Job hunting is the new hunting. Before iPhones, Tiktok, Google meets and Slack chats our ancestors woke at sunrise and worked 15-hour weeks. Their worries consisted of questions like what/how will I eat today? Is my community protected? What maintenance is required to my living space? Today, one might argue we are much the same. We ask; how much money do I have to spend on groceries? Has mum recovered from her illness? Do I have time to do the laundry? But a lot of the relieving factors of small tribal communities have been lost. We no longer have a village to rally behind us to help us with the baby or the housework or give us a job. When it comes to job hunting, there is a clear link between our ability to find work, and our ability to provide, maintain and live our lives fully. LinkedIn may have fooled us into viewing career aspirations as status symbols, but for most of the population, jobs are still about making a living. Considering this, finding full time work can place enormous stress on our nervous systems.
When job hunting, there are thousands of factors to be considered. For the employer, will this employee be worth the salary I pay them? Will they get along with their colleagues? Will this role impact the company in a positive way? For employees, will I be able to pay my rent doing this job? Will the place where I spend a third of my day fulfil me? Are these employers likely to exploit me or cross my boundaries? I think to most of us it is clear which position holds more power.
Job hunting can be soul crushing. It can be a grueling period of immense stress where everything about a person is called into question. It can make a person wonder if they are capable of providing for themselves and imagine what will happen to them if they cannot. Job applications are not just about putting your best foot forward and hoping for an exciting new opportunity. They are about survival. When you are applying for a job, who you are is being judged to determine whether you will get to survive, and if you are lucky, thrive. If you are lucky enough to land an interview, whether you are hired then depends on how convincingly you are able to perform excellence, which in itself can be a truly daunting challenge. As if job hunting is not difficult enough, our current hiring practices are making the market increasingly unpredictable.
Getting a job is getting exceptionally complicated. Just 10 years ago, the guidance for how many job applications were required to land a role was 10-20. That number has increased tenfold, with estimates now at 100-200. Most candidates disagree with this number however, claiming they have had to do up to 400 applications before they were even able to land an interview. Each job application comes with its own set of expectations. Some companies expect a cover letter, some expect 500-word answers to multiple questions, some expect video introductions and tests before the candidate has even interacted with a human being. When we were doing 10 to 20 applications, free work such as this for the chance of employment was permissible. Now? It has become exploitative. 4 in 10 companies have admitted to posting fake job listings this year for the purpose of data mining, in which they not only collect resumes but obtain details about candidates like their sexual orientation or gender identity. Some post a listing knowing they are going to promote internally just to get around the potential legal ramifications of unfair hiring practices, only to give candidates false hope, leading to a sense of inadequacy when they do not get the job. After the obscene amount of hard work and psychological fortitude that goes into filling out 100’s of job applications, most candidates are ghosted and virtually none receive feedback or explanation of any kind.
The rise of the use of applicant tracking softwares (ATS’s) in the hiring process has stripped us of one of our collective virtues: an investment in each other’s development. Now with the machines doing all the work, there’s no room for giving chances. Already vulnerable, job seekers are being treated like nothing more than numbers filling criteria boxes, and they are finding they must relinquish boundaries with employers, work for less than they are worth, or work at jobs that wreck their mental health just so they can have a chance at paying their bills.
An ATS analyses a resume and cover letter and discards any that don’t match a set criteria. This means that thousands of qualified applicants can’t even get their foot in the door. To explain the pitfalls of this, imagine that a company has listed ‘5 years of video editing’ as one of their criteria. This means the ATS would discard an applicant with 4 years 11 months of video editing experience. The software has now eliminated a perfectly qualified candidate because of an arguably, arbitrary number. The use of ATS’s reflect a wider issue. The prioritisation of profit over people. Companies want to save money on the hiring process and so automate it. What’s left behind is a machine that doesn’t understand the complexity of the decision it is making. AI is simply not developed enough to be given the responsibility of deciding on someone’s livelihood. . The ATS will eliminate any candidate that doesn’t match the criteria exactly, but who’s to say that somebody incredibly talented with a knack for video editing who has been doing it for 3 years, doesn’t know as much, if not more about it than someone who has done it intermittently for 5?
Human intuition cannot be replicated and we are suffering the consequences. Employee retention rates are worse than they have ever been. In 2023, 75% of companies announced that they would be downsizing. The employee attrition rate in 2024 is set to be 20%. That is 12% more than it was in 2013 (8%), 5 years after the housing crisis. The hiring process has now also, ironically, become slower. From start to finish, hiring in 2010 took 2 weeks. Now it is a staggering 44 days or longer depending on the role The candidate pool is far too large, and companies are finding themselves having to post longer and more ludicrous job requirements to filter out applicants. They are then finding themselves in a position where they have received 100’s, sometimes 1000’s of applications, but can’t hire anyone because nobody fits their extremely selective criteria . This means 100s of people are denied a chance, though it is more than likely that there are qualified candidates in that pool.
It’s clear that this method of recruitment is unsustainable in the long run, creating a detrimental cycle for both employers and job seekers. People are being squeezed on both ends and something has got to give. We must inject more compassion into our hiring practices. It is essential that employers hire with an awareness that this is not a clinical process for job seekers, but rather a highly emotive feat of endurance, and that candidate welfare must be prioritised.
References
https://standout-cv.com/how-many-applications-to-get-a-job#:~:text=From%20our%20previous%20research%2C%20we,applications%20to%20land%20a%20job.
