This week will mark the one-year anniversary of getting laid off from my job at one of the biggest and most successful toy companies in the world. After 12 years working for the same employer, being unceremoniously tossed out and finding myself jobless was profoundly destabilizing. I spent much of this past year asking myself deep questions about what matters to me, who I want to be and how I want to move forward with my life. It’s only recently that I’ve started to approach something like clarity.

As tumultuous as it was, this year of reflection has been a gift and I am thankful for it. It prompted me to reconnect with myself and make the necessary course correction that will (hopefully) lead to a life better aligned with my values. But even as I embrace this newfound sense of direction and purpose, I can feel the panic of impending financial catastrophe, as the need to secure gainful employment becomes increasingly urgent.

Applying for jobs is not good for one’s mental health or sense of self-worth. There’s something inherently degrading about the power imbalance. You have to sell yourself, to stand out from other applicants and to project self-confidence in order to convince potential employers that they need you - but also that they can afford you, that they will be able to manage you, that you are “a good fit” with their corporate culture.

As if that wasn’t challenging enough, it’s getting harder to pierce through the various obstacles that stand between you and the people who might actually want to hire you. I used to refer to it as “the HR wall,” meaning the screening process done mostly by low-level HR staff before they hand over a selection of promising candidates to the hiring manager. What has changed since the last time I was actively job hunting is the degree to which this screening is now automated.

HR departments rely on software solutions that are supposed to make the hiring process easier for everyone involved. But as often happens with tech solutions that claim to save you time and money, these systems create additional layers of abstraction and noise between the humans on either end of this tragicomedy.

Do you remember a time when it was important to have a nicely laid out resumé in PDF format, maybe even some printed copies on nice paper? This doesn’t matter anymore, because in the process of ingesting your PDF, the software strips all the formatting and spits out the raw information into a pre-populated form, which you then have to spend time reviewing to fix all the errors it introduced.

Not only will you will have to perform this extra labour again and again for every job you apply to, but the most “sophisticated” of these softwares will then automatically evaluate your application (using a form of mostly unreliable AI) and assign you a score. Your application may never even reach a human being if it doesn’t include the right keywords or otherwise doesn’t meet the obscure criteria of the AI. If you get a rejection email, it will be automatically generated, impersonal, and come from a “do not reply” email address.

You might object that HR departments are understaffed, that recruiters are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of applicants and that they need tools to help them sort through it all. That may be true, but the same technology that makes it possible to automate the screening of applicants is also making it possible to automate the applications themselves, which means their volume will continue to increase. Anyone can now spend a day on LinkedIn collecting job postings, then ask chatGPT to customize their resumé and cover letter for each posting. Instead of crafting a handful of quality applications for jobs they really want, they can quickly pump out 20 or 50 garbage applications in a day. This proliferation of data always leads to the same thing: more noise, more trash to sift through, more distance between real human beings.

What are we doing?!

Problemista

In Julio Torres’ 2023 directorial debut, Problemista, Alejandro (played by Torres) is an aspiring toy designer (!) from El Salvador, now living in New York City, who navigates absurd government bureaucracy, predatory banks and dehumanizing HR departments, in pursuit of a work visa. After Alejandro’s application to his dream job at Hasbro is rejected, the narrator (Isabella Rossellini) tells us:

It was as if he had sent his dream into a void and the void replied with an email signed by no one in particular, sent by a mysterious “do not reply” address.

Sound familiar?

Throughout the movie, which often veers into surrealism as it delivers its sharp social critique, Alejandro is confronted with one nonsensical bureaucratic problem after another, as he struggles against a system designed to be impossible to win. The application for his work visa will cost him $6,000, but where is he supposed to get the money when he’s not legally allowed to earn it without a visa. Another example: After flagging his deposit as “potentially fraudulent” and putting a hold on it, his bank charges him overdraft fees, which he can’t afford to pay with his negative balance.

When Alejandro complains to the bank and points out that its policy only punishes those who can least afford it, he implores the customer service rep to step outside of her corporate role and admit that she agrees with him, even if she can’t help him. He delivers an impassioned monologue, as the music swells and the camera zooms in on her face, and we see that her name tag reads: “Estefani.” For a moment, she seems genuinely moved by his appeal to her humanity. (“I know there’s still a person in there and I know that she can hear me.”) But then she turns around, points a gun at him, declares: “I stand with Bank of America,” and shoots him.

The point is that the oppressive systems dehumanize us all, whichever side of them we are on - whether we are cogs in the machine or struggling on the outside of it, desperate to get in.

Being difficult

At the heart of the film is the relationship between Alejandro and Elizabeth, an art critic played by Tilda Swinton. She’s an extremely unpleasant woman, but she has agreed to sponsor Alejandro if he helps her put on a show of her husband’s paintings. Another character describes her as “a nightmare,” but Alejandro (like Julio Torres) sees past the monstrous exterior and empathizes with the human within.

In a climactic scene, Alejandro - who has been exceedingly patient with Elizabeth so far - finally asks her why she is making everything so difficult. She points out that they have more in common than he realizes:

Oh, that's rich coming from you. You who adore difficulty. You cannot get enough of it. You seek it out around every corner. Not Mexico City, not Montreal, not Berlin, nowhere easy to migrate to. And not a doctor, not a software designer, nothing that anybody is gleefully handing out visas for. No, an aspiring maker of toys!

Problemista ends up being a sort of ode to difficult people, which is to say people who refuse to take the easy path, who reject the dehumanization that the machines inflict on us, who insist on asserting their humanity no matter what. While this can sometimes lead to destructive behaviour, there is power in it and it is worth celebrating. In the end, Alejandro learns to stand up for himself and demands to be seen and heard. He manages to meet with the human behind the automated HR rejection emails and convinces them to hire him. It’s a satisfying Hollywood happy ending, but in a movie full of surreal scenes, it’s perhaps the least realistic moment.

Julio Torres’ artistic vision is not a bleak one. It’s colourful and queer and creative and funny and full of wonder. I don’t think it’s going to help me find a job, but it makes me feel more confident about the choices I’ve made to hold on to my humanity in the age of automation.

Thanks for reading A Series of Doubts! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.