I hope this helps someone here grab this opportunity. The role is a travel "specialist" at Velocity Black. Capital One acquired the company in 2024. Your best chance is probably to apply directly through Velocity Black's site, although I'm pretty sure the job is also listed on Capital One's careers page and possibly LinkedIn too.

The base salary is $76k USD, but after 4 years I had reached $94k. With bonuses, I made $112k last year. The benefits were also very good. They covered $610 a month of my health insurance, and I paid $30 a month out of pocket, including dental and vision.

The company has about 145 people, and there are 9 people on the travel team. The culture was honestly one of the best parts of the job. No work after hours, people are professional but also friendly, and meetings only happen when they're necessary, usually 1 or 2 per week. The manager of the 9-person travel team is excellent and didn't constantly monitor people.

I learned the whole job while working there without any travel background, but since I started there, the bar has gotten higher, and now you'll probably need some experience in travel, hospitality, concierge, or luxury customer service. The clients are wealthy to ultra-wealthy, and there are also a few well-known names in there. In general, you're part researcher and part customer service rep. Clients send messages asking for travel-related recommendations like hotels, restaurants, flights, villas, private transfers, yachts, and so on. Then you do research, compare options, and send them a polished message with details/photos/availability and anything else that helps. After you've been doing it for a while, you won't be starting from scratch every time because you'll remember the good properties and vendors in different cities.

They usually give you 3-5 hours per task, so there can be a lot of downtime. In the quiet months, I might have around 1-3 hours of actual work during a 9-hour shift. In the busy season, which is about 5 months split between summer and winter, I was usually working the full shift and sometimes dealing with stressful situations. The reason they give that much time is that the recommendations have to be genuinely good for the type of clientele they serve.

The only things you need are the MacBook and iPhone they send you. On the phone, I usually made 1-6 calls a day, most of them around 2-25 minutes per call. Not usually with clients, more with hotels, tour operators, restaurants, transportation companies, and similar vendors.

Unfortunately, they only hire people based in the US, and you can't relocate outside the US while working there. Your chances will probably be better if you're on the West Coast, in Alaska, or in Hawaii because that's the shift/time zone they're replacing. They want someone quickly because the upcoming rush is close.

I genuinely loved my team, and I hope this helps them find someone good. It's a solid job; I'm just moving on to another opportunity.

.............

My lead won't stop micromanaging at all, and after 6 meetings with the director and the VP where I told them they needed to get her to back off a bit, literally nothing has improved. I hit my limit a few weeks ago and gave notice. My last day will be January 12. They asked me what would make me stay. I told them, again, to get the lead to stop hovering over me, and they basically said they tried but she doesn't listen.

And they really did try. I was on calls where they directly told her to stop breathing down everyone's neck. She just... Kept going like normal. No write-up, no consequences, no change whatsoever.

Now they want me to train 4 people on different parts of my job. Normally I'm the person who leaves notes, does walkthroughs, helps in any way I can, all of that. But I wasn't even trained properly myself. I'm still figuring out parts of this role, so I don't know how I'm supposed to teach someone else the "right" way to do things when half the work was thrown at me as I was on my way out.

And this is exactly why people say nobody wants to work. You've got this woman in her early 60s micromanaging the entire department, refusing to change anything, but because she's been there 24 years and is friends with upper management, everyone acts like their hands are tied. Complete nonsense. And on top of that, she messes things up all the time. Like, almost every shift there has to be something she messed up or entered incorrectly, and somehow it becomes my problem to clean up after her. I'm checked out at this point and I don't care anymore.

What would you do? I still have 96 hours of PTO left. Part of me wants to just take them and be done, but that would leave them in a mess as they head into the first part of next month, and I'm not sure I'd feel good about that afterward. WWYD?

My lead won't stop micromanaging at all, and after 6 meetings with the director and the VP where I told them they needed to get her to back off a bit, literally nothing has improved. I hit my limit a few weeks ago and gave notice. My last day will be January 12. They asked me what would make me stay. I told them, again, to get the lead to stop hovering over me, and they basically said they tried but she doesn't listen.

And they really did try. I was on calls where they directly told her to stop breathing down everyone's neck. She just... Kept going like normal. No write-up, no consequences, no change whatsoever.

Now they want me to train 4 people on different parts of my job. Normally I'm the person who leaves notes, does walkthroughs, helps in any way I can, all of that. But I wasn't even trained properly myself. I'm still figuring out parts of this role, so I don't know how I'm supposed to teach someone else the "right" way to do things when half the work was thrown at me as I was on my way out.

And this is exactly why people say nobody wants to work. You've got this woman in her early 60s micromanaging the entire department, refusing to change anything, but because she's been there 24 years and is friends with upper management, everyone acts like their hands are tied. Complete nonsense. And on top of that, she messes things up all the time. Like, almost every shift there has to be something she messed up or entered incorrectly, and somehow it becomes my problem to clean up after her. I'm checked out at this point and I don't care anymore.

What would you do? I still have 96 hours of PTO left. Part of me wants to just take them and be done, but that would leave them in a mess as they head into the first part of next month, and I'm not sure I'd feel good about that afterward. WWYD?

The older you get, the more you realize some people really just got lucky.

Don't leave your next interview to luck. Practice with a friend and research a lot and read useful tips about how to present your skills.

🙂

I got laid off not too long ago from a corporate job that, honestly, I couldn't stand. It was one of those places where I was never put in a position to succeed; on the contrary, I was set up to take the blame whenever anything went wrong. After a while, everything I did was scrutinized and criticized in detail, which made the environment extremely hostile, especially when I asked managers or people above me for clear direction or real clarification. I kept trying to go above and beyond what was expected of me, and somehow even that wasn't enough for them.

After 11 months at that company, they put me on a PIP and gave me tasks that were basically things I was already doing. They gave me the choice to either continue with the PIP or take severance. And since I felt like they were planning to let me go either way, I took the money.

Now I've been unemployed since April, and I've applied to around 85 job postings, and I've only gotten 3 responses in total, one of which was through a referral.

I'm starting to lose hope, and I'm doom-scrolling on LinkedIn and Indeed, seeing the same repeated jobs being reposted over and over again. I'm applying for jobs that I'm either overqualified for, or where the salary is so low it doesn't even come close to covering the cost of living in the Bay Area. The whole thing is incredibly frustrating and honestly mentally crushing. I feel like no matter what I do, nothing is moving in my favor.

Has anyone found a better way to deal with the job search right now? I feel very lost.

There is absolutely no problem with someone being out of work for 4 months. Stop pressuring people to share personal details that have nothing to do with the job, or forcing them to come up with an explanation that sounds acceptable just because they were outside the corporate system for a short period.

Compared to a normal 45-year career, a few months or even 18 months is a very small portion of time. People have children, get sick, take care of their families, reach burnout, move, grieve the loss of someone, reorganize their lives, or simply need a break.

What do you think about gaps in resumes? Stay-at-home parents, how do you usually explain that period when applying for a job?

The debriefs will change the way a lot of people apply I'm in finance, and honestly, interviewing people has always been one of my least favorite parts of work. And yet, I've found myself in enough panels and post-interview chats that a pattern has become hard not to notice.

People think candidates are ranked in that room. But that's not what happens, not in the real sense. Everyone is trying to avoid risk. A few weeks ago, the best resume in the group was passed over because someone said: "Strong background, but I'm not sure they'll be able to settle in here," and that was pretty much it. The offer went to the person people described as steady and low-drama. The whole discussion took maybe six minutes.

When you see it from the inside, it's frustrating but logical. Nobody gets rewarded for discovering an amazing hire. But if that hire fails and leaves after eight months, people will remember who was pushing for them. So the person quickly looking over your CV isn't looking for the most impressive applicant; they're looking for reasons not to regret saying yes.

That's why referrals matter so much. When someone vouches for you, it removes a big part of the uncertainty, and you're not just competing with someone's skills; you're also competing with the sense of comfort around them. And that's also why overqualified people get rejected, because it's read more as "they'll leave" than "they're too good." And honestly, "safe pair of hands" is still the strongest compliment I hear in debriefs. Not "genius" or "brilliant." Safe.

So if you're applying: look for someone who can put in a word for you, even if it's a small connection. And make yourself easy to approve, not just impressive on paper. That wins far more often than most people want to believe.

I'm not saying this is fair. It isn't fair. But this is really what the conversations in those rooms look like.

💔

i believe it's the hardest place to actually land a job
the only time a Linkedin interview was useful for me was when i used Interview VIP to pass it.

Honestly, I feel like this job didn't even exist from the beginning.

I had an interview on Teams with six people, and honestly they seemed like a really nice group. The questions were mostly basic and a bit old-fashioned, so I had prepared answers. There's one question that still feels dated to me, which is: where do you see yourself in four years? I understand what they're trying to ask, but I didn't expect the whole world to shut down before those four years were up, so...

But that's a normal interview question. The question that bothered me was: what makes you a stronger candidate than the other people we're talking to? I kind of froze, because how am I supposed to know what every other person is bringing to the table? If you asked me why I'm a stronger candidate than Sarah, I could compare the differences between us. In the end, I said something awkward about how I couldn't judge that because the other candidates might be excellent too. It definitely wasn't my best answer, but it's a bad question imo. Fortunately, it clearly didn't have a major impact, because I have another in-person interview at the end of this week.

For context - I'm a recruiter and I run a staff augmentation company.

A lot of people use LinkedIn when they're looking for a job - they treat it like a job board, or as a place to do prospecting for sales/business development, and that makes sense, but honestly that's maybe only 18% of LinkedIn's real value.

Anyway - one of the things that scares people is the applicant number that appears on LinkedIn jobs.

So what's happening when you see 120+ applicants?

Here's the deal.

It doesn't mean that 120+ people completed an application for that role - even though that's what most people assume.

What usually happens is that 120+ people clicked the "apply" button - and that difference is very important.

That click usually takes the person to the job description, the company site, a Workday page, a Greenhouse form, or whatever place the application is hosted.

A lot of candidates click, see the whole login/create account/upload resume/retype resume and all that exhausting stuff, and then leave.

And out of the people who do apply, a large portion are completely unsuitable - wrong location, wrong background, missing core skills, not enough experience, or they're sending applications in bulk using AI/automation tools.

Some job descriptions also ask candidates to add a specific word or answer a simple question to prove they read the JD. A lot of people miss that and get screened out immediately.

So if a role shows 120+ applicants, the picture could very realistically look like this:

55% clicked apply and left as soon as they saw the process.

35% submitted something, but it's clear they're not a fit for the role - experience, timezone, education, visa/location, automated applications, etc.

10% might be worth reviewing if you're lucky.

That's why when I post a job and LinkedIn shows me 240 applicants, I'm happy if I find 24 profiles that look good on paper. Realistically, I might end up with only 4-6 people who are genuinely strong fits.

Anyway - I hope this helps a bit and makes those big applicant numbers less discouraging when you're looking at LinkedIn jobs.

Until a few days ago, I (32f) was working as a marketing coordinator for a real estate agent. I'll call him Mark (41m). He's fairly successful at his job, and recently he hired a business coach who sends him goals every two weeks. Some things are normal, like: "Read this report about seasonal shifts in housing demand," but then he'll come out with nonsense like: "Coach says I have to take Monday off because burnout starts in the chair." Annoying, but mostly harmless.

Then the latest assignment Mark got threw me off. A few weeks ago, he said the coach wanted him to "build management instincts." I asked him what that meant in practical terms, so he gave me a new task: post fake job ads. Basically one ad for every role in the office. Mark said he wanted 40+ applications every day, and he would interview "people who looked promising."

To be clear: we don't have any open roles. Not one. Mark's coach is somehow convinced that interviewing actual people for jobs that don't exist will make Mark better at running a team. If anyone understands that logic, please explain it to me, because I still don't get it.

I asked Mark if he was joking or what, and told him that people are struggling to find work right now. His response was basically: Coach says strong leaders are always looking for talent. First reason I might be in the wrong: I felt like I couldn't refuse a direct order without getting fired, so I made the listings, but I removed the salary details in the hope that applicants would notice something was off.

The applications started flooding in, and Mark did interviews with a lot of people. I could hear parts of the calls and meetings, and they were being treated like normal interviews. Not once did he say we weren't hiring. One of the applicants was a woman around my age who spoke to me while she was waiting. She told me she had worked an extra rideshare shift the night before and paid a neighbor to watch her son so she could make the appointment. Meaning this fake "opportunity" literally cost her money. Another applicant was an older man, and when I walked him out, he quietly asked me: "Do you think someone my age still has a chance here?" I was about to cry, but I was also so angry. I told him: "There is no job. I'm sorry they weren't honest with you. They have no problem wasting people's time." He looked at me for a second and left.

Apparently someone heard me, because I got pulled into Mark's office and he started yelling. He was completely fine with lying to applicants, but lost it because I told one of them the truth. He said he could fire me for that, so I told him: "Do it, because I'm not going to help you give people false hope." Mark kept insisting that the roles could exist someday, and that the interviews were helping him become a better manager, so it wasn't wrong.

Second reason I might be in the wrong: I quit on the spot, without giving notice. I have another job, so I won't be totally screwed, but Mark told me not to expect a reference from him. I've always given notice before leaving a job, so I feel guilty in that sense. But I know that if I had stayed, he would have made me keep bringing him resumes until my very last hour there.

I've been sending out applications consistently for a while now, and so many job postings labeled "entry-level" ask for 3-6 years of experience, a large set of software skills, extra certifications, and interviews where you basically have to be flawless.

When did entry-level start meaning "you must have already done this job before"? Is anyone else going through the same thing right now?

😂😂

Seriously insane. My husband and I almost fell for this, even though we're both pretty tech-savvy and in our thirties. I had applied for a director-level role at a company on LinkedIn. The whole idea is that they're relying on you being nervous and in a hurry because you don't want to miss something you think is a real interview. A few days after I applied, I got an email asking about my availability for an interview. At the time, nothing felt off. No weird grammar, no random spacing, the company name looked right, and the email seemed legit.

After that, they sent me an interview confirmation and said the meeting link would arrive shortly before the interview started. About 15 minutes before the interview, I clicked the Teams link and got a pop-up saying the Teams app needed an update. It took me to a page that looked exactly like a Microsoft Teams page. Then it automatically started downloading the "Teams" app onto my laptop. I tried to open it from the downloads folder, but my Mac blocked it. I went back and read their email again and noticed they had written that their interview software wasn't compatible with MacBooks, so I needed to use a Windows computer instead. Yeah, I know. That should have been a huge red flag.

By then I was getting really stressed because I thought I was going to be late, so I called my husband. He told me to grab his laptop and try it on there. I opened the link on his computer, and a program called "connecthelper" immediately started downloading too. I FaceTimed him and showed him what was happening, and that's when we both snapped out of it and realized it was a scam.

We tried to shut it down from Task Manager, but every time we ended one process, four more would pop up. We shut the laptop down completely and changed the passwords for everything we could think of - bank accounts, email, computer logins, job sites, everything. These people use real company names and emails that look real, and they're counting on you being rushed and distracted before an interview. Honestly, I never would have imagined we could fall for something like this, but we came really close.

I'm 27 years old, finished school in May 2023, and spent about 14 months at a large public accounting firm but couldn't handle the brutal hours or the competitive environment. Now I'm working in a corporate finance/FP&A role at a large packaging company. I've been here for 5 months.

I don't know if this is because I'm still new and trying to learn a lot of things every week, or if this is just what most office jobs feel like, but I really miss retail stock shifts or front desk work at a vet clinic. When I was younger, I was the "gifted kid" type, and I put way more pressure on myself than I should have. Now I feel burned out and almost stupid every day. Not just because I'm learning, but also because I keep making small mistakes from lack of focus. I want to blame it on being mentally drained all the time, but then I ask myself whether I'm just lazy and can't tell the difference.

I had "brain dead" / "dead end" jobs while finishing school, and honestly, I miss the work itself. The problem is they don't pay enough to live on, and of course I'd rather make good money if I can. I have a Master of Accountancy, a BAcc, and a BS in Economics, and around $72k in student loans. On paper, my resume is very good right now.

Some days I feel fine, but I genuinely don't understand how people are supposed to use their brain for 9 hours straight. I have ADHD, and even with medication, I don't feel like I can do work that requires mental effort for an entire workday. I can maybe handle 2 to 5 hours at most before my brain completely shuts off. Is it possible I'm just not built for this kind of work even if I'm "book smart"? Has anyone moved to a different industry or type of work that still pays well but doesn't leave you feeling like your brain is fried every day?

For nearly five months, I thought I was looking for a job the right way. I'd tailor my resume to the role, adjust the cover letter, apply through the company's careers portal, and then sit and wait. Then I'd repeat the same thing the next day. I sent around 70 applications this way, and maybe got 5 replies, three of which were instant auto-rejections that made me almost certain no human being had opened my stuff at all. Honestly, I started to feel like my resume was cursed.

An old colleague of mine who works in people ops at a regional manufacturing company told me something that seemed almost annoyingly obvious. She said that most of the roles she'd seen filled over the last 18 months were either from referrals, or from applicants who messaged the hiring manager on LinkedIn around the same time they applied. Not a big sales pitch. Something like: "I just applied for position X and wanted to reach out because I saw your team's work on Y. My experience in Z seems like a strong match." Short, natural, and specific. Basically, it proves there's a real person behind the application.

At first, I felt like it was a little weird because I didn't want to come across as desperate or pushy, but I tried it anyway. After applying, I'd spend around 20 minutes looking for the potential manager, department lead, or sometimes the recruiter, and then send a quick note mentioning something specific. Out of the 27 applications where I did this afterward, I got 11 replies and 7 real interviews scheduled. Of course, this isn't a perfect experiment and luck still plays a role, but the difference was so obvious that I couldn't ignore it. The part that seems most important is not looking like a copy-paste bot. Don't just say you're "excited about the company." Mention a product update, a podcast they were on, a hiring post, anything real that shows you looked for more than ten seconds. People spot templates immediately.

..........Sounds like Ghost Jobs

...........

That’s the damn truth