Read the full transcript of marketer, speaker, and author Fredrik Fornes’ talk titled “How To Land A Job And Master Corporate Bullsh*t” at TEDxArendal, March 27, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
Fredrik Fornes: Did you know that over 80% of every adult alive right now has at some point thought “God I hate this job”? These numbers that I just made up to prove my point – these numbers are alarming.
I have also hated my job. In fact, I might have accidentally told my boss about that in an email, which is why I’m now looking for a new job. But luckily, I’m an expert in applying for jobs. Last time I was job hunting, I applied to over 200 positions. Only once did I hear back from anyone, and that was when a recruiter called me to tell me that he found it unprofessional that I had listed “fluent in corporate bullshit” under skills in my resume.
My response to that: “Well, I believe that this demonstrates my ability to leverage key synergies while proactively aligning cross-functional deliverables. I’d love to circle back on this to ensure alignment moving forward. Let’s touch base ASAP and get some boots on the ground to ensure we have bandwidth.”
To which he replied, “Wow, that sounds great! Actually, when can you come in?”
You see, by applying to so many jobs unsuccessfully, I hadn’t become a failure. I had become what I updated my LinkedIn headline to be: a senior director of strategic application failures and rejection optimizations. And through my journey, I identified four key steps to succeeding in my career, and I want to share these with you today.
Step One: Surviving the Job Ads – The Land of Corporate Poetry
“We’re looking for a rockstar ninja with five plus years of experience in an industry that didn’t exist five years ago.” Or how about this gem: “We’re looking for an experienced candidate who is young and dynamic.” Excuse me, experienced and young?
Isn’t that saying “we’re looking for a virgin with five years experience of sex”?
And what about all those cliches? What do they actually mean? Well, let me help you interpret some of the most common ones.
“Competitive salary” means that your salary would be competing with your bills every month, and trust me, it’s going to be a tough battle.
“Unique opportunity” of course means that there are plenty more opportunities just like this one.
“Team player” – you’ll also be doing everyone else’s work here because we can’t manage workloads.
And the classic one: “We’re a family.” Prepare for drama, emotional manipulation, and guilt tripping if you ever dare to ask for a raise.
The Application Process
So once I had learned to cope with these job ads, I was ready to apply. So first, I spent hours polishing my resume, making it super fresh, gave it a nice design, turned it into a beautiful looking PDF, uploaded it to the application system, clicked next, and then was asked to fill out the exact same resume information all over again but in manual text fields.
And at first I was annoyed, but then I realized this is a genius move from the corporate world. They’re testing my patience even before I’ve applied. And I also quickly understood that this was a great opportunity for me to show that I work smarter, not harder.
So I wrote the following in the manual text fields: Education: “I’ve already uploaded this information in my attached resume.” Experience: “This is also in my uploaded resume.” Languages: “Also in my uploaded resume.”
And to my surprise, it worked! The company told me that because I was 32 years old, I was the correct age for their company culture. All the other applicants were either too young or too old, and that made me realize how the corporate world rates experience.
The Corporate Experience Graph
Here’s the graph to show you exactly how it works. See, when you’re young, your limited experience isn’t valued at all. But once you hit 26, you enter the golden era where your experience is really appreciated. However, once you turn 40, you’re already old and over the hill. And by God, if you pass 60, you’re as good as dead.
So in other words, you have a very short time span where you are in the correct stage for the corporate world. And luckily, I was, so I got the interview.
The Interview: A Conversation Between Two Liars
Now what I’ve learned about job interviews is that they’re basically just a conversation between two liars. So I decided to be the change and answer all the questions completely honestly.
So then they asked me, “Where do you see yourself in five years?” I answered, “Either in your job or not here anymore.”
When they asked, “How do you handle stress?” I replied, “Well, I run out of the office chewing on my shoe, then I run around the building a couple times, then I come back in, lie down in fetal position in the corner for a couple of minutes crying before I’m ready to go again.”
Now for some reason, I didn’t get any more questions before they tried to send me off with, “Okay, so do you have any questions for us?”
And Simon Sinek once said that his favorite interview question is “I hate surprises. Can you tell me something that might go wrong now so I won’t be surprised when it happens?” And that got me thinking: why can’t I, as the candidate, ask similar bold questions?
So I did, and I said, “Yeah, what are your weaknesses? How do you handle conflict in the workplace? Because when I walked in, I sensed some tension between you and Karen at the front desk. And where do you see yourself in five years? Still sitting here asking people where they see themselves in five years? Because that sounds five years of procrastination, sir.”
Now after 200 applications where almost every company ghosted me, I had learned that playing hard to get is the way to go. So I ended the interview by saying, “Okay, well I have what I need. If I want the job, I will let you know. And if not, I’ll just ghost you completely and leave you wondering what decision I’ve made.”
So six months later, I decided to let them know that I would take the job.
Identifying Toxic Workplace Indicators
And on my first day, I started looking for the toxic indicators. See, there’s a very scientific way of determining the probability of a workplace being toxic, and it’s simple. The more quirky and excessive office perks, the more toxic culture are they probably trying to cover up. Let me show you in a graph.
So if you see a water dispenser and coffee, it’s fine – no alarm bells there. It’s once they start inviting you to pilates you should start to be aware. And by God, if you ever see bean bags and a ping pong table, you run. You’re out of there.
And sadly, I have to confess I did participate in some pilates with my boss, confirming my suspicion I had a toxic manager. And my suspicions were further confirmed when he started sending me emails on Friday nights asking me to fix stuff by Monday.
The White Text Revenge
My first instinct was to reply “go screw yourself,” but I needed the job. So I came up with this genius, almost risk-free way of venting my frustration, keeping it from building up.
So one Friday, I replied to his email with “Dear boss, of course I’ll get this done, no worries.” Then I added “you micromanaging toxic dork, God I hate this job,” and then I highlighted that and I gave it the font color white.
Now the only minor flaw in this otherwise brilliant plan was that I forgot the small detail of my boss having Outlook in dark mode.
In other words, I’m now back at step one. And now I need to wrap up this TED talk because I have to go home and brush up my resume, make it look really good, upload it as a PDF, click next, and then re-enter the same information all over again in manual text fields.
