Associates degree, hundreds of applications, zero offers: Netizen's honest assessment of a two-year job hunt

A post on Reddit’s r/recruitinghell from someone who graduated with an Associate’s degree in May 2024, subsequently obtained a pharmacy tech certification and has spent more than a year applying to jobs across every platform imaginable. Their application also included specialised sites like VivianHealth, ihirepharmacy, and Wanderly.

The original poster has applied to Walgreens, CVS, Costco, Starbucks, Dunkin Donuts, music stores, and dozens of pharmacies. They have walked into stores and asked about vacancies in person. They have asked working pharmacy technicians how they got hired. The consistent answer: “I got hired during quarantine.”

They are living with parents who want to retire and who, despite hundreds of explained attempts, interpret the ongoing unemployment as laziness. “My doctor Mom must have reviewed and had me retire my resume five times by now,” they wrote. “I don’t know how much longer I can take this.”

What Reddit said

The thread offered a mix of uncomfortable truths and practical redirects.

Several commenters addressed the credential gap directly. “An Associates is basically a nothing-burger,” one wrote bluntly. Another elaborated: “In today’s world, the average person applying for any job already has a bachelor’s degree if not a master’s. You may have to go to a staffing firm to just get by.”

On the pharmacy tech path specifically, one commenter offered a practical alternative the original poster may not have considered: “Reach out to vet offices. They need pharmacy techs too, and it always seems like they don’t have them.” At the very least, it’s a place to start.

Another commenter also pointed to the possibility that the resume might be the problem: “You say you can count the number of interviews you had on one hand in this two-year period. That suggests to me that something about your resume might be putting recruiters off. Have you shared it in a resume review subreddit?”

Ultimately, the situation highlights how the market has changed. The glaring issue in this case is that the floor for acceptance likely changed and that employers may prioritise those with a bachelor’s degree over those who have an associate’s degree. There’s nothing wrong about either, but it’s simply the way the market has fundamentally changed.

More than that, it may also be an issue of how the applicant is presenting themselves in their resume. It’s a recruiter’s first impression, and when the application is unimpressive in a stack of hundreds of applicants, a rejection is unfortunately likely to happen.

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