Surely I'm not the only one who feels that services like HeadHunter are dead. The site itself is alive — vacancies refresh, applications fly out, dashboards glow nicely. But as a way for an actual human being to find work, it's been a zombie for a long time.

I honestly tried to remember: how many times in my life have I actually landed a job through job-board applications? Not through friends, not through referrals, not through inbound recruiter messages — but the way the service promises: posted a CV, sent an application, walked in. Never. Seriously. The one and only time I got a job that way it was off a posted CV — someone found me, no applications involved. And I get it: that was during the golden age, almost a different life, and these days it already feels like a fairy tale from the late 2010s.

Everything else came through people. A friend pulled me into a project. Another handed off a contact. A former colleague left, and six months later pinged me: "they're putting a team together here, want in?" When I look at my own path honestly, with no illusions, the picture is unambiguous: not a single normal job in the last many years has come out of a job feed. They all came from human beings.

Here's what I'm seeing now. When you don't pass an interview — that's about you. You showed up, you were seen, you got a no, you understood where you fell short, you moved on. That's painful but it's real feedback. You can work with it.

When you get an automated rejection fifteen minutes after applying — that isn't about you anymore. That's about a system that can't handle the volume and can't see a human inside it at all. And that's where the truly nauseating part begins.

You open the service. You spend time on it. You read the job description. You cross-check your experience. You try to write a short but meaningful cover note. You attach it. You hit "apply." And then, while you're still finishing your coffee, the notification arrives: "Unfortunately, the employer has decided not to consider your candidacy." Once. Twice. Five times. Ten times. After a while you catch yourself thinking something very simple: I'm not looking for a job. I'm voluntarily walking into a place where I get ritually humiliated.

Why pay this kind of mental tax for every application? Because you don't just click a button. For a second you hope. For a second you picture yourself on that team. You allow yourself to believe it could work. And that's exactly the hope the system grinds up in fifteen minutes. Not because you're bad — because a filter triggered. Age. Location. Title. Some combination of keywords that didn't match.

Why keep feeding this system your anxiety? What if you just accepted the fact that the system doesn't work anymore, and stopped voluntarily putting your self-worth and your morning under its filters? That isn't job hunting. That's self-harm with a nice UI.

— — —

And here's what I really want to say.

The hiring market is a zombie.

Not "broken," not "imperfect," not "needs adapting to." A zombie. It moves: vacancies get posted, applications come in, candidates move through stages, recruiters write messages. From the outside it looks alive. From the inside there is nothing living left.

Nobody trusts anyone. CVs are "let's see how prettily you can lie in one document." Experience is "yeah, we can't actually verify any of that." Words are "let's check with an eight-hour take-home." Projects are "are you sure you wrote that yourself or did the AI help?" Everyone is terrified of making a hiring mistake, because mistakes are expensive, and instead of learning to tell a real human apart from a template, the market just adds another filter. And another. And another. At some point the human disappears from the process entirely. What's left is a set of fields and checkboxes that either passes the script or doesn't.

I'm not even angry at recruiters. Most of them work inside a system that gives them no chance to work humanly. They have KPIs, funnels, automation, clients who wanted it yesterday. None of that changes the result. The result is a corpse. A polished, well-designed corpse with a smooth UI.

And then comes the uncomfortable part.

If you don't have connections, you are basically lost to this market. You can criticize "networking" and "it's all about who you know" all you want — it's just a fact. If no one can vouch for you in the right room, if no living human can wave a hand and say "take this person, I'll back them" — you step out onto the roulette table. And that roulette table is called the job feed.

All those nice stories — "I rewrote my summary, fixed my keywords, and two weeks later I got hired at a top company" — sound like methodology. Most of the time it's just luck. The CV happened not to drown in the flow. It happened to land in front of a human and not a script. It happened to match the hiring manager's mood that day. I'm not denying that a good CV helps. But a good CV is a lottery ticket, not a contract with reality. And when the industry pretends otherwise, it's selling people the illusion of control over something that isn't controllable.

A whole parallel industry has bloomed around that illusion. Upgrade your CV. Upgrade your LinkedIn. Learn how to apply properly. Hear why you should plan for a four-month job search, not a one-month one. Buy another checklist. Some of it is genuinely useful — especially for people who never thought about their own packaging before. But at some point you want to stand up and say: enough. Stop turning a human life into endless optimization for a dead market. Sometimes the most honest piece of advice is to stop feeding this thing your anxiety and go live.

— — —

And then the question becomes: what do you do if the endless cycle of "apply — get rejected — sign up for another resume course" doesn't work anymore? I honestly don't have a universal answer. But I know what's shifted for me.

Visibility. Texts. Projects. Not "personal branding," which is nauseating, but the act of leaving traces. When you write, you show how you think. When you ship projects — even small ones, even ones that never took off — you show that you can carry something to a state where other people can see it. And at some point those traces start working for you on their own.

Social capital. I long stopped treating it as a toy or as vanity. I used to have a fairly active Facebook — almost five thousand friends, posts pulled real reactions, comment threads turned into actual conversations. After 2022 all of that quieted down, the audience split into two camps, I had to stop posting there, and I still feel that as a real loss — not because I liked collecting likes, but because that was a channel through which people and opportunities reached me. Same story with Instagram.

And, to be completely honest: there is one profession that doesn't die in this world. Being a known person. Not in the sense of cheap recognition from a feed — in the sense of a person who is known, who can be recommended, who people come to because they trust them. Ambassadors: when you're known, you get called. When you're known, people believe you faster. When you're known, others have a reason to want to work with you, because through you they get access to something they value. That's the most honest piece of advice I could give my son. Don't optimize your resume. Become someone who's known.

— — —

If my experience isn't wanted as a line in an HR system, I'll package it into products. Into texts. Into my own markets. Not because that's easier — it isn't. But because at least it is alive. There are users, feedback, mistakes, failures, revenue, real people. There is no ritual.

So maybe the best way to look for a job today is to stop looking for one in the old sense. To become a person who can't be fully reduced to a resume. Write. Make things. Meet people. Argue. Show how you think. Build your own projects. Because the zombie market won't recognize a living human anyway — until another living human points at them.