“Desperate” Job Seeker Waits on Interview Call for 30 Minutes Despite Recruiter No-Show

A TikToker said that she waited alone on a video call for a job interviewer to show up even though they were 30 minutes late. Her reason for waiting for the person to show up even though there were clear signs that they either completely forgot about the interview or just didn't bother to let her know that they wouldn't be on? She's broke.

Sragvi (@sragvipattanaik) posted a viral, 6-second clip capturing a snippet of her experience on the platform, which prompted a litany of anecdotes from other TikTok users who vented about their own hiring experiences.

The clip in question, which racked up over 945,000 views on the popular social media platform, begins with the TikToker looking directly into the camera. Sragvi writes in a text overlay for it: "staying onto a no-show interview call for 30 mins bc I am poor and desperate."

The video then transitions to a shot of her waiting in a video conference room, a dialog box window on her laptop showing her holding her phone and giving a thumbs up. She adds "rough out here" in a caption for the clip along with a hashtag detailing that she's a pre-med student.

Sragvi's concerns about securing a job have been echoed by other social media users online who've faced issues in attempting to secure gainful employment, like this one TikToker who went viral after sharing all of the job rejection emails in a viral clip that had others on the app relating to their struggle.

Then there was another person who said that they had applied to 76 different opportunities online and not securing offers from any of them. Their video was posted to, at a time, when there were purported staffing shortages all across the country, leading the social media user to decry the job market as a scam.

Let's not forget another job seeker who went on the web and claimed to have submitted their resume in for over 500 different positions, only to to get rejected from every one of them, leaving her to declare that she was officially "done" from trying to get a job.

For some folks, it's not like having higher education or specific certifications are necessarily helping them secure jobs that they want, either. Take this college grad who said that they couldn't even get a job checking people's wristbands so that they could use the porta-potty toilets at a music festival.

And if you're on the folks who have been finding it difficult to land a gig, then you might not like to hear what SHRM has to report about the situation: apparently unemployment numbers are only going to increase throughout the year and employers aren't necessarily going out of their way to hire people.

"Experts anticipate slight increases in unemployment and layoffs in 2024," the outlet writes with an analyst saying that while the labor market will certainly "bend" that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to "break."

2023 saw a bloodbath in the tech industry when it came to layoffs — according to NerdWallet some 262,682 workers were laid off from numerous companies: Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, Sony Interactive Entertainment, Electronic Arts, Expedia, Bumble, and many more announced sizable layoffs at their respective places of work.

And then there were folks who shared some of their own horror stories from the world of prospective employment: "My bf had a 'interview' and they made him record himself and answer basic questions you find on Google," they wrote.

Someone else said that even with in-person interviews they found themselves left twiddling their thumbs: "I had a interview scheduled for a grocery store and they were supposed to call me and never gave me their phone number and I never got the call"

But there were others, like this TikToker, who thought that Sragvi ended up dodging a bullet with this job: "Any interview no show is actually a blessing. Those types of employers are walking red flags anyway, who will be terrible to work for"

Another TikTok user thought that strategies like this are part of a larger cross-corporation collusion tactic where businesses are holding off on hiring new people or making the job-search process so difficult that folks are ultimately left hoping to grab any gig that they can: "yall got to realize they're doing this on purpose. they're starving out the workforce so we come crawling back asking only for scraps, it's so they don't have to pay us more, we'll pick the lesser."