Have you ever wondered where your online application forms, résumés, cover letters, and countless follow-up emails go once you hit the submit button? Well, here at The Void, we suck in and trap nearly 500,000 applications each and every day. In fact, 99% of all job applications end up here. While The Void devours applications from all over, the largest percentage come from humanities graduates and people whose names indicate that they are most likely not white men. The Void tends to spit back applications from members of the 1% and those whose last names match those of chief executives of the companies at which they are applying.

Now that you have a little background knowledge, let’s begin our tour.

Directly in front of you, you can see the open black expanse through which all applications enter but do not leave. From there, they are filtered into equally abysmal expanses, which we will now explore.

The bottomless pit of nothingness on your right is reserved for emails that begin, “I know you are busy, but I applied to this position four weeks ago and was wondering if there are any updates on the hiring timeline.” Each day, thousands of these emails are broken into their atomic parts and vanish, along with any lingering hope the applicant may have for an interview.

In the deep steaming vat to your left, you can find online forms in which job candidates have input, in little boxes, every detail already listed on their résumés. Theoretically, the data, which is cryogenically preserved in liquid nitrogen, will remain intact for millennia — although there is no known procedure for retrieving it. If applicants chose instead to write “see attached résumé,” their forms spontaneously combust upon arrival at The Void.

Résumés that list proficiency in Microsoft Office Suite, excellent organizational skills, and core competencies acquired during volunteer service in a gap year disintegrate into infinitesimally small pieces until they vanish completely and become one with the colorless mist you see floating above your heads.

All cover letters that begin “Dear Hiring Manager” also pass into this mist. On a related note, The Void is now taking possession of nearly everything that used to go at the top of a cover letter — names of specific hiring managers, company addresses, and so on. Unfortunately, The Void regrets that it cannot respond to questions about why these items are here and not on company websites.

Let’s pause for a second. Did you just feel a cool breeze? That was one of The Void’s spectral eels, which feed on applications rejected entirely because the dates of previous employment were not entered in the proper MM/DD/YYYY format.

Are there any questions? How are there eels in a void? Isn’t the very definition of a void a space of complete emptiness? Again, The Void does not respond to questions, but we like to make people feel heard at first so that, when their questions are met with nothingness, they remember what we’re all about here in The Void.

We cannot address your concern about the eels, nor can we address why Ryan with the bacon tattoo got that supervisory job you wanted, or why your 4.0 college GPA and Master’s degree don’t qualify you for a position that pays $10 an hour.

That concludes our tour. Thank you for visiting us. One quick note before you head out: we are hiring new tour guides at the moment, so if you like what you saw today, feel free to google around until you find the job posting. Due to the volume of applications we receive, we do ask that you please NOT inquire about the status of your application.