I Applied To Over 100 Different Companies As A Writer And Didn’t Get Hired. (That’s Okay!)
Let’s start with the most obvious elephant in the room.

If you are a follower of mine, then you already know that I am a writer by trade. This is what I do to survive. As in, this is my field. I have over 15 years of SEO experience, magazine experience, PR experience, and have covered almost every single part of the writing world.
I got my major public break by going viral on Medium with this article, but I’ve written for dozens of clients in the past. I also was an in-house writer for Vocal.media, Rebel Circus, as well as several other names.
Lately, I’ve been struggling to make a living writing — primarily because I had the rug pulled out from under my feet by Medium. So, lately, I’ve been applying for jobs. I applied to 100 with a resume you could cut your teeth on…only to be universally rejected.
Believe it or not, the Medium crash was a wakeup call I needed.
It’s often said that the universe will make you grow, even if you don’t want to. I’ve found this to be true in my life. I’m one of those people who, if given a sinecure of a job, would happily sit there doing nothing but that for the next 50 years as long as I could pay the bills.
Hell, I’m going to be even more candid than I probably should. My dream job is to be a stay-at-home housewife to a man who loves having lots and lots of cats. If I had that and knew with absolute certainty that I’d never go hungry or have to leave, I’d never write.
Medium, for a while, was my sinecure. It was where I made my bucks and how I was able to start working on other projects. (Or at the very least, it was how I paid the bills even though I was already financially precarious in a high COL area.)
I would have lived and died as a Medium-only writer had it not been for the new algo fucking up the platform. Then, I left a gig that was wrecking my mental health. Bam. I just lost over $3000 a month through those two moves.
I decided to send out my resume to a wide range of companies, only to be universally declined.
I am not surprised by this. I don’t have a college degree and I worked in a stigmatized industry. With HR being more restrictive than ever before, you basically have to jump through a series of hoops to actually get placed.
A lot of those hoops have nothing to do with your abilities or talent. They are literally just a tickbox on a check-off list that helps human resources cover their asses if they are wrong and do a bad hire.
There were a lot of instances where I just wanted to message them back saying, “If you actually gave me a chance, you’d see I’m a decent writer. Please let me prove my worth to you. Try me out.”
But, let’s face it. Once you’re a “no,” you’re going to stay a no.
My story in the job world is not unusual.
If you are searching for a job in this market, I feel for you. We’re in the same boat here. This is not a normal job market regardless of how many people you hear squeal about how “no one wants to work anymore.”
The more well-paid the job is, the less likely it is that you can get hired. Most jobs that openly hire people aren’t paying a living wage or are asking you to “contract” work to hire…even though they aren’t paying a contractor wage.
There are people who have applied to over 1,000 jobs only to still not get hired. We don’t have a worker shortage. We have a shortage of companies willing to hire what’s out there and an even bigger shortage of people willing to pay a decent wage.
Personally, I’m fed up with trying to apply to these positions because I’m not willing to work with people who will only take me seriously if I have a $40,000 piece of paper with me.
If my portfolio (which includes Yahoo! and MSN) is not enough, I don’t know what to tell you. Clearly, my writing resonates with some people. If that’s not enough, I don’t know what you want but it’s not what I offer.
In other fields, I noticed other friends get deplatformed and blackballed from hires.
I have a lot of connections in entertainment and elsewhere. I know of people who played E-Zoo and Ultra Music Festival that have been purposefully targeted by record labels they pissed off.
There are people who had creative cosplay sites that got fired from fucking Starbucks because of their hobbies outside the job. I’ve also seen people who grinded away for 30 years and got dropped for a younger hire right before retirement.
When it comes to my friends in the adult film industry, it became abundantly apparent why most stopped relying on film bookings alone to make ends meet. It only takes speaking out once about the wrong person to get blackballed.
I started to realize that this wasn’t just a “me” problem. It’s a corporation problem and it’s one that is quickly leading to a very strange economy where having any steady job is a status symbol. That’s not healthy. That’s not normal, either.
There’s a pattern here.
So far, the worst times of my financial life were all caused by me putting my faith into other people’s businesses. Business is a cruel, hard mistress. The company loyalty of the 50s is a thing of the past. Company loyalty doesn’t exist, neither do companies that truly care about potential hires.
Medium was the first slice of quasi-independence I ever experienced from the job market. It made me realize that other people’s businesses will never care about me the way I care about me.
Companies will make you dance for dollars and sacrifice your integrity for their benefit. When you no longer fit their business model, it’s sayonara. That’s why both Medium and Newsbreak are able to slash their payments.
My biggest mistake was assuming that Medium was different as a company. It’s not. Medium threw us all under the bus hard because they needed to cut costs, even though it meant sacrificing top writers.
Other companies will always throw you under the bus unless they profit from you profiting. The only person you can ever trust to treat you right in a business setting is you.
Our economy requires any and all creatives to have their own unique business and brand.
There are so many horror stories about people who relied on one company for an income, only to have that income break. I am one of those horror stories. Seriously. I’m not sure how I will afford rent this month, but I’m grinding away and it’s looking good-ish.
A platform can fail at any time, at any moment. Your goal as a creative is to make sure that you’re on multiple platforms, that you can get the bills paid, and that you have a unique voice and brand that works with your lifestyle.
It’s hard, but it’s doable.
In fact, you might already have some of the tools you need via Medium or other platforms like it. Want to know how I got to bounce back so fast? Well, it’s simple.
Part of the reason that I was able to partly bounce back from the collapse of Medium was because I signed up for Substack two years ago, sat on it, and had a Medium email list to populate my blog with. Now, I’m on here and I don’t have to worry about boosts.
This is my invitation to you to learn about the ways my friends and I cope with the new creative economy.
If I can do it, so can you. So, are you ready? Sweet. Check out my new side publication on Substack.