William Rath had already been documenting the miserable side of looking for work when his TikTok followers gave him a less conventional suggestion: try an Etsy witch.
Rath, a recent law school graduate in Florida, went along with it. But the transaction was less supernatural than the nickname suggested. He didn’t pay someone to cast a job spell. He bought a tarot reading and asked when he might finally land a job.
Then his job-search updates changed dramatically. In the days that followed, Rath began posting about a flood of interviews, eventually saying he had nine scheduled in a single week.
What started as a joke from his audience has since turned into a sprawling TikTok series, with Rath documenting the strange timing while trying to figure out whether the cards deserve any credit at all.
Call The Witch
Embedded media follows; please allow a moment to load.
@william.rath Replying to @yahaosoo #unemployed #unemployment #job #etsywitch #unemployedlife ♬ original sound – William Rath
Rath introduced the experiment in the TikTok above, tagging the post with both #unemployed and #etsywitch.
The reader he chose was MysticTarotGuide, an Etsy seller operating under the name Raven. The shop offers tarot and psychic readings covering relationships, the future, and careers, including a listing specifically marketed as career tarot guidance involving jobs, money, and a person’s path to success.
The shop also draws a firm line around what those services promise. Its disclaimer says its readings are intended for entertainment and personal awareness and do not guarantee specific real-world outcomes.
That caveat became particularly relevant once Rath started posting his updates.
Suddenly, Interviews
Rath had been struggling to get traction in his job search. His LinkedIn profile shows that he attended the University of Oregon School of Law from 2022 to 2025, and in a post about his search he described the job market as “brutal.”
He was looking broadly at legal opportunities and said he was particularly interested in work that might combine his legal background with the skills he had developed creating content on TikTok.
After the tarot reading, his account began filling with follow-ups.
Five days into the experiment, Rath said he had accumulated nine interviews that week. The turnaround was enough for him to joke that the Etsy witch needed to “chill.”
The problem, if it could be called one, had flipped. Rath went from worrying about finding interviews to complaining that there were too many to comfortably fit into his schedule.
“I’m a human being. I’m tired,” he joked in one update.
Not A Spell
The distinction Rath has made throughout the saga matters: he did not ask MysticTarotGuide to magically force an employer to hire him.
He bought a tarot reading and wanted to know when he might find work, particularly in law or marketing. The reading offered a prediction; Rath kept applying and interviewing.
His own explanation for the sudden change isn’t entirely supernatural, either.
As the interviews accumulated, Rath said employers appeared to like his personality. He also considered the possibility that the experience had changed the way he was presenting himself, giving him confidence he didn’t have earlier in the search.
That leaves a much less mystical possibility sitting beside the tarot cards: a discouraged applicant started approaching interviews differently just as more opportunities arrived.
Rath has nevertheless continued leaning into the running joke, producing dozens of videos about what happened after he sought out the Etsy reader.
For now, the series still has the one ending that matters most to a person documenting unemployment: whether all those interviews actually turn into the job he was looking for.