Nepotism, networks and human connection

My 15-year-old daughter is looking for her first part-time job. As a digital-first Gen Z kid, she quite reasonably assumed the best thing was to apply for jobs online. This has become the default, after all, whether we’re getting food, buying things, talking to people or simply asking questions.

Except, as anyone who’s ever got a job knows, that’s often not how it works. Many jobs, even in 2025, are awarded through a combination of knowing the right people and being in the right place at the right time. Also, nepotism. Heaps of nepotism.

Applying for jobs online sucks and is a particularly terrible idea for a 15-year-old kid. She’ll be lost in a sea of applicants, sure, but in the last few years, the deck has been stacked even differently.

Hiring managers’ inboxes are clogged with spam applicants from India, bots, and hundreds of laid-off public sector workers looking for a side gig. The manager don’t have to read all those applications - they use an AI tool to cull them and create a shortlist.

There’s not much luck for a fresh kid in that process, so we’ve been mapping out alternative strategies.

• Go from one local shop and cafe to another to say hello, let them know she’s looking for work, make a personal connection, and leave a printed copy of her CV.
• Post on our community Facebook page to let people know she’s local and available for jobs, dog walking, babysitting, or whatever else.
• Put a flyer up on the noticeboards at our local supermarkets and cafes.

You know, old school stuff from the olden days. The things you won’t find in online job searches but will probably get you a job, because someone who knows someone with a cafe’s niece is moving to the Hawkes Bay. In 2025, opportunity still flows through human networks

(That reminds me. Someone from Health NZ told me about some of the insanity of their current restructuring debacle. Get this. Staff whose jobs will be disestablished are encouraged to make ‘Expressions of Interest’ for a limited pool of new or remaining jobs. The applications are written only, with no interviews. So that sucks. But worse, the managers who make the decisions about who gets the jobs will read the applications ‘blind’, even though they know the people involved. Apparently, it’s so they aren’t ‘biased’ in their decision.

Let that one sink in.

They will only use words typed in a text box to make their hiring decision, rather than stuff like: KNOWING THE PERSON, managing the person, having observed the person working on projects and in teams, and understanding the person’s style, potential, life experiences, and other skills. The mind boggles. Have we become so confused and digitally gaslit that we’ve conflated human interaction with bias?)

Unplug the internet, it’s broken

This isn’t just happening for jobs. Technology is in such a weird space right now that the inconvenient physical world is calling us back, whether we want it or not.

I don’t know if you’ve tried to buy anything on Google lately, but it offically sucks. A year ago, if I’d Googled ‘comforter for kids’, I’d have been mad about how many sponsored, but relevant, links I’d have been presented with. When I tried googling that last night, hoping to buy a cute duvet, I got a weird AI summary, two relevant local shops, and a slew of US, UK, and Australian content that had nothing to do with what I was asking for.

Google is no longer working for advertisers - more on this from Ted Gioia. Which means I’m off to the shops for a look around. Wild.

This trend is popping up everywhere. Chatbots have ruined customer service, so we have to call or go in. Social media is spoiled with ads and bots. The news is gone, garbage, or just one ad and pop-up after another. We broke it. This is why we can’t have nice things

Whisper networks for the win

Invisible architecture is not just about shady backroom deals and golden handshakes. It’s also the life-sustaining and economy-creating networks of human connection, relationships, and happenstance that drive so much of our lives.

These are the networks that don’t operate through a portal, that don’t leave a trace in the record books, but keep the wheels turning. Sometimes, it’s a phone call from a funder to tell you they’ve got money left at the end of the financial year and they thought of you first. Sometimes it’s a mate of a mate with some mobile scaffolding. Sometimes it’s going into a shop for one thing, and leaving with another - plus a bonus tip about a book club in your neighbourhood.

This is all problematic in many ways. The reason we were so excited about the Internet in the first place was the democratisation potential. These whisper networks have always excluded those without access or social capital, reproducing privilege - and it turns out the computers didn’t fix it. But it’s not unsaveable, and right now, anything looks better than Troll-Porn-Incel-Bot-Summary-Fuck-The-Environment Town.1

Besides, this whole “being a person in the physical world with connections and serendipity” stuff… It’s pretty good. It’s the stuff that online shopping, endless Zoom meetings and over-engineered internal processes robbed us of, but we can maybe have it back now the fun machine took a shit and died.

Back to reality

We could embrace the enshittification of all things digital and lean into ^[1] the real world, if we want. We'll need our physical bodies and interpersonal skills in the revolution, after all.

And our kids need this.

Let's teach them the stuff Gen Z hasn’t been forced to develop, like making polite phone calls ^[2], writing personalised letters and making face-to-face introductions to people they don’t know.

They need to order the fish and chips, ask a question in a shop, and book their hair appointment on the phone. They won’t cope in the post-Internet world, otherwise.

(Will we? I dunno man. But we can give it a shot.)

Til next week,
AM

1. Yes Kevin, there are also many great things about the internet, and I’m using it here to write this newsletter, which I’m very grateful for. I’m being dramatic for narrative effect. ↩︎
2. Just finished Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams and will never hear ‘lean in’ the same again. ↩︎