What the job market taught me (and what I taught myself instead)

When capable people keep getting ghosted

I HAVE SPENT THE LAST SIX MONTHS talking to people about work. Mostly as a natural outcome of coaching them, but also in the way you might interview someone for a project you are obsessed with.

I’ve spoken to designers, strategists, writers, communications folk, product people. All of them are experienced. All of them are talented. All of them are passionate. And all of them are, quietly, stuck.

One guy (an experience designer fifteen years into his career) described his situation like this: “I feel like I’m perched on a rock in the middle of a river and I’m unable to move in any direction. I know I need to jump. But I’m not entirely sure whether I can swim anymore.” He’s not the only one who’s described their stuckness in such evocative ways. But I cannot stop thinking about that image in particular.

The thing that has struck me most about all these conversations is not the frustration people feel (though there is plenty of that!); it’s the special kind of intelligence their frustrations seem to have. These are not people who’ve missed something obvious. They know what is happening.

They know that most job postings lead nowhere.

They konw that everyone is writing cover letters with AI, employers are reading cover letters with AI, and nobody is getting hired.

They know that the full richness, the full cross-domain, hard-to-categorise thing they actually bring to the table doesn’t fit neatly into the boxes that the market provides.

They know all of this. And still they are stuck.

Something else keeps coming up too, which took me longer to notice. Whenever someone puts a lot of effort into an application (rewriting their CV, landing a warm intro, adding something extra, making a thoughtful attempt) and gets nothing but silence back, something deadens inside them.

Not in a dramatic way; it’s more subtle than that. The next attempt fosters slightly less energy. There’s now more self-protection built in. One person told me, “If I don’t get a response, it just reduces my interest in putting in effort.” This is a rational response to an irrational situation; it’s not laziness. The prevailing job application process has been silently shaping him, and he’s adapted to it. What else can he do?

I’m seeing this pattern more and more now. Capable, creative people with 10+ years of proper work experience and real value to contribute are gradually talking themselves into a sort of strategic patience that is really just an understandable form of learned helplessness.

The conventional approach to getting a job does this to people almost by design. You spend days polishing your “assets” for a system that isn’t reading them. You stand in line. You wait. You do as you’re told. And then you get ghosted. Or you don’t get ghosted but you get a three-line email seven minutes after you apply, with some boilerplate about the “quality of applications.”

After a few rounds of this, you start to internalise a story about how you’re not as strong as you thought you were, or maybe the market has moved on, or maybe you’ve aged out of it, or maybe…

All of this is objectively not true, but it does feels increasingly hard to argue with in today’s climate.

It got me thinking about the ways in which I’ve landed the work that has mattered most to me. I didn’t apply for any of it.

When I wanted to work at Write of Passage, I didn’t apply or send a CV. I partnered with another student and we built a technical tool we thought could help the team. Just something small and basic. It wasn’t even that useful. We got twenty minutes on a Zoom call to show it to one of the senior people. Nothing came of the tool in the end. But it didn’t matter; I had made myself visible in a way that was authentic and not desperate. And eventually I was invited in.

When I wanted to work at Act Two, I didn’t apply for that either. I interviewed ten students from the first cohort about what had worked and what hadn’t, turned it into a research report, and gave it to the founders. They eventually gave me a job.

On the other side of the recruitment equation, I have also hired people who applied to my company in strategic ways. Even though Dan, my designer and first-hire, was way less experienced than the other candidates, I simply HAD to give him the job because he’d researched my company goals and challenges, built a piece of permissionless work that added real value, and made himself unignorable in a respectful way.

I’ve thought a lot about what these three experiences have in common, and it comes down to not asking for permission to be useful, but just being useful—and then finding ways to let the people you want to work with know about it.

This sounds simple, but it isn’t. There is real exposure in it. One of the people I spoke to described it wonderfully precisely: “In a regular application, there’s still some mystery. You say you can do things, but no one really knows. With your approach, they can see everything. If they say no, there’s nowhere to hide.”

She’s right. With my approach, there’s a risk that the work you deliver will not be good enough, and that’s exactly what makes it so frightening. But, that’s also exactly what makes it work too.

So, I’m building something around this idea, and I want to tell you about it.

As a new strand of my coaching work, I’m launching a small group programme, with a clear beginning and end, for experienced creative professionals (the kind of people I’ve been describing in this post) who are ready to try designing their own way into their dream job. It runs April through July 2026, the first cohort is 8 people, and the work moves through three phases:

1. getting sincerely clear on what you have to offer and who you want to offer it to

2. building real knowledge of a specific company and the people inside it

3. doing a piece of work, scoped carefully to your strengths, that makes a case no CV or cover letter ever could.

This programme is not a networking offer. It’s not a Linkedin optimisation service. It’s not a get-hired-fast solution. And it is not for people who measure success primarily by salary or status.

It is for people who want a better relationship with their own professional identity, and who are ready to do something that feels more exposed, and more alive, than anything they’ve tried before.

If that sounds like you, or if you’re simply curious and want to know more about it, reply to this email or send me a DM. I’d like to have a conversation with you.

Speak soon,

—Harrison 🧑‍🎨

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