You Hate Your First Real Job: Don't Just Quit: How early-career hiring actually works, and how to make your next move the right one

You Hate Your First Real Job: Don't Just Quit is a practical, psychologically grounded book for recent college graduates who hate their first job, had to settle, or still cannot find work. Drawing on how early-career hiring actually operates, the book lays out the unwritten rules that determine which candidates move forward and which get filtered out: why hiring managers favor candidates who are easy to defend, how recent job titles quietly rewrite your story, why narrative coherence matters more than potential, and how to build a thread between where you are and where you want to go. The tone is direct, realistic, and unsentimental, treating the reader as an adult navigating a system with real incentives and constraints rather than a meritocracy. Parents who are paying for advice, supporting an adult child, or trying to understand why their graduate's job search has stalled will find the same framework useful from the other side of the conversation.

David J. Buckley, Jr. spent nearly a decade at Amazon, most recently as Global Directorof Ad Tech Sales, following leadership roles at privately held and publicly held companiesincluding Fortune 500 firms. He also served as a Bar Raiser, one of Amazon's trainedinterviewers who sit outside the hiring team to protect the quality of every hire, supportinginterviews and hiring decisions across the company. He has been active in intern, undergraduate, and MBA recruiting throughout his career. That work is the foundationof this book. He wrote it after watching too many of his children's peers, capable graduatesworking hard, struggle to find a foothold in a difficult market. He holds an MBA fromDuke University and a Bachelor of Arts in Psychology from Stonehill College.