it just seems like it never gets any better. All I want is a job that pays me enough to live with a straight seven in the morning until 4:00 or 5:00 in the evening Monday through Friday schedule.
I just want an honest days pay for an honest day's work. I mean there are jobs out there like that, but when they advertise, my application is getting drowned out in the stack of like 200 other people who are competing for the same damn role. when the hell is the economy going to get better so I could finally get my damn foot in the door? how the hell am I supposed to buy a house when most jobs don't even pay enough to cover rent for a one bedroom apartment? when are we going to get those manufacturing jobs back and transition out of this stupid fucking low-wage service economy? I just keep seeing things getting more and more expensive and I really don't give a shit about all this political fucking theater when at the end of the day I'm still getting squeezed just as hard as I was under Joe Biden.
I realize I'm late to this thread. But with a month of time now passed, have you found any of the suggestions to be helpful? For your consideration I'd like to offer a variant of the idea of u/killerspacerobot.
What I think you should do is start a Substack blog. Title it something like My Journey as a Deaf Person to Land a Good Job. Chronicle your efforts. Share things about the obstacles of being deaf in society and what people in your predicament try to do to overcome them. Share your blog with others in the deaf community for ideas and input. But try to reach out to a general audience. To the extent you are comfortable share your emotional side. People love people stories. And in America, especially, stories of triumph over adversity. Invite readers to comment, provide suggestions, and offers to make connections. Follow up on feedback with new blog entries.
If you can afford to do so, be a product tester of new technology. For example language translation glasses, where in your case L1 = spoken English and L2 = written English. Also, there are now software companies building add-on business software APIs to teleconferencing products such as Zoom or Microsoft Teams that perform live language translation. The intended use case is speech-to-speech translation for multinational corporations that span English/Spanish/Portuguese etc. regions. Come to think of it, you might prefer translation from spoken English to ASL. I have not looked but that capability might already exist in some open source software package. Testing this type of tech with an eye towards lowering the barrier to being hired for a job is a subplot that I think would interest many readers.
Now let me share some insights of what you are up against. In the corporate world the hiring process is primarily driven by fear. It's the fear of making the wrong choice and being back at square one. That's why networking is such an advantage and why hiring managers lean so heavily into personal recommendations from colleagues whom they trust. The hunt for a "close fit" in the job description stems from the desire for a rapid learning curve. Hiring managers fear that the new hire is just using them to job jump to the next, better-looking, gig. And above all, HR, who should be thought of as an extension of Legal, fears discrimination lawsuits. Your disability is going to right away raise a red flag in their subconscious.
But take heart, because in every company there are people in pivotal positions who secretly desire one thing. They wish they could get rid of their shit tasks. So when asked some wishy-washy question about how you see yourself in the company, some variation of the following will be music to someone's ears. "I will do my best to learn how to take responsibility for the tasks you wish you could offload from your plate, and to support you in completing your goals on time." That's sort of corporate speak but relatively low on the BS meter.
Tying this back to my suggestion for A Day In The Life type of blog, what you'd hope for it to do on top of public outreach is to lower the fear in the reader that you'd be a risky bet. I assure you there are managers out there who want to feel good about themselves for giving someone such as yourself a chance.
And---having a blog with any kind of respectable readership would be a big plus in your curriculum vitae. It would be something the HR person would be able to go out and see for himself.