Job Portals of the Impossible

 

Zornitsa had grown used to rejection, but nothing prepared her for the labyrinth of modern job portals. They promised opportunity but delivered impossibility. Each platform—LinkedIn, Indeed, Glassdoor, local boards—shone with polished ads, sleek corporate branding, and endless lists of roles that seemed to shout: “Apply here, the world is waiting for you!” Yet behind the glossy interface, Zornitsa felt she was pushing against a locked door, her applications dissolving into silence.

The first time she created an account, she felt optimistic. She uploaded her CV, carefully formatted, polished her skills list, and added a professional photo where she smiled gently into the lens. The portal encouraged her with bright green progress bars: Profile 70% complete. Profile 85% complete. She kept clicking until she saw the glowing 100%, as if achieving completeness could somehow guarantee success.

The illusion of completion was powerful. The system made her believe she was almost there, that the world of work was just one click away. She began applying.

At first, it was exciting. A marketing assistant role here, a web designer position there, a content manager opening that seemed written for her. Each time she pressed “submit,” she imagined a real person, somewhere behind the corporate curtain, receiving her file and pausing to think: Yes, this one. She’s interesting. She clung to that fantasy.

Days passed. Weeks passed. The silence grew heavy. Not even rejections—just nothing. Applications fell into a void.

She thought maybe she was aiming too high. She lowered her expectations. Customer service jobs, entry-level office assistants, remote freelance gigs. She clicked submit, submit, submit, her computer becoming a machine of hope and despair. Still, the void swallowed everything.

What no one told her was that job portals weren’t designed for humans. They were designed for algorithms. Her CV was parsed, stripped of formatting, reduced to keywords. If the right words weren’t there, the system discarded her before human eyes ever saw her. She wasn’t a person; she was a file ranked by an algorithm.

The cruel part was how the portals pretended otherwise. They asked her to write cover letters, to pour her time and sincerity into each application. She wrote about her passion for design, her adaptability, her resilience despite health struggles. She thought maybe honesty could touch someone’s heart. But honesty wasn’t a keyword. Honesty didn’t match the ATS—the Applicant Tracking System. Her words dissolved, unscored, unseen.

Sometimes she received automated rejection emails. They came in the dead of night, cold and scripted: We regret to inform you that after careful consideration, we will not be moving forward with your application. She wondered what “careful consideration” meant when the process was automated. The machine had decided long before anyone cared.

One time, she applied for a position that seemed like a perfect fit: a content editor role for a wellness brand. She had all the skills, the experience, the voice. Weeks later, she found the same job reposted, unchanged. Her application had vanished like it never existed. She felt erased.

The cycle repeated: search, apply, wait, despair. The portals offered tools to “increase visibility.” They suggested premium subscriptions—paying to see more jobs, paying to be “top applicant,” paying for priority placement. It was a cruel irony: the unemployed were asked to spend money to be seen.

Zornitsa laughed bitterly when she saw these offers. If she had spare money, she wouldn’t be desperately applying to jobs in the first place. Yet the system thrived on desperation, squeezing hope into a product.

The most painful part was the endless “experience required” paradox. Even the simplest roles demanded years of prior experience. “Entry-level” meant two years. “Assistant” meant five. It was as if the world had decided no one could begin anywhere. For someone like Zornitsa, who had skills scattered across freelance work, creative projects, and self-taught endeavors, there was no neat category to fit. She was experienced in everything and nothing at once.

The portals couldn’t handle that. They wanted clean boxes: degree, role, years. Anything else confused the machine. Complex humanity didn’t translate into data fields.

Zornitsa began to feel like the portals weren’t gateways to jobs at all, but mirrors reflecting her inadequacy. Each time she logged in, she saw reminders of her missing credentials, her non-linear path, her health gaps that left her without the seamless work history employers demanded. She started to dread the login screen, the professional photo of herself smiling back like a cruel joke.

At night, she lay awake scrolling through listings. Some jobs sounded too good to be true—flexible hours, remote work, supportive teams. When she read the fine print, they were scams: companies fishing for free labor, pyramid schemes disguised as marketing agencies, or shady operations demanding upfront fees. The portals were haunted by predators.

She thought of all the other people like her, scattered across the world, clicking “submit” into the void. Millions of invisible applicants, each hoping for a chance, each reduced to keywords. The thought was suffocating. It wasn’t just her failure—it was systemic.

There was a moment that broke her. She had applied for over fifty positions in a single month. She forced herself to be disciplined, to treat the process like a job itself. Each morning she sat at her desk, scrolled listings, tailored CVs, wrote cover letters. It consumed her. At the end of the month, she had received exactly one response: an interview invitation.

Her heart raced. She prepared for days, rehearsing answers, researching the company. She showed up early on the video call, her face framed by careful lighting. The interviewer appeared distracted, glancing off-screen. Within ten minutes, it was clear he hadn’t even read her application. The questions were generic, the tone dismissive. A week later, she received the rejection email: We have decided to move forward with another candidate.

Zornitsa stared at the words until her eyes blurred. All that effort for ten minutes of being unseen.

After that, something cracked. She stopped believing in the promise of portals. She began to see them for what they were: machines of illusion, built to make applicants believe opportunity was within reach while serving the interests of corporations and algorithms.

Still, she couldn’t stop checking. The listings glowed like sirens, whispering possibilities: maybe this one, maybe now. The system fed on that hope. Even knowing the truth, she clicked anyway, trapped in the cycle. Hope and despair became indistinguishable.

She started noticing how the language of job ads mirrored the falseness of the portals themselves. “Dynamic team,” “fast-paced environment,” “competitive salary”—phrases that meant nothing. Behind the words lay burnout, underpayment, exploitation. Yet she was expected to present herself as enthusiastic, adaptable, endlessly energetic. The gap between her fragile reality and the fantasy demanded of her grew unbearable.

Sometimes she wondered if the portals were designed to exhaust people into compliance. To make them accept anything, even roles far below their worth, just to escape the void. If so, the system worked. She began applying to jobs she didn’t even want, jobs she knew would drain her health. She hated herself for it, but survival screamed louder than dignity.

The worst part was the feeling of invisibility. Not rejection—rejection at least acknowledged her existence. But the void, the silence, the endless absence of response—it was like she didn’t exist at all. She thought of herself as a ghost wandering digital corridors, leaving no trace, unseen by the living.

And yet, deep inside, a stubborn ember of resistance glowed. Zornitsa refused to believe her worth was defined by portals or algorithms. She had lived through illness, through despair, through invisibility before. If she had survived that, she could survive this.

She began to step back. She applied less. She redirected some of her energy into her own projects, even if they didn’t pay. She realized that the portals were never built for people like her. They were built for the streamlined, the conventional, the already advantaged. For her, they were doors that opened only to reveal walls.

Zornitsa understood now: the portals of the impossible were not broken systems—they were functioning exactly as designed. To filter out, to exploit hope, to maintain power. The impossibility was the point.

Knowing this didn’t fix her situation. She was still unemployed, still searching, still vulnerable. But it gave her clarity. And clarity, even without answers, was a kind of strength.

When she looked at the green “100% profile complete” bar on her account, she no longer felt the rush of promise. She saw it for what it was: a gamified illusion, a trick of design meant to keep her playing. She closed the browser, shut the laptop, and sat in silence. For the first time in months, she let herself breathe without the suffocating glow of job portals defining her worth.

The impossible would remain impossible. But she was still here. She was still alive. And maybe, just maybe, she could find another path—outside the algorithms, outside the portals, outside the cages of a system that mistook ghosts for people.

 

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FND83M4C