ten days? That's barely a deep breath in this market. people are sitting on six, eight, even twelve months of applications with nothing to show for it. The remote gravy train has all but left the station-unless you're building your own pipeline through outbound or referrals. Every job posted publicly gets buried under hundreds of applicants, and half of those listings are either fake or get pulled before you even finish the application.
The whole recruitment ecosystem feels broken right now. i just spent six weeks going through a gauntlet with a major agency-told it'd be two weeks and three rounds, ended up being six rounds plus a full presentation. Ten years of experience, a portfolio, case studies, references from Google-none of it mattered. the final round was a deck for a client that launched in 2027, with nothing but a landing page and zero social presence. Halfway through the call, the client had to leave. They asked for the deck, but i couldn't send it because it was all proprietary strategy-audience breakdown, content pillars, a full month's calendar, a unique campaign idea. two weeks of silence later, they said i didn't have the skills I'd literally just demonstrated in that presentation.
It's a macroeconomic hellscape. Interest rates, VC pullback, layoffs piling up, and companies running recruitment processes that are more about covering their own ass than finding talent. The only way through is to treat job hunting like a sales funnel-build your own pipeline, don't rely on job boards, and expect the process to be chaotic. Buckle up.
