LOG 004 // MILLENNIAL MANAGERS WITH CHAT GPT KILLED THE HIRING PROCESS

As a new member of the “your unemployed friend at 11am on a Tuesday” club, I’ve been spiraling about WHY everybody on both sides of the hiring process is saying the same shit, but nobody has any real insight.

Before quitting, I’d been in the job hunt for A YEAR AND EIGHT MONTHS. This whole mess is a combination Pizza Hut/Taco Bell of the critical thinking crisis + incompetent millennial managers. Yeah, I said it.

The kind that excelled through their early career, got promoted, and are now hiring their very own direct report. But managing is not the same as doing. And without the ability to apply their experience in a new context, these managers have no idea what the hell they’re doing.

I figured this out while meditating on my experience. I quit my fuckass job two weeks ago. I used to love it, but it really hoed me at the end. I traced the bullshit back to my manager’s promotion. Once she moved from leading execution to leading strategy, I fear she folded.

Tragic, because she was SO good when I started and her job was teaching me to replicate what she’d perfected over the prior four years. But the second she needed to apply all that great work to a slightly different situation, she couldn’t walk the walk.

The elevated role came with two more marketing channels AND two more direct reports. What we could accomplish in 40 hours working in sync didn’t survive the transition. We had fewer alignment points and I was getting further from the flow of information. Turns out I was doing a lot of the strategy-to-execution work on my own. I didn’t realize that until I wasn’t close enough to the strategy to inform execution.

Add the complexity of three channels each with different timelines, partners, and standard operating procedures. The team couldn’t catch the process fast enough to execute her strategic vision. Even when her ideas were sound, she couldn’t architect the system to bring them to life.

Eventually, I shuffled back to owning one channel. It was less chaotic but still undermanaged.

Now, we’re both no longer with the business.

The Western education system has always rewarded Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V over synthesis. And while I DO have a calculator in my pocket, the kid whose book reports were summaries has ChatGPT. Yike.

Inside the hellscape of the 2026-27 job market, I genuinely feel like I’m doing ALL THE THINGS. I update my keywords and make sure the bullets match the job description. I keep my LinkedIn up to date so it plausibly matches whatever resume I’m submitting. I write the cover letter and answer the bullshit screening questions with intention. I reach out to the hiring manager and follow up. PER. JOB. Net two screenings and one interview later…I’m over it.

The first recruiter call was kinda shaky but I felt like it went well. And even though I wasn’t asked to interview, I did get valuable-ish feedback: it was a channel-specific mismatch, not necessarily experience, knowledge, or strategic thinking. Though my fiance challenged me to really sallow the feedback, I still felt like it was kinda dumb. Marketing strategy is channel agnostic if you know what you’re doing. And I have a Master’s in marketing??

Second prospect, at this point for a super entry-level role with a steep pay cut. GREAT recruiter call. I prepared a short slide deck explicitly connecting the dots for the hiring manager. Super disengaged call…decided to move in a different direction?

At this point, it’s not about the skills. Or it’s racism, who’s to say ¯\_(ツ)_/¯.

Inside the chaos of “how to beat ATS” and “keyword optimization hacks,” did we pause to ask who programmed the damn robot? Somebody, somewhere set the filters, defined parameters, decided what success looks like. These hoes don’t know what they’re doing. And they set the software to the same dumbass frequency.

Cool.

So what do we do? Artists have always known how to draw inspiration from different places, experiences, and information to create new realities. Imagination is innovation. Translation: the Humanities will save us.