So we agree. Job hunting is appalling for our mental health.

What a viral Substack Note can teach us about confidence & community

Jan 26, 2025

On a walk through the East Sussex countryside over Christmas, my four best friends and I were discussing what we hoped for in the year ahead. It was a happy conversation, full of optimism and laughter—until my turn came. “Obviously,” I began jovially enough, “I’d really like a job.” I’d been precariously freelancing my way through 2024, never making enough to feel relaxed, constantly searching for increasingly elusive clients, and applying for job after job in the long, empty hours I used to fill with work. My friends nodded somberly, and I felt my vocal cords burn, my eyebrows pucker. And then I was crying. Crying and apologising because I’d ruined the lovely mood. They flocked around me, stroking my hair and squeezing my hands. “I didn’t know how awful you’d been feeling,” said Rachel. And how was she to know? On the whole, I’d kept that part to myself.

Because it wasn’t just the fact I had no money. It was the shame. The way my confidence had left me - day by boring day - until I could no longer remember what it was to feel shit-hot at what I do. I used to win writing pitches for Google and pen articles for Cosmopolitan. I single-handedly bagged Aston Martin as a client. I was a boy-wonder at my first creative agency, getting promotions and prizes for my talents and tenacity. And now I was weeping onto the keys of my Macbook, unable to get a call-back for entry-level writing jobs. Where exactly had I gone wrong?

The quiet shame of role rejection

There are lots of situations where - socially - we expect people to experience poor mental well-being. Breakups. Bereavement. Job loss. But searching for a job? It isn’t accompanied by that same expectation.

If you were constantly being rejected by a love interest - your messages left unread, your efforts ignored - you’d leave the situation, or at least give yourself a break to recoup. You wouldn’t continue to suffer the shame of not having your worth appreciated. But you can’t do that when looking for a job. As long as the world keeps turning and your bank balance keeps depleting, you must continue. And that continuous rejection can be disastrous for our mental health.

Chartered Psychologist, Megan Edwards, told me, “When you couple the outcomes of rejection with long-term unemployment, the cumulative impact can be profound. The longer a person is unemployed, the worse psychological and physical well-being can become and the less likely they are to engage in job-seeking behaviours. Ultimately, they are less confident and have less belief that they can achieve employment. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Tech is an issue, but it’s also the employers themselves

During my year of job searching, I wrote endless cover letters (all uniquely tailored to the individual business), updated and refined my expertly-designed creative portfolio, spent hundreds of pounds I didn’t have on a website, and during one application was even tasked to write 600+ words about which famous fictional family I’d join if I had the choice. It all came to nothing.

My parents couldn’t believe it. “What do you mean they haven’t gotten back to you yet?”, “Did you send them your CV?” Ah, the CV. I remember when that sheet of A4 paper was all that was required. Today, AI scanners will filter through hundreds of CVs, looking for certain keywords before binning the rest. A former colleague who worked in HR once told me that she only bothered to look at around 10% of job applications her company received via LinkedIn—she just couldn’t get through them all. But when nearly every job application requires a 500-word cover letter as a first step, for a job application that receives an average of 200 applicants, that’s 90,000 pointless words written. Hours and hours of precious, fragile time.

The level of effort companies expect from applicants doesn’t match the effort they put into their own search. At one point, I was interviewed by a Creative Director on Zoom who asked me questions for a full thirty minutes longer than our allocated interview time. He never got back to me—not even to say no. When I chased the wider company for an update, they ghosted me, too*.

Megan elaborates on this, “The cognitive and emotional demands on job seekers have increased significantly, and practice is so variable depending on the organisation type. Issues arise when employers go ‘rogue’ and have interviews to assess ‘cultural fit’, bring team members into the interview who have no right to be there, or set massive tasks that are not fit for purpose.”

*Must get around to that Glassdoor review…

A more common problem than I realised

No matter how many like-minded posts you see on LinkedIn, or how many people assure you that their sister, cousin, friend or neighbour is going through exactly the same, you can’t help but take it personally. I was constantly grappling with feelings of failure, merging lanes. In one lane, I knew I was talented, bright, creative and capable. In the other, I must’ve lost my touch. Because what other explanation could there be?

In the end, my job salvation came in the form of people who already knew me, and therefore knew what I was capable of. I was asked to interview for a role by two real-life people (one of which subscribes to this newsletter—hi Jade!) and got the job. I felt a weight lift, almost literally, off my shoulders.

And once that weight had lifted, I felt better able to shift some of my shame. I could talk about the last year and how it made me feel. I wrote a Note on Substack (pictured above) and it blew up, with the likes of

Annie Macmanus

Yrsa Daley-Ward

and

Poorna Bell

engaging with it. Contrary to how I felt over the last year, I was not a standalone failure. Thousands of people on this app alone are currently beside themselves, their self-esteem turned upside down by a thankless, automated job market. What was especially surprising was how impressive so many of these people were. Vogue writers. Doctors. Meta geeks. Published authors. The derelict job landscape didn’t discriminate. Anyone could be a victim of it, which - though frightening - should allow us to release that sense of personal shame.

Thankfully, there were also plenty of stories from people who had spent their time in the job hunt trenches and came out the other side thriving.

Some (much-needed) success stories

Writer,

Ossiana Tepfenhart

, described to me the experience of applying to 2,000 jobs only to get few callbacks and almost no returns. “Job searching completely destroyed my self-worth. I have a lot of issues that make it very hard for me to get a job. First off, I'm a writer by trade. Writers are getting replaced by SEO. Second, I have no college degree. So, already, my resume was not perfect. I was gearing up to get back into STEM and go back to school because I felt so worthless. And this is coming from someone who has 50,000 followers on Medium!” Thankfully, Ossiana weathered the storm and was able to continue down a career path that felt fulfilling, working in tech as a VP of Marketing and being approached for additional job roles, too. “I feel far more empowered, and I feel like I learned a lot about myself through this.”

Award-winning destination writer,

Kristi Keller

told me a similar story. “In the summer of 2023, I was terminated "without cause" from my full-time position after sustaining an injury that took me temporarily off work.” Kirsti is still in the process of taking legal action against this, but it didn’t stop her from being pushed back into the job search. “Nobody comes straight out and says you're too "mature", but they don't really need to. When you attend interview after interview that you're fully qualified for but continuously get ghosted, you figure it out pretty quickly. The pressure of constantly hustling to figure out where your next dollar is coming from is horrific. I'd never been in that position before. I'd never been "unemployable" before. It's terrifying.” Eventually, Kristi took matters into her own hands, “I said fuck it and winged it in the entrepreneurial space out of sheer desperation. I had to invent my own job. And you know what? Somehow it worked.”

Writer, stylist and creative consultant,

Eleanor Cording-Booth

, chatted to me about her experience with what she calls “the nightmare” of job searching. Having been Head of Editorial at a travel company for six years, she decided to take a six-month break when her boyfriend was given the opportunity to work overseas. “I assumed I’d just get back and get another job. Until that point, every job I’d ever applied for I’d got, so I had no experience with rejection, how to deal with it, or how to prepare myself for it.” After getting to the final interview stage for around nineteen different roles - becoming emotionally invested in each one - her mental health began to suffer drastically. “I can’t really emphasise enough how the experience completely destroyed me as a person. I feel like I lost my personality, my confidence, my self-belief. I thought I had no skills or talent, or that there was something fundamentally wrong with my personality.”

After being rejected for an entry-level copywriting job that she was wildly overqualified for, Eleanor decided to give up on finding an in-house role and went freelance. Shortly after, her talent for interiors and styling was spotted by someone at the Evening Standard. She was offered a weekly column, and has since gone on to write for the likes of Vogue, House & Garden, and Cabana Magazine. But despite all her success, the time she spent looking for work has stayed with her. “The scary thing is, I don’t think I’ve ever fully recovered from it. The impact was too great and it lasted for too long. I still don’t feel like the person I once was.”

How can we take better care of our mental health when job searching?

While the job search will inevitably be a gruelling experience for most of us, there are certain things we can do to improve our well-being during this challenging - and even traumatic - time. Megan Edwards has shared the following advice for anyone who is currently searching for a role and worried about the mental toll it’s taking:

Practice self-compassion. Searching for a job is hard, so be kind to yourself. Treat yourself like you would your best friend; you wouldn’t tell them they’re useless for not getting a job, so why tell yourself that?
Believe in yourself. Don’t internalise job rejection. Set small goals, develop skills, celebrate wins, and challenge assumptions about yourself, your ability, and your competence. Learn from others. Plan and prepare. The goal is to believe you can do it—even when you are facing rejection.
Develop a support network. Don’t shut people out. Sometimes, you just need someone to have a good cry/moan/rage with.

Have you had (or are currently having) a terrible time searching for work? Feel free to vent your frustrations in the comments below. And - most importantly - remember you’re not alone, and that your talent remains, no matter how many rejections you receive from a thoroughly broken job market.