Jacob rows. He told me the thing he likes about it is that the returns are linear. Do the work and the number on the erg gets better. You might start out an athletic freak, but the people willing to work harder will catch you eventually.
Then he started applying for graduate roles, and none of that held.
This episode is a conversation with Jacob Armes, a third year Commerce student at UWA in Perth, finishing at the end of this year and in the middle of grad applications right now. He isn't bitter about any of it. He went out of his way, more than once, to say he understands why the system works the way it does. That's what makes what he said land harder.
Here's the line I keep coming back to. He said it stings to get cut off a CV before anyone has seen your face or heard your voice. Not the rejection itself. The fact that the decision got made before a single person knew what he was like.
By the time we spoke he'd been through both kinds of interview. The recorded video interview he called a different beast. Weird, talking to yourself into a camera, and it took him a few practice runs to get anywhere near comfortable. Then one in-person interview, his first ever for a graduate role. He told me walking through the doors was the hardest part of the whole thing, and the second he started talking he was fine. He'd decided beforehand that he wasn't going to memorise answers. He'd be honest and let his character do the work.
That's the whole problem in one story. The version of him that would have won the room never got the chance to be in it.
He knows the maths, by the way. He raised it himself before I could. The firms are big, the recruiting teams are small, the application numbers are enormous. I told him what it looks like from the employer side, that a graduate program can pull thousands of applications with three or four people managing the entire process. Nobody is phoning everyone. Filtering has to happen somewhere.
But there's a difference between filtering and never being seen. What he asked for wasn't a longer process or a guarantee. It was two minutes. Two minutes for someone to hear how he thinks and why he wants the role.
We also got into how he actually uses AI, which is not what most employers assume. He had a derivatives unit last semester with some high level maths he was struggling with, so he'd drop practice questions in and work through them step by step, then ask for another one like it, then another. Getting reps in, he called it. A coach, not a shortcut. And he doesn't think he's unusual for it. Meanwhile employers are watching candidates read answers off a second screen in video interviews, and you can see it happening live. Same tool, two completely different students, and most processes right now can't tell them apart.
Then there's the thing he wants that almost nobody builds for. Stability. He's interested in the entrepreneurial side, he just doesn't want it yet. He wants a first role, a foundation, something to fall back on before he tries anything else. His words: get my foot in the door, start building that experience, and maybe spread out later. If you've been told this generation won't commit to anything, he's worth forty minutes of your time.
This podcast is for HR leads, talent acquisition managers, and hiring managers who want to hear how their hiring process actually feels from the other side.