What the term doom jobbing means

The neologism doom jobbing grows out of doomscrolling, the habit of obsessively scrolling through negative news without being able to stop. Several American outlets trace the coinage to an eight-year-old girl who described her unemployed father’s days this way: he spent hours scrolling through LinkedIn, applying everywhere, and rarely landing anything. The term caught on fast, because it captures an experience countless people, myself included, live through every day.

There’s a nuance I find central, the same one suggested by the subtitle of the D di Repubblica piece by Giulia Mattioli that inspired this post: doom jobbing doesn’t always mean applying. Often it’s the opposite, a search that exhausts itself in scrolling listings, comparing salaries and companies, imagining different paths, without ever reaching the moment of choice. It resembles the way people browse gorgeous houses they’ll never buy or trips they’ll never take. Every posting becomes a glimpse of a possible professional identity, more than the first step of a real application. And it doesn’t just affect people who are genuinely job hunting, say, after a layoff, but also those who already have a job and, on tired days, indulge in the same scroll, almost to gauge how many alternatives there are out there.

A term that joins other labels for modern work

Doom jobbing joins a string of neologisms coined in recent years: quiet quitting, refusing to give more than the bare minimum, career cushioning, building a backup plan ahead of a possible layoff, rage applying, firing off a wave of applications after a frustrating experience. Labels are often built to grab clicks, which together describe a real shift: work is no longer seen as a place of fulfillment, but as a space to be protected from.

My daily freelance routine of newsletters and groups

As a freelance content strategist, hunting for opportunities is as much part of the job as writing or client calls. I start the morning with industry newsletters, move on to LinkedIn and Indeed feeds, check a couple of Slack and Facebook groups for freelancers, and close with a quick scan of the usual job boards. I’ll admit it with a bit of irony: I check my phone notifications the way one might wait for exam results, even knowing nothing urgent is coming. It’s a ritual that has repeated almost unchanged for years and that, as online listings have multiplied at a dizzying pace, has come to resemble an infinite scroll.

Why so few listings are actually a good fit

Out of the dozens of postings I read every day, the ones that genuinely match my profile can be counted on one hand. The reasons pile up: roles already filled internally and posted only as a formality, ghost listings designed to harvest résumés without a real hire behind them. These automated filters reject valid applications before a human ever reads them. In Italy, add a freelance labor market that’s still loosely regulated, where it’s common to apply with a single click without knowing much about the company on the other end.

The cognitive and emotional toll of applying every day

A 2025 Checkr survey of three thousand people in the US found that 58% consider it nearly impossible to land an interview through a job board, while 62% say the lack of feedback has eroded their confidence. Numbers that, for anyone who’s been job hunting for a while, come as no surprise. Every application means tailoring a résumé and cover letter, vetting the company, calibrating tone. The silence that usually follows weighs more than the writing itself, and over time starts to resemble the heartbreak of job hunting I already wrote about in another post.

There’s a paradox worth naming: while half an hour on social media leaves the nagging feeling of wasted time, scrolling job listings feels useful, almost productive, even when nothing is actually moving forward. At some point, continuing to scroll becomes a comfortable way to put off the harder part: choosing, applying, accepting the risk of rejection.

Job hunting is unpaid work

Anyone who freelances knows this well: the time spent writing pitches, following up on deals and monitoring listings never gets billed to anyone, yet it drains energy that should go toward current projects. Job hunting is a job, essentially, with its own hours, self-imposed deadlines and a rejection rate no other profession would be expected to absorb without a hit to morale.

The break I’ve decided to take

Here’s the spoiler promised at the start: I’m stepping back from the search, at least for a while, but not out of exhaustion. I’ve got my hands on a project I’m genuinely excited about, one that will keep me busy full-time for months, so the hunt is taking a back seat, not because I’ve given up, but because for the first time in a while I don’t need it. I’m keeping this blog going, but I’m done checking notifications every hour as if the day depended on the next posting, and I’m letting the next opportunities come through relationships and networking built over time, rather than from the endless scroll. If anything, the twist is that this pause comes from abundance rather than emptiness: the good news I’d been waiting for has arrived, so raise a glass, and see you back here soon.

Related sources

• Doom jobbing, la ricerca di lavoro nell’epoca dello scroll infinito, by Giulia Mattioli (D di Repubblica, in Italian)
• The rise of ‘doomjobbing’ reveals a hiring system nobody trusts (Fast Company)
• Doomjobbing, la svilente ricerca del lavoro che spiega il clima di questo Primo maggio (Lettera43, in Italian)
• ‘Doomjobbing’ Is The New Doomscrolling Quietly Derailing Careers (Forbes)