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Mentor
Dumb luck in my case, I was laid off and found a FT gig after 16 months. I freelanced for roughly a year during that time and the uncertainty was terrible. It’s absolutely brutal out there and has been for awhile so it’s not you, the market is just bad right now and there’s not enough jobs to go around.
Sadly as a society people have found it’s easier to ghost than to have awkward or uncomfortable exchanges. I’d much rather hear a “no” than to be left wondering. I can’t tell you how many recruiters would reach out and then I’d send my book and never hear from them again.
Mentor
CD, it’s a really bad market, imo this is worse than the 2008 financial markets collapse or the dot com bust in the early aughts.
I know a lot of people that have been laid off in the last 12-24 months that have truly struggled to find work. A lot of people have no clue at how brutal it is out there until they go through it themselves.
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CD thinks sending 15 "hey, remember me?" messages on LI is supposed to work. Wait til she or he finds out CD doesn't mean you're a director any more. You're a doer. The real Creative Director at every agency is the finance director of the holding company.
Honestly, your clear resentment about the "recruitment gatekeepers holding us back" is going to make a lot of people, including recruiters who would have hired you, decide that you're too entitled to bother working with.
Sometimes you don't get the result you want because the market is actually hard and you actually have to try, not because an entire profession is staffed by evil people who are part of a conspiracy against you.
Recruiters are usually not gatekeepers, but low-ranking humans doing their best to meet the demands of very picky hiring managers in fields they don't fully understand while getting 1500 emails a day.
It is definitely an employer's market with loads of candidates from which to choose and salaries significantly lower than they were several years ago. I agree though, that recruiters should say if there's a match I will be in touch versus I'll get back to you either way.
Have you been reaching out to your network of former colleagues? For the past decade+ I’ve found jobs through former colleagues. Someone on the inside sent my book / resume to recruitment or the CCO, and that usually kept things moving along.