Maybe the Problem Isn’t You
On hiring algorithms, disappearing jobs and why people are looking to build their own thing
A few weeks ago, a friend sent me a screenshot of a job posting she was excited about. Decent salary. Mission-driven company. A snazzy title and a job description she felt reflected all she brought to the table.
By the time I clicked the link on her potential role, there were already 900+ applicants. It’d only been open a day! I remember staring at that number while sitting on a bench before my cycling class, thinking…WTF are people supposed to do?
You send applications to hiring portals that barely acknowledge receipt, while competing against thousands of others for jobs that may not even exist in a year. Entry-level roles are already disappearing. The already overloaded job tools are now flooded with AI-generated resumé slop for recruiters and hiring managers to sort through on impossible timelines.
Meanwhile, companies still demand that job seekers stay polished, optimistic, and relentlessly strategic (build and optimize your LinkedIn profile. No, your portfolio. No, wait, also your verified skills) about their careers as though the underlying rules of work haven’t fundamentally changed.
It’s bonkers.
From the many conversations I have each week with people looking for work, whether it’s undergrads, former C-suite leaders or anyone in between, I can tell you people are not sitting around asking simple career-optimization questions anymore.
The emotional atmosphere feels much darker than that.
People want to know if knowledge work will still exist in recognizable forms in five or ten years. Whether loyalty to institutions means anything, let alone ambition, when companies eliminate entire teams and functions in the name of “innovation” or “AI transformation”.
The most heartbreaking part is how many extraordinarily capable people, who are collaborative, ingenious and deeply hungry to contribute, can’t get traction anywhere because templated hiring processes, many of which feel obsolete, can’t recognize the talent right in front of them.
It’s a familiar heartbreak and one I’ve been feeling more intensely this year, given the atmosphere.
In a lot of ways, qb. was a response to the same problem, minus the AI of it all.
A few years before founding qb., I’d spent a long stretch trying to enter the sustainability field. I applied everywhere: consulting firms, sustainability teams, climate organizations, social impact roles. I got some interviews; I had a lot of black holes and made it to way too many final rounds with no offer letter.
At first, I treated the problem like something I could solve through self-improvement. Better credentials. Better proximity. More legitimacy. More let’s doooo this!
So I enrolled in business school, interned at a prominent firm, read disclosures front to back, participated in the group Net Impact, and inhaled everything I could about sustainability strategy and corporate responsibility.
And because I was 29 and completely lit up by the work, I genuinely believed that if I became qualified enough, eventually the right institution would recognize me and let me in.
Over time, I started realizing I was trying to force myself into professional environments that struggled to interpret nonlinear, generalist or nontraditional people. The traits that made me adaptable and strategically useful didn’t translate neatly into hiring portals that filter thousands of applicants at a time.
So when a close friend and former colleague at the time, Noemí, and I sat at a café in San Francisco, venting about the sustainability industry and consulting more broadly, somewhere between beautiful pastries, two empty cappuccinos and me talking with my hands—I asked:
Can I pitch you on something?
She said yes.
Six months later, qb. existed.
Noémi and I weren’t trying to build a “lifestyle business” or a visionary future-of-work company. We were tired of waiting to be recognized by people and processes that didn’t know how to value us.
So we built something that could.
In 2017, that felt radical. Now I watch more and more people arrive at similar conclusions every week.
People are tired of concocting perfect, clean narratives to satisfy hiring algorithms, climb corporate ladders and meet professional expectations that no longer match how they actually want to live and work. And with multiple rounds of layoffs since 2024, ongoing restructuring and nonstop AI panic, more and more people no longer trust the corporate machine to build a meaningful future for them anyway.
So if this is you, or any part of this resonated, what if you built something different?
Increasingly, the people building the most hopeful, human and genuinely useful things are not the loudest or the most funded; they are thoughtful people paying attention to what’s broken and deciding to create something better anyway.
If that’s you, tell me your story. Or forward this to someone who needs to hear that maybe the problem isn’t them.
Thank you. I needed to read this today!
On the nose! I don’t know how many more rounds of applications I can do before I just give up on the whole process. The question is, how many diamonds can feasibly be produced from this kind of widespread pressure?