Exacting revenge on a cold-blooded boss is all the rage among fed-up Gen Z and millennial employees.
Emerging online as a newly viral form of workplace retribution, the #RageApplying trend is inspiring overworked, overlooked, unappreciated and underpaid laborers to mass-submit their resumes to job listings in effort to secure more suitable posts — which often come with handsome pay boosts, flexible hours and work-from-home options.
“I got mad at work, and I rage applied to, like, 15 jobs. And then I got a job that gave me a $25,000 raise,” raved a 29-year-old TikToker, virtually known as @RedWeez, in her social media testimonial, which has garnered more than 2.4 million views.
“So keep rage applying,” she encouraged in closing.
Although it’s not a novel concept, as a buzzword, “rage applying” is as simple as it sounds.
Frustrated participants of the #RageApply craze, which has stockpiled over 13.3 million TikTok views, are applying to multiple job openings in the hopes of landing their dream designation.
And much like the popular “quiet quitting” and “malicious compliance” movements — retaliatory tactics used by burned-out staffers to penalize their superiors for unjust treatment — rage-applying mania has erupted amid the ongoing Great Resignation era.
Between 2021 and 2022, amid high concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic, a combined 85 million workers in the US voluntarily resigned from their jobs, per the Bureau of Labor Statistics. A 2021 report on the impetus of the mass exodus found that insufficient pay, limited opportunities for professional advancement and a lack of respect in the workplace were employees’ top reasons for abandoning their posts.
And, according to a November 2022 study conducted by the Cengage Group, an education technology imprint, a staggering 85% of those who resigned in an effort to pursue alternative employment were satisfied in their new roles.
For Lisa Crist, a millennial mom in Indiana, rage applying helped catapult her out of a job she’d been chained to for nine years, and into a position that offered “way more money” and a “fully remote” work schedule.
And the hot corporate comeuppance strategy isn’t just picking up steam among twenty- and thirty-somethings on American soil.
Sanjna, a 28-year-old finance specialist, from Sydney, Australia, garnered over 135,000 TikTok views after revealing she’d successfully increased her annual salary by $50,000 thanks to rage applying.
“When I knew I wasn’t going to get promoted at my Big Four job, I rage applied,” Sanjna explained to her 17,400 followers. “I hit up all of the recruiters that hit me up before, and I told them that I was looking for a job again.”
Within a week, she secured a managerial position at a notable bank within the world’s Big Four accounting firms — Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PricewaterhouseCoopers.
“Sometimes you need something to not go your way,” said Sanjna, “[in order] to realize that there’s something better for you just around the corner.”
