Thought Your Job Search Was Hard? Meet the Junior Who Won’t Add Anything to Your Company

Recent trends are clear: Millennials are not prepared for the workforce. More employers than ever are noticing that potential employees either have the technical training or the social capabilities for today's fast-paced work environment, but rarely both. Still, only the truly inept manage to have neither. Meet one of those guys.

Mark Roth (C '19) has nothing to add to the companies of his possible employers. Roth is a communications major who has a sweet start-up idea related to “socks,” but can’t tell you more than that for obvious reasons. A “bilingual” scholar, Roth can read Hebrew but has a 0% comprehension rate and has a fair bit of trouble with the “ch” sounds when reading aloud. His resume skills section includes “Excel” but when really pushed on it, he conceded he couldn’t utilize it in any greater capacity than as a digital “fill in the blank,” and definitely could not create functions with it. “I’m pretty good at finding topical memes, though,” he remarked.

Roth has little knowledge about big-picture concepts like the economy, foreign relations, and effective marketing strategies, in addition to struggling with smaller concepts like budgeting, using wireless printers, and knowing where commas go in sentences.

Although his basic technical qualifications are low, his social capabilities are also low. Roth is a self-described intellectual type, spending many hours in a day thinking about topics such as, “What if everyone is seeing different colors but just calling them the same thing?”

“Like, what if, to you, grass looks like my purple, but we both call it green because that's all that we know?” he asked, in a long-winded response to the question, “Tell me about yourself.” Roth also noted he is the type that “doesn’t perform well under pressure.” 

Others have described Roth as “fine” and “a little twitchy.” 

Even with qualifications stacked against him, Roth is still hopeful about his internship with the legal team at O'Neill & Roth. “I think my interview with them was bomb,” he said.