Reflection and renewal

I wrote the above in October, at the start of my second year of the MCM program. The semester before had taxed me; I was 11 months into a forced sabbatical, the world was full of anxiety, and the topics for this semester were unsettling me. The fall is often a time of starting because we ramp up after the summer break if we have one. Kids go back to school, events start up again, so much of our society revolves around the school year, and so when nature is winding down, we are at odds with it, winding up.

Even though, a year prior, I had been one of hundreds of thousands of people impacted by the mass tech layoffs, I was still calm and reasonably happy. Although my job search was definitely lopsided, and my Employment Insurance benefits had run out, I was hopeful. 

Granted, I had been laid off before, albeit long ago, in a life I no longer live. At the time, a newspaper interviewed me about the impact of the dot-com bubble burst on my life, and I said something along the lines of “I have reinvented myself before; I will reinvent myself again.”

This is a recurring theme in my life—continual renewal and reinvention when the conditions change. 

Reinvention

Nine months before the layoff, Stella Odogwu floated through the social media algorithm, talking about taking ownership of your life and your career by shifting your mindset. It is not a new thought, as my work with the school board brought me to the work of Carol Dweck around a growth mindset, but it is a thought that landed at the right time. I had already taken a step with a new job to move fully into the communications field instead of continually being communications-adjacent. Applying for the Master of Communications Management (MCM) program at McMaster was a natural next step.

Herminia Ibarra, a professor of organizational behaviour, updated her book Working Identity in 2023. She writes on LinkedIn about the challenges and rewards of reinvention in “mid-career and beyond” as people face a rapidly shifting social makeup. She focuses on mindset and envisioning a future where you are bravely, purposefully, who you want to be. 

My future is finding my place in the communications field. Getting into the MCM program helped me navigate the layoff. It provided a schedule, responsibilities, new people, validation, and, most importantly, new ideas. It was action toward my next reinvention, not just hope and dreams. 

Disruption

When I was laid off, I had high hopes that I would soon land a new position. Then, the news brought more headlines about tech layoffs and the flood of worthy job applicants searching for roles outside of tech. LinkedIn and the forums were filled with reports of fake interviewers, fake résumés, fake jobs, fake employers, and what seemed like an exponential increase in services (paid, of course) designed to help you beat the Applicant Tracking Systems (ATSs), who were reportedly rejecting qualified applicants.

The Algorithm came out, exploring how ATSs were blocking people from getting interviews while employers were complaining about not having qualified applicants. WIRED interviewed the author, Hilke Schellmann, in January 2024, identifying the disconnect between job-seekers and employers and highlighting the bias in the tools. 

I focused (with some rough moments) on connecting with people, and wonderful friends and former colleagues sent me job opportunities. After a few interviews, it was clear the reports from the forums and the media were, if anything, underplaying the situation. What once took a few months now commonly takes a year or more to find a new position after a job loss—assuming the new position does not result in a new layoff within a few months. 

It is worse when the people searching are over 50 and female. In May 2024, HuffPost published an article entitled People Are Sharing What It’s Like To Job-Hunt Over 50 — And It’s Harrowing, which identified that people in their 50s were often laid off and that it took them much longer to find a new role. While the research was conducted in the U.S.A., Canada is often a mirror for these types of business trends. 

How did we get here?

I had been looking for new opportunities for a few years before I took the job in 2022, which led to the layoff. The difference between job-searching in 2018-2021 and 2023-2024 was stark. While earlier, there was already a long run of interviews, they happened over a shorter period, and the interview opportunities were more frequent. Now hundreds of applications resulted in very few screening interviews, and where the interviews did happen, the process was now months long. Recruiters suggested timelines of six months before you would hear if you were even in the running. 

The uptick in using ATSs to “streamline” the hiring process also infused algorithms with all their biases and poor configurations. Years earlier, in 2016, Cathy O’Neill wrote Weapons of Math Destruction, warning about the need for oversight in algorithmic systems to alert to bias and prevent harm. This warning clearly went unheeded. 

In 2022, another researcher, Max Fisher, published The Chaos Machine, revealing how social media and all the algorithms in use further destroyed the social fabric of countries worldwide, creating strife for profit.

Disrupting people’s ability to find employment seems to be a highly effective and destructive way to destabilize a society.

So, now what? 

So now, we shift our focus. 

We come back into our bodies and out of our heads. We reinvent how we connect and relate to each other beyond the screen. 

We fight the demands and hype of hyper-efficiency and optimal productivity. 

We focus on slowing down to make better decisions with a deeper understanding and to achieve objectives with less churn and froth. 

We steadfastly work to achieve more meaningful objectives with calm purpose. 

“We step away from the urgency to pause and go deep instead of bouncing endlessly across the surface of chaos” (Loving, 2024).

What’s next?

I used to joke about The Great Algo and the wonderful things it brought me with its hyper-personalized results. However, this joke is now in poor taste with the recent escalation of generative Artificial Intelligence (genAI). We are being pushed further and further from a shared reality. GenAI is already radically changing the world in very few good ways. In another post, I will explore the environmental and social costs of this loss of shared reality and the widespread adoption of unregulated generative AI.  

Meanwhile, we cannot find a path into a future with genAI by being less human, abandoning our morals and ethics, or sacrificing the people around us. We all need to work to build effective guardrails and to build lives away from the screens, where we connect with genuine interest. 

Next commUnity meeting: January 19, 2025, KPL Central Branch, 1–3 p.m.

References

Loving, S. (October 27, 2024). Stop [Unpublished manuscript]. Department of Communications Studies and Media Arts, McMaster University.