This is Part 3 of a three-part series. If you missed Part 1: The Impossible Math, and Part 2: Privilege Dressed As Strategy, start there.

Part 3: The System Is Broken

Or: Stop Blaming Job Seekers

Now let’s talk about what the career advice world refuses to touch: the system itself.

Not you. Not your resume. Not your LinkedIn headline or your STAR method answers or your follow-up email timing.

The system.

The passion performance

One of the cruelest parts of job searching is the demand for passion and enthusiasm when your basic survival is threatened.

Every job posting, every interview, every piece of advice wants the same thing: tell us why you want to work HERE specifically. What excites you about this role? How does this position align with your career goals? Show us you believe in what we do. We’re looking for culture fit.

Here’s the honest answer nobody can say out loud: I’m applying because I need money. I need this job so I can pay rent and not be homeless. I need income because I’m broke in Canada — one of the most expensive countries in the world — and there’s virtually no safety net for someone in my position.

But you can’t say that. If you admit you need this job to survive, you get rejected for not being a culture fit, for just looking for any job rather than THIS job specifically.

There’s a concept in psychology called Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The idea is simple: you can’t access the higher levels — purpose, meaning, self-actualization — when the bottom levels are under threat. When you’re worried about where your next meal is coming from or whether you’ll have a roof over your head next month, your brain is in survival mode. You can’t think about meaningful work or aligning with company values or finding your passion. You’re just trying not to fall apart.

But employers demand the passion performance anyway. Even for minimum wage jobs. Especially for minimum wage jobs.

And that’s the cruelty of it. A job is a transaction — your labor in exchange for money to live. That’s the fundamental relationship. But modern hiring has wrapped that simple transaction in so many layers of performative nonsense that you’re expected to pretend the job is a calling, act grateful for the opportunity, claim this specific company is where you’ve always wanted to work, and hide that you’re desperate — all while they’re offering you $17 an hour to stock shelves.

They want your whole self. They’re willing to pay for a fraction of your time.

Exhibit A: The Bushbalm job posting

Let me show you exactly what I mean with a real example. See for yourself.

Bushbalm is a skincare startup in Ottawa. They posted a Retention Marketing Coordinator role at $45,000 to $55,000 CAD. Sounds reasonable. Let’s look closer.

The posting required a mandatory unpaid project as part of the application — not optional, not for finalists only. Mandatory. Before they’d even consider talking to you, they wanted a full email wireframe with structure and reasoning, an audience segmentation strategy with justification, a subject line with explanation, and a demonstration of how you think about email marketing, targeting, and messaging.

That’s not a skills assessment. That’s free consulting work disguised as an application requirement. And because hundreds of desperate candidates will do it, they get that work for nothing.

The posting also wanted someone “detail-obsessed” who would serve as the “final line of defense” — catching every typo, testing every link, ensuring a flawless customer experience. All the responsibility. None of the authority. When something breaks, and it will, it’s your fault. But you won’t have the power to fix the broken processes that caused it, the budget to address systemic issues, or the support when things inevitably go wrong.

And the role required one to two years of experience with specific platforms like Klaviyo and Postscript. That’s not entry-level. Someone with platform-specific experience should be paid more than someone fresh out of school. But they want experienced workers at entry-level prices.

One more flag: “newly created role.” Which means the scope isn’t defined yet, expectations will expand as they figure it out, and you’ll be building processes from scratch — unpaid, of course, because that’s just “part of the role.”

Bushbalm probably thinks they’re being reasonable. They’re a startup! They’re growing! They were on Dragons’ Den! They have passion and innovation and culture!

They still want free labor from people who can’t afford to say no.

And this isn’t unique to Bushbalm. This is the pattern. Ghost jobs that were never real. Unpaid test projects that end up in someone’s campaign folder. Six to eight interview rounds. Entry-level salaries for specialist skills. Rejection emails after you’ve invested hours. Or no email at all. Just silence.

But career advice says the problem is you. Your resume wasn’t tailored enough. You didn’t network hard enough. You didn’t show enough enthusiasm. You gave up too soon.

When “help” means more of the same

Here’s a sample of workshops I’ve been invited to recently. Not from shady sources — from legitimate employment organizations supposedly designed to help newcomers like me find work:

Interview Skills. Crafting a Targeted Resume. Effective Job Search Strategies. How to identify and leverage your transferable skills. How to become visible, relevant, and employable through artificial intelligence. And my personal favorite: the myths and realities of careers in Canada.

The myths and realities of careers in Canada. Aimed at a job seeker who can’t land a job at McDonald’s.

I didn’t RSVP to a single one. Because I already know what’s inside: the same advice I’ve heard a hundred times, repackaged with a fresh title. Optimize your LinkedIn. Tailor your resume. Use AI to your advantage. Network strategically. The ex-Microsoft guy’s framework, delivered by a workshop facilitator who has never been in my position.

These workshops exist. They run on schedule. They get attendance numbers and satisfaction surveys and government funding renewals. And they change nothing for the people sitting in the room.

Recently, I was invited to complete a survey for a pilot project at Collège La Cité called Phare Emploi, designed to help newcomers find jobs. The survey asked: why do you think you don’t have a job?

The options were things like lack of in-demand skills, lack of professional network, lack of Canadian experience. Every option pointed back at me. At something I was missing. Something I needed to fix.

Not on the list: employer discrimination against foreign credentials. The Canadian experience catch-22 — can’t get experience without a job, can’t get a job without experience. Ghost job postings. Unconscious bias filtering out non-Anglo names. An objectively terrible job market. Hiring practices that treat candidates as disposable.

The entire framework assumed the problem was me.

So I didn’t answer the way they wanted. Here’s what I submitted:

What services would be most useful? Direct matching with employers who have real positions to fill, without going through saturated platforms. Access to a network of partner companies with accelerated and transparent recruitment processes. Psychological support for dealing with abusive market practices — unpaid projects, excessive interview rounds, unrealistic requirements. Stop blaming job seekers and start holding employers accountable for their toxic practices. Skills can be developed, but without real access to decision-makers, it leads nowhere.

Their response: silence. Not even an automated acknowledgment.

They probably hated it. It challenged the entire premise of their program. Because most employment services for newcomers aren’t actually designed to fix the problem — they’re designed to look like they’re fixing the problem. They collect government funding, run workshops, report the numbers, and declare success. Meanwhile the structural barriers stay exactly where they are, and newcomers keep getting told to optimize their LinkedIn profiles.

Everyone has an opinion. Nobody has a clue.

There’s more to this story than I can fit into three posts. So let me just say: the noise doesn’t stop at bad advice. It comes from everywhere.

There are the Canadians who blame immigrants for the job market. I’m an immigrant. I’m also jobless. Let that sit for a second.

There are the people who say you should apply to 20 jobs per day. Twenty. As in, tailored, researched, personalized applications — twenty of them — every single day. I don’t know what they think a job application is, but it’s not a text message.

There are the optimists who say “but what if the next one is the ONE?” It’s never the ONE. At some point that sentence stops being encouragement and starts being a way to avoid sitting with the reality that the system is genuinely broken.

There are recruiters who approach every resume looking for reasons to eliminate you rather than reasons to consider you. Who see a gap and ask why it took so long to find a job — as if people leave positions for fun, as if we can afford to quit and go backpacking through Europe when we can barely afford rent WITH a salary. The gap is there because the market is a disaster. The gap is the market’s fault, not mine.

And then there are the everyday people — family, friends, colleagues who’ve been employed for 15 or 20 years without interruption — who still see the job market the way it looked when they last had to navigate it. Their perspective was never shaken by sudden job loss, by months of rejection, by applying into a void. So they say things like: if you don’t like your job, just quit. People just don’t want to work anymore. Maybe your resume needs fixing. You have to get out there and network.

They’re not malicious. They’re just completely out of touch. They speak from a place of comfort and call it wisdom. And until the market forces them to actually experience what job searching looks like right now, in 2026, they’ll keep handing out advice that’s as useless as it is confident.

The people who know what’s actually happening are the ones too exhausted to explain it.

It’s not your fault

I wrote this series because I’m angry.

Angry at advice that doesn’t work and won’t admit it. Angry at the victim-blaming dressed up as career coaching. Angry at institutions that take funding to help people like me and spend it on resume workshops. Angry at employers who post fake jobs, demand free labor, run six-round interview processes, and then ghost the candidates who gave them hours of their time.

Angry that I’m applying as a woman with a hijab, with a Moroccan name, with qualifications from a country nobody recognizes, and the system filters me out before a human being ever reads a word I wrote. Angry that this is treated as a personal failing rather than what it actually is: discrimination with plausible deniability built in.

The career advice circus wants us silent and endlessly optimizing. Convinced that one more tailored cover letter, one more LinkedIn connection, one more workshop about transferable skills will finally crack it open. It won’t. Because the problem was never your resume.

If you’re reading this and you’re in it — broke, exhausted, applying sporadically because consistent effort stopped making psychological sense a long time ago — I’m not going to tell you it gets better. I don’t know if it does. What I know is that it’s not your fault. You’re not failing because you can’t sustain the impossible. You’re not weak because the system ground you down. You’re not broken because you stopped believing the advice.

The system is broken. You’re just living in it.

And someone needed to say that out loud.

Featured image courtesy of Pexels.