• Elon Musk's X is seeking a PR leader to bolster its public image.
• Under Musk, the platform's relationship with some advertisers has been fraught.
• Musk has also attacked journalists by name.

Help wanted: X is looking for a PR guru to boost its reputation.

Since Elon Musk bought the platform formerly known as Twitter, its relationship with advertisers and reporters has been fraught.

X is now looking for a communications leader to help improve its relationship with reporters, multiple people familiar with the matter told Business Insider. One person who was contacted by a recruiter said the remit was described as helping craft the company's public image. The job has been vacant since Dave Heinzinger left his role as head of media strategy earlier this year. The person would work closely with CEO Linda Yaccarino, who's been trying to rebuild X's ads business.

The company saw an exodus of advertisers after Musk acquired it in October 2022, though there have been some recent signs that the company's ad revenue is turning around. In 2023, Musk lashed out at advertisers directly, telling those that had stopped spending on the platform to "go fuck yourself." And X is suing 11 advertisers, alleging they collectively conspired to boycott the platform in contravention of antitrust laws. The case is ongoing.

On the media front, Musk has attacked journalists by name on the platform.

X has also been criticized for loosening moderation and account verification rules and reinstating some banned accounts of provocative figures. Separately, Musk has used the platform to tout MAGA messaging and promote President Donald Trump, stirring division among users. In March, Musk said his startup xAI acquired X in an all-stock deal.

X has had a revolving door of comms execs in the past year. Joe Benarroch, a longtime associate of Yaccarino's, left in June after a year. Nick Pickles, a legacy Twitter employee who was vice president of global affairs, followed him out the door in September. Then Heinzinger, a public relations vet, came in December and stayed for just three months before returning to his former role as president of Haymaker Group. John Stoll, a former Wall Street Journal editor who was hired in January to head up a news and partnerships team, has taken on comms duties while the role has been vacant.

People in PR circles credited X for being self-aware in trying to expand its operation and said it would take someone with an uncommon sense of adventure to fill such a role.

"It certainly would be the challenge of a lifetime," one person said.

• Sam Bankman-Fried's crisis PR rep didn't know about his interview with Tucker Carlson.
• The rep, Mark Botnick, resigned from the role on Thursday.
• The crypto scammer is reportedly seeking a pardon from President Donald Trump.

Tucker Carlson's jailhouse interview with Sam Bankman-Fried came as a surprise to everyone — including the crypto scammer's crisis manager.

Mark Botnick, who had represented Bankman-Fried since the collapse of his cryptocurrency exchange FTX in November 2022, resigned from his role on Thursday after learning of the interview.

He told Business Insider that he had no involvement in planning the interview with Carlson, which was posted to social media outlets on Thursday afternoon — Bankman-Fried's 33rd birthday.

"As of today, I no longer represent SBF," Botnick told BI.

Bankman-Fried is serving a 25-year prison sentence after a jury found him guilty in 2023 of an $11 billion fraud and money-laundering scheme through his cryptocurrency exchange, FTX.

Botnick is a seasoned public relations operative, having worked on several political campaigns for former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. He represented Bankman-Fried through the turbulent waves of his criminal case, including when he violated the terms of his bail and was jailed ahead of his trial due to witness tampering.

In recent weeks, Bankman-Fried has gone off-script. He posted messages on X offering advice on the Trump administration's efforts to fire federal employees. Botnick told BI that he was not involved in those X posts and is unsure who posted them on his behalf.

Bankman-Fried's conversations with journalists have gotten him in trouble before. His interviews with The Financial Times, Bloomberg News, and Vox were cited in his criminal trial as evidence of how he misled FTX investors and customers.

Botnick referred additional questions about Bankman-Fried to his criminal appeals attorney, Alexandra Shapiro, who didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

A representative for the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where Bankman-Fried is incarcerated, declined to comment on his interview with Carlson. A representative for Carlson's media company didn't respond to a request for comment.

The former crypto mogul — who once had an on-paper net worth of over $26 billion — has been fishing for a pardon from President Donald Trump, Bloomberg News reported.

Trump and Bankman-Fried may have some perceived enemies in common, although Bankman-Fried didn't raise the issue with Carlson, a staunch Trump ally.

The federal judge who oversaw Bankman-Fried's trial and sentenced him, Lewis Kaplan, also oversaw two cases that the writer E. Jean Carroll successfully brought against Trump. Danielle Sassoon, the lead prosecutor in Bankman-Fried's criminal case, resigned as the acting head of the US Attorney's office in the Southern District of New York after refusing a demand from a Trump-appointed Justice Department official to drop charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams.

Carlson raised the question of a potential pardon in the interview.

"If you are not pardoned, how old will you be when you get out?" he asked Bankman-Fried.

Bankman-Fried said he'll be in his late 40s.

During FTX's collapse, in 2022, Bankman-Fried had considered an interview with Carlson, a Fox News host at the time, to "come out as a republican" and rail "against the woke agenda" as a way to restore his reputation, he wrote in a Google Document that became public as part of his criminal case.

"Note: these are all random probably bad ideas that aren't vetted," Bankman-Fried wrote at the top of the document.

Virgílio Bento was in a bind. He wanted to spread the word about his growing healthtech company, Sword Health, but the entrepreneur hated the traditional public relations playbook. He'd hired a PR agency before, which in retrospect "seems moronic," he says. "For a comms person to understand what you're saying, they need to be in the weeds." But when he tried hiring someone to run comms internally, he says, "that also sucked."

Then he shared his frustration with Delian Asparouhov, a cofounder of the spacetech startup Varda and a partner at Peter Thiel's venture capital firm Founders Fund. Asparouhov told him there was only one PR person he should be talking to: Lulu Cheng Meservey, a communications executive who has led messaging at companies including Substack, Anduril, and Activision — with unusual flair and aggression.

From the outset, Cheng Meservey struck Bento as radically different from other comms people. She had a no-nonsense approach. Her first piece of advice to him was: Don't let your message get diluted by your comms team, and don't depend on PR agencies to bait the media's interest. You are the founder — own your company's narrative. In short, go direct.

For Bento, it was a refreshing tack, if a little beguiling. A PR manager proselytizing the mission of "going direct" would seem to obliterate the whole point of having a PR manager in the first place. But this is Cheng Meservey's defining doctrine, and it has made her one of today's most sought-after communications gurus in Silicon Valley and beyond, particularly among high-wattage founders. Her website includes personal endorsements from OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong, and the Free Press cofounder Bari Weiss, all three of whom attempted to hire Cheng Meservey in-house before she launched her own firm in 2024. "i super value her advice," Altman wrote to me in a text. "she is someone i love talking to."

As more tech founders follow the examples of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg — shedding their communications teams and taking their messaging directly to social media and the chatty podcast circuit — it's easy to see why someone who encourages founders to unapologetically be themselves would be in demand today. "She has gotten good at teaching founders how to fish," Asparouhov says. Or as Ryan Delk, the CEO of the education startup Primer, tells me: "Lulu is the Steph Curry of comms."

Significantly less charmed by Cheng Meservey are many of her peers in the PR industry that she's set on disrupting. "People bring up Lulu all the time," one communications executive who knows Cheng Meservey tells me. "They say, 'Do you know Lulu? Isn't she the worst?'" Another snipes: "She does not have a thriving business. What she has is a thriving Twitter following."

Some of the vitriol is owed to the rumor-churning nature of PR. "If somebody is effective at communications and has a good point of view, then the industry will react to it," says Brooke Hammerling, who experienced a wave of resentment among her peers after her tech-PR firm, Brew, was featured in a splashy New York Times story. "They will feel uneasy about a new approach, so they'll criticize it."

Cheng Meservey invites the spite; it's core to her brand. The sparse landing page of her new firm, Rostra, declares: "TRADITIONAL PR IS DEAD." Beneath is an 850-word "Go Direct Manifesto," in which she smears "corporate communications" as "an oxymoron, as nothing meaningful can be communicated by a faceless committee." "A founder's passion, vision, and conviction," Cheng Meservey writes, "can't be simulated by other — least of all the press-release-enjoying middle managers already scouting for their next jobs." On X, she offers her 100,000 followers barb-filled, Harvard Business Review-like mini case studies on PR triumphs and blunders of the day. A recent United Airlines post was "lazy and patronizing," she declared. A memo from the founder of CrowdStrike was full of "cowardly and callous" and "legalese doublespeak," she said.

"Some people would call this self-promotion, but what Lulu does is marketing in a smart way that resonates with founders: She shows them how she thinks," Rachael Horwitz, the chief marketing officer at Haun Ventures, says. "This flies in the face of what many tech comms people think is OK. Comms is a bit of a snake pit in this way. It's like Fight Club. They do not want you to talk about comms." (Most of the communications executives I spoke with requested anonymity.)

Cheng Meservey's vision for communications neatly aligns with today's shifting media paradigm, in which everyone — from competitors to customers — can publish their stories and screeds about companies online without depending on publicists or journalists. While there are obvious upsides to a "go direct" strategy, there are also obvious reputational risks, and it's difficult to execute at scale. For it to work, you need to stand out in the oversaturated ideas marketplace, a feat that's only becoming more challenging: "How many thought leaders do we really need? This is information overload," says one communications executive. "At the very least, you're subscribing and curating your own echo chamber."

After graduating from Yale and then the Fletcher School at Tufts University, Cheng Meservey worked for JPMorgan as a financial analyst before cofounding her first communications firm, TrailRunner International, in 2016. Its clients included the blue-chip venture firm Founders Fund and fast-growing corporations like Spotify. Even then, Cheng Meservey was known for bucking traditions.

During one 2018 meeting about a coming announcement with a corporate client, Cheng Meservey "said something along the lines of, 'You guys shouldn't put out a press release — press releases are so boring,'" Hannah Guenther, a director at TrailRunner who was on the call, says. To Guenther's surprise, the client agreed. "They were like, 'You're so right. I couldn't agree more, but we're stuck in this routine and no one wants to change,'" she says. This tendency for challenging convention stood out to a TrailRunner client that was looking to challenge the media industry, the newsletter company Substack, which Cheng Meservey joined as vice president of communications in 2021.

Cheng Meservey happened to be entering the arena of tech communications at a pivotal moment. For years, the communications divisions of the world's most influential tech companies, in an attempt to be taken more seriously by the media, hired massive teams made up of Washington-imported policy wonks and attorneys. They specialized in what one former Meta communications executive describes as "the Hillary Clinton style of communications: We figured out what people wanted us to say; then we said it." The person adds, "Sheryl Sandberg used to tell us all the time, 'As long as journalists hold the pen, you have to endear yourself to them.'" (Sandberg did not respond to a request for comment.)

It was a conciliatory strategy that relied, almost entirely, on milquetoast corporate statements and communication managers equivocating behind the veil of anonymity. To avoid public outrage at the height of cancel culture in the late 2010s, companies were instructed to deflect criticism and never own up to their mistakes. "It was all about keeping your head down, getting the press to like you, and trying to win a game that the average tech founder isn't inclined to play very well, much less win," that same former Meta exec says.

Eventually, these tactics led to an overwhelming public mistrust in the tech industry, which fueled an increasingly negative press. "The relationship collapse between media and tech came in part from the fact that tech was spewing so much bullshit through press releases that the media said, 'We can't trust direct company communications. We can only listen to disgruntled former employees,'" says Eric Newcomer, a longtime reporter who runs the tech news Substack Newcomer.

So when Cheng Meservey joined Substack and began immediately playing offense, it stood out. If, in her view, reporters got the story wrong, she called them from her personal Twitter account. "It was like, 'Oh, look, the Substack flack is going off on Twitter again," says one tech reporter who asked to speak anonymously because he wasn't authorized to talk on the record. "She was always getting into hot water, spouting off about free speech, deplatforming, that kind of thing." When The New York Times ran a critical story about Substack's "growing pains," Cheng Meservey tweeted that the piece was filled with hearsay and cherry-picking. When Wired suggested that Substack "paid extremists," she fired off a series of tweets saying the reporter put out misleading information, which eventually led to a correction on the story. Soon after, Fox News published a story under the headline "Substack executive explains journalism to Wired writer."

Cheng Meservey's unabashed stance seemed tailor-made for one particularly embattled tech company: Activision Blizzard. When she became Activision Blizzard's chief communications officer in April 2022, The Wall Street Journal had recently published two especially searing investigations involving several accounts of sexual harassment and a toxic workplace at the video game giant. The company was also embroiled in an antitrust lawsuit brought by the Federal Trade Commission in an attempt to block Microsoft's proposed $69 billion acquisition. (In July 2023, a federal judge ruled against the FTC's bid to delay the acquisition. In December 2023, Activision paid $54 million to settle a workplace discrimination lawsuit.)

Activision's future depended on its resurrection from the rubble of public opinion, and Cheng Meservey threw herself headfirst into the onslaught. Less than a month into her tenure, she became headline news after she was accused of union busting. After more than a dozen Blizzard quality assurance testers secured the right to hold a union vote, she told staff on Slack that unionizing might result in smaller raises and difficult conflicts with management. Her Slack messages were leaked, and Cheng Meservey doubled down on her position on Twitter. Ethan Gach, a reporter at Kotaku, wrote a story with the headline "Activision's Newest Exec Has Decided to Post Through It." In response, Cheng Meservey subtweeted Gach, inferring that he was obsessed with her.

The reporter had never before been dragged on Twitter by the chief communications officer of a multibillion-dollar company. "It was unusual," Gach says, but so was everything about the way Cheng Meservey was running comms at Activision. "Here was the head comms person for the biggest video game publisher in the United States having casual conversation about policy on Twitter."

Months later, a pitch from Activision arrived in the inbox of Stephen Totilo, a veteran gaming reporter at Axios. "It was a weird, tortured" attempt at blowing a hole in the FTC's antitrust case, Totilo says: It suggested that the HBO adaptation of Sony's video game "The Last of Us" was proof that Sony wouldn't be weakened if Microsoft bought Activision. Totilo figured he'd take Activision up on its offer to speak with Cheng Meservey. "From her work at Substack, the vibe I was expecting was, 'OK, you idiot reporter, let me tell you how wrong you are,'" he says.

Instead, he discovered the opposite: Cheng Meservey not only was more vulnerable than he'd anticipated but also answered tough questions with a sense of "humanity and thoughtfulness," he says. "She functioned radically different from any other comms person I've ever encountered in 20 years of covering gaming," he adds.

Early into her time at Activision, it was obvious that Cheng Meservey was having an outsize effect on how the company was covered. "She facilitated more journalism being done," Totilo says. For one, the company switched from dodging the press to actively, and frequently, engaging with reporters, often by text message. "I found her very charming," Totilo says. "Whether that makes me an astute observer or a chump, I'm not sure. But I prefer her strategy to the traditional approach."

Today, Cheng Meservey's growing list of clients has included people known for their bold, contrarian approach to business like Polymarket CEO Shayne Coplan, Safe Superintelligence Inc. cofounder Ilya Sutskever (formerly of OpenAI), and Scale AI founder Alexandr Wang, who stoked controversy this past summer when he said that he planned to forgo DEI policies and instead hire for MEI: "merit, excellence, and intelligence." Her advice has been essential to founders in moments of public scrutiny, like Varda's Asparouhov, whose company launched a capsule into space in September 2023 that was unable to return on its planned schedule because of regulatory restraints.

At the time, Asparouhov says, he was in a state of "extreme cortisol panic." Cheng Meservey was able to clearly navigate the complexity of company messaging dealing with military regulation, space travel, and, of course, announcements on X. She broke down various tactics for approaching reporters and regulators, along with a strategic narrative for company messaging. "She summarized it in this way of like, 'Look, make sure that any time you're thinking about comms, at the end of the day, your job is to make the company successful.'"

When I first reached out to Cheng Meservey, she seemed — despite her public persona — not all that into the idea of having a story written about her. "I'm not sure if I'm as interesting as your editor thinks I am," she said. "I would urge them to reconsider." Then she shifted into strategy mode. Had I considered pitching a profile of her to The New York Times?

I asked whether some of the well-known names cited on her company website, like OpenAI's Altman, might be interested in speaking with me. "Neither he nor I will want to talk about that, unfortunately, which is annoying because the work I did for them is really interesting," she said. "[Sam] has offered to pay me, but I haven't taken a penny. And OpenAI and Worldcoin are always in litigation." Then she rattled off a few names of people who might talk, including The Free Press' Weiss, who had encouraged Cheng Meservey to start her own company. ("Things are hectic here but Lulu is the best :)," Weiss wrote in an email.) Given how unusual it is for a communications executive to dish about her high-profile clients on the record, I was surprised by her candor. Was this gossipy transparency the new model of going direct?

But as I continued to report, Cheng Meservey eventually declined to speak any further on the record, save a boilerplate statement she sent over email: "I appreciate the interest and wish I could be more helpful, but we don't discuss client details. I will say that the most gratifying thing about building Rostra has been getting to see 'going direct' become a default in modern communication. The best founders are building their own platforms and their own narratives, and that's the story worth watching closely!"

Given Cheng Meservey's lively online presence, I'm certain she has far more nuanced thoughts on what it means to "go direct" in the new media paradigm. But for those, you'll have to follow her on X. Which may be the gist of Rostra's modus operandi. Why speak with a reporter when you can distill your thoughts, directly, on your own terms using social media?

Therein lies one of the obvious downsides to Cheng Meservey's strategy. Much like the founders she represents, Rostra is building a brand that's genuinely compelling, with an expressive, opinionated leader at its helm. It reminds me of something Delk, the microschool founder, told me: "If what you're building isn't interesting and you don't have conviction, then Lulu's strategy doesn't work."

Zoë Bernard is a feature writer based in Los Angeles. She writes about technology, crime, and culture. Formerly, she covered technology for The Information and Business Insider.

• Torrey Grant commutes eight hours each week for a teaching job at Syracuse University.
• That job is in addition to his account executive role at a PR agency where he works full time.
• The share of supercommutes in the 10 largest US cities has grown from four years ago.

Torrey Grant said his roughly eight-hour weekly commute for his part-time gig is worth the time because he enjoys the job and it supplements his income.

In June 2022, Grant and his wife moved from Syracuse, New York to New York City so they could be closer to her family. Grant landed a Manhattan-based account executive role at a public relations agency that specializes in the food, wine, and spirits industries. He was also able to retain his part-time gig of more than five years: teaching a wine and beer appreciation course at Syracuse University, his alma mater.

During typical weeks when school is in session, he wakes up at 4:30 a.m. on Tuesdays in his Manhattan residence, drives roughly four hours to Syracuse, and is at his desk by 9 a.m. During the day, he works remotely for his public relations job. He then teaches two courses in the evening, stays overnight at a hotel, works remotely for his PR job the next day, teaches two more classes in the evening, and then drives home Wednesday evening.

"It's well worth it to keep a great job and it keeps my wife and I close to her family," said Grant, 50, when referring to his teaching position.

Grant is among the supercommuters who are defined by traveling more than 75 miles to work. The share of supercommutes in the 10 largest US cities was 32% greater between November 2023 and February 2024 than between the same time period four years prior, per a study from Stanford University that was published in June.

The researchers said this increase was likely driven by the uptick in remote working arrangements. For example, some Americans who moved away from their offices — in part for lower housing costs — decided they could stomach a long commute when their employers rolled out return-to-office policies after the pandemic.

Driving several hours is worth it for the job and pay

Grant said he earns between $80,000 and $100,000 annually from teaching, depending on the number of courses he teaches — which can vary based on student interest, among other factors. Grant estimated that he dedicates about 30 hours a week to his teaching job, which includes 12 hours of lecturing and additional time spent in meetings, conducting office hours, preparing for classes, and grading.

Grant said that his round-trip commuting costs typically include between $40 and $50 for a full tank of gas, roughly $80 for one night at a hotel, about $25 in tolls, and $36 to park at the school — a total of about $200 per round-trip.

Before he committed to driving as his preferred mode of transportation, Grant said he tried taking the train and flying. However, he said the train can take up to six hours if there are delays, and that flying — which can also come with delays — typically doesn't save any time.

Looking ahead, Grant said he plans to keep supercommuting for the foreseeable future. He said the biggest downside of the commute is that he has to be away from his wife two days a week. However, he said he enjoys teaching and that working with students helps him stay up to date on what's popular with younger wine and beer consumers — which can also give him a leg up at his public relations job. He said he's considered looking for teaching jobs closer to home, but only a few schools offer similar courses.

Ultimately, he said the teaching job's pay — and the limited travel costs — are what's made his commute sustainable. In the future, he said the job could bring about another financial benefit: discounted college tuition for his children.

"Financially it still makes sense," he said of the commute. "I'd love to say I would do it even if it wasn't but that's not realistic."

Do you have a long commute to work? Are you willing to share your story with a reporter? Reach out to [email protected].

• Kyle Ankney is looking for a remote role in PR because he has cerebral palsy.
• Ankney's insurance covers in-home care, complicating in-office work.
• The 34-year-old has found there are fewer remote roles in PR — a broader trend in the workforce.

Kyle Ankney, 34, lives near Fort Lauderdale, Florida, and works in public relations, including running his own firm. He's looking for a remote role in PR because he has cerebral palsy, which limits his physical abilities, and his insurance covers in-home care. Business Insider has reviewed medical records that confirm his diagnosis. This essay has been edited for length and clarity.

I never really wanted to run my own PR agency. Yet a client who didn't want to lose me convinced me to start my own firm. Now, the client is going on an indefinite hiatus and isn't sure if they'll return.

So, for the past few months, I've been trying to re-enter a traditional PR agency-type role, to have a team to grow — to do all the things I enjoy, minus running a business. I'm looking at, I would say, mid-senior level or something around director level.

I've been doing this work for more than 10 years, quite successfully — not to toot my own horn.

One recruiter told me I was super qualified but said I was probably hitting bumps because when you get to my level of experience, many people are expected to manage teams. Then, the recruiter told me I might have to consider looking for a more junior role because most managing jobs would be in person.

Some of the conversation now about remote work goes beyond it just being a perk. It's almost like it's a drawback for some employers.

My condition requiring the nurse three times a day is the reason that remote has gone from a luxury for me to now being a necessity.

The way my insurance works, it only allows the nurse to come to one address. So, even if I were to find a job here in South Florida, I would still have to be remote because of that.

Getting this care took decades

It took me 20 years on a waiting list to get this level of home care by a nurse covered through Medicaid. If I leave Florida and go anywhere else, I lose those services and have to go to the back of the line.

Needing extra help from a nurse started four years ago when I was 30. It changed my world in the worst way. It now feels like the cerebral palsy and the wheelchair and all of the other BS that comes with it is nothing in comparison to needing the nurse to help me go to the bathroom. This I literally, physically, cannot handle on my own.

So, it's been a rough year trying to run a business, trying to find a job — it's just been a lot. I'm not trying to be completely unrealistic, but having as much resistance as I've had has been surprising just because you're taught, at least in society, that the more senior you become and the more experience you get under your belt, the easier it is to make connections and find opportunities.

As someone who's managed a team of six, I know how difficult it was to direct them remotely because there was a lot of oversight needed to make sure that mistakes weren't being made. There was a lot of back and forth, and ultimately, I was able to figure out how to do that quite well at my agency.

I try to reiterate whenever I have opportunities to meet with anyone in my field that working from home is necessary and that I've figured out how to manage a team remotely. I say, "I understand that this may be a point of hesitation for you. However, I've been able to navigate it this way for so many years."

When the recruiter told me I should consider more junior roles, my ego was like, "That's absurd." Yet now that I've been looking for four months, which feels like four years, my savings are drying up, and I'm not making ends meet. I've been lowering all the search criteria and the salary range and I'm not really finding a bunch more.

The last time I was looking for a job, I got remote positions just by chance, but I would have been able to do in-office if it was absolutely required — and now I cannot.

There are fewer remote roles

In 2020, because of the pandemic, I saw a lot of PR opportunities becoming fully remote. It was a game changer for me in terms of opening up opportunities. But because I've been running my own agency for several years now, I hadn't been paying attention to what was remote versus hybrid versus in-person. I was shocked by the level of swing back.

I've reached out to everyone I know in PR, which is a substantial group. They're saying things like, "I'll send people your way."

I have looked up every agency I wanted to work for, and I wrote a blunt email. It wasn't, "Hey, I need a job." It was, "Hi, I respect you. I admire you. I need advice because here's what I'm running into. I would love the opportunity just to pick your brain." That has been successful in the sense that I have had three or four conversations with people at different agencies, yet no one is quite hiring.

If there's a role that I'm particularly interested in, I'll go to RocketReach, I'll look for the best email that I can find, and I'll say, "I've already applied. Here's my situation." I continue to follow up to try to make myself stand out.

You have to try. I'm shocked by how many postings and emails I've received that say, "We're not hiring for this role, but we want to collect résumés." Or if you apply for positions, you get "We're on pause." Or it's just complete ghosting. I've experienced all three.

I don't know if this is the best- or worst-case scenario, but I recently interviewed with an agency, and it went to six rounds. The role was listed as remote. Then they were like, "You know, we might need travel to be involved, so we have to take this a different direction."

You would think you would know that at round one. I don't just blindly apply to jobs. I read for things like whether travel is required. That particular posting said nothing about travel. So there have been a whole bunch of hurdles.

It's just a game of resilience at this point — just holding on and crossing your fingers and praying.

Do you have something to share about what you're seeing in your job search? Business Insider would like to hear from you. Email our workplace team from a nonwork device at [email protected] with your story, or ask for one of our reporter's Signal numbers.