Looking for work can be a very fraught experience, filled with immense stress and pressure. The sociological literature, however, has tended to view job searches as simple matching processes, connecting potential employees to employers. In my dissertation, I argue for further interrogation of the job search itself from the perspective of job seekers. In doing so, I highlight the ways in which experiences on the job search come to shape individuals' conceptions about work and about themselves in unequal ways as well as important meaning- and decision-making processes that occur over the course of job search.Drawing on longitudinal interviews with 63 men and women seeking internships and full-time employment in computer science, I find that the actors, processes, and procedures of the job search teach heavily gendered conceptualizations of the field and disproportionately alienate women who were more likely to question their passion for the field and express intentions to leave within five to ten years than their men counterparts. I further show how the processes, actors, and experiences that make up a job search contribute to individual perceptions of competition in the labor market, frequently increasing feelings of pressure and precarity beyond the economic realities of supply and demand. While the impact of this increased pressure was broad, increasing worries and concerns about being competitive enough even among the most privileged job seekers, job seekers with less access to status either through their education institutions or their family class background were more likely to find these experiences played into existing concerns about their belonging in the field. Finally, I additionally examine how job seekers aim to evaluate companies on factors like their diversity and societal impact in the course of a job search, but that doing so is often challenging and ambiguous. Because of this, job seekers frequently considered and applied to companies that they did not feel acted in socially responsible ways and had to manage the tension of seeking employment at firms that do not meet their stated goals. Together, these findings aim to illuminate not just the outcomes but the experience of seeking work in order to begin to unpack the black box of the job search. In doing so, they underscore the unequal and consequential challenges and opportunities that this presents, with important implications for workforce diversity and inclusion as well as the ways in which companies are able to manage potentially negative assessments of their broader social impact.
