasingly existential. In her essay in Chapter One, Jordan White recalls reflecting on the assorted applications she’d recently sent out to hiring managers: “Which version is more appealing, I wondered passively, and why, and to whom? Is a human even reading these?” . . . 

Photograph © Georgia Hilmer Rachel Meade Smith is a writer, editor, and civic design worker focused on information access and the world of work. Since 2016, she's authored Words of Mouth, a free newsletter sharing opportunities for good work and creative expansion, reaching tens of thousands of readers across the globe.

Since waged work became the norm under capitalism, the process for seeking it has become both increasingly streamlined and increasingly baroque. In Chapter Two, Elizabeth Goodspeed presents a selection of twentieth-century recruitment ads, each stuffed with visual personality and euphemistic promises, that job seekers would have found peppered throughout their periodicals. The primary tool available to the twenty-first century seeker is the comparatively soulless but seemingly more efficient continuous-scroll online job board. The internet’s most popular job site, Indeed, reports fifteen jobs added to the site per second, accessible to anyone with an internet connection. A job seeker can feed a listing and their resume into ChatGPT and receive a customized, if generic, cover letter, in moments. But all this convenience does not create a shorter or less arduous road to employment. In June 2025, the New York Times reported that eleven thousand applications are now submitted on LinkedIn every minute—a 45 percent increase in the past year. Overwhelmed by the deluge, recruiters cannot attend meaningfully to each application (an increasing number of which are clearly composed by AI), leading some companies to turn to automated screening tools, which can be biased or reductive in their assessments. As applications get easier, so do rejections. Gridlock.

Today’s job seekers might encounter the formerly figurative, now literal inhumanity of the job search before, during, and after applying for a role. They could accidentally apply to ghost jobs, which intentionally advertise roles that don’t exist, and must swat away proliferating recruiting scams and spam. They’ll have to weigh the ethics of using AI to craft application materials, to “keep up” with other job seekers who’ve already embraced such tools. If candidates make it past the applicant filtering systems by copy-pasting the right keywords from the job description (something an AI-generated cover letter will, admittedly, do quite well), they might show up to virtual interviews to find a bot instead of a human. Recruiters are reporting a parallel trend, with candidates using AI personas to fake their way into positions they’re not qualified for. This is making referrals from current employees, who can vouch that an applicant actually exists, even more important—to the detriment of the under-networked. Things are getting very weird.

In a booming economy, the weirdness might feel tedious; in today’s labor market, it’s given job hunting a “dreamlike quality,” as A. Underwood describes it in one of the book’s text collages. The questions that job seekers must ask, now, are increasingly existential. In her essay in Chapter One, Jordan White recalls reflecting on the assorted applications she’d recently sent out to hiring managers: “Which version is more appealing, I wondered passively, and why, and to whom? Is a human even reading these?” . . .