This summer, Dominic Joyce discovered the harsh reality of the job market after he had applied for over a hundred job vacancies and failed to secure a HR maternity leave position at a tech company he had aimed for. Following two virtual meetings and an assessment day with senior management, his hopes were dashed by a brief dismissal email. Despite his redundancy back in March, he was no closer to getting employed, and lack of constructive feedback and response from half of the 156 applications he handed made it worse.
As he recalls, some days would see him suffer three rejections at once. To keep up financially, he found himself taking up freelance driving for Amazon and selling firmly-held family jewels. His own perspective, forcedly cheerful, was that the job-seeking process was flawed.
Considering his experience in the recruitment domain, he appreciates that his situation isn’t unique. In the aftermath of the abundance of job opportunities during the Covid-19 period, there has been a slowing down in hiring in fields like tech, finance and administration. This situation has resulted in a tougher competition for professional, or white-collar, employees than in previous years.
By the end of last year, job vacancies both in America and the UK had increased by 60 per cent compared to the period before the pandemic. However, currently, only the United States maintains a 12 per cent increase in vacancies, while the UK has seen an 8 percent drop.
There exist multiple reports of individuals applying for several positions and getting outright rejections, or receiving no feedback at all. Joyce suggests, from his interactions with people of different ages, that the current situation is graver than the financial meltdown experienced in the past.
This could be shocking news to some applicants considering the pandemic has caused an exodus of the working population, resulting in a saturated labour market. Recruitment company, Indeed, claims that there were 1.6 job seekers per vacancy in August in the UK, an increase from one per vacancy in 2022 but a decline from the average 2.9 in the past 20 years.
Even though unemployment rates are still low in the US and Europe, a recent delay in recruitments, coupled with the disparity in skills between potential employees’ proficiencies and employers’ demands, many applicants are finding it difficult to get the right job.
Kory Kantenga, LinkedIn’s chief economist for the Americas, suggests that recent increases in interest rates have restricted employers’ capacity to invest in recruitment, leading to fewer job vacancies and opportunities. The labour market is now more saturated, with more applicants per job, allowing employers to be more selective.
LinkedIn’s measure of ‘job-seeker intensity’, a metric defining the volume of applications made by a person via the platform, has risen by over 8% in France and Germany and 4% in the US – implying job hunters have to put in greater efforts.
At an initial look, it seems beneficial for recruiters. According to a report by Recruitonomics, as of late 2023, UK employers were likely to spend around £12 to yield a single job application, a decreased cost from over £20 the previous year on expenditures like advertising and hiring agencies. However, the reality is more complicated.
“There’s been a significant change in employer attitudes quite rapidly,” Andrew Flowers, Recruitonomics’ director, comments. He explains while previously employers were concerned of the insufficiency of applications, now they struggle to sift through the high volumes to find competent candidates.
AI appears to be contributing to this issue. A study by Canva, a content creation platform, revealed about 45% of job seekers globally use AI to enhance their CVs, increasing application numbers and cause difficulty in identifying potential candidates.
Leading recruiter at Zapier, Bonnie Dilber, stated that employers receive such a multitude of applications that looking through each one is unfeasible. She stated only top candidates are reviewed while other applications are often disregarded. This behavior can start a detrimental cycle as candidates, feeling ignored, cast more applications, prioritizing quantity over quality – a practice known professionally as a “spray and pray” strategy.
As businesses increasingly scale down their hiring operations, recruitment teams are shrinking, leading to less personalised handling of growing application volumes. Jane Curran, head of talent acquisition at JLL – a real estate company, emphasised that recruiters are struggling to focus on the basics of their job due to increased workload, expressing a collective desire in the industry for improvement.
Not every sector, however, is battling with a surge of applicants. Some sectors, particularly those offering lower wages or requiring specialist talents, continue to find it challenging to draw in potential employees. When it comes to applications per person, tech, media, professional and financial services ranks highest on LinkedIn, while the health sector lingers at the bottom.
Flowers identified a disparity between jobs that demand physical labour and desk-based roles. Sectors like trade or hospitality are encountering fewer issues with hiring, whereas for roles requiring university degrees, the post-Covid recruitment upturn quickly dwindled with the rise in interest rates, causing a rapid evaporation of demand.
Competition remains stiff in senior roles, though variations are less noticeable as these roles are advertised less frequently. For success, networking comes crucial. Lewis Maleh, founder of executive recruitment firm Bentley Lewis, shared that they advertise none of the roles they work on. He revealed that with fewer job opportunities available, accessing this ‘hidden job market’ is essential.
Marketing professional Sarah, who invoked anonymity due to her ongoing application for a role, has experienced the rough side of the hiring market. After succumbing to burnout last year and leaving her previous job, her former employer guaranteed her a place. However, by early spring, the job offer disappeared along with other possibilities. The unresponsiveness of most of her hundred job applications and the emotional toll of successive rejections left her feeling disheartened and demoralised.
Similarly, sports marketer Jose Hervas, despite initially receiving responses, confessed his weariness of attending interviews. Since February, he’s appeared in over 30 interviews, which has caused his confidence to slump.
Hervas has expressed his frustration at the lack of feedback following the numerous online assessments and intensive preparations he underwent throughout the interview process. He remains in the dark regarding the outcome of a final-round interview he partook in back in June. In his nutshell, he claims that his wait to hear from employers has been far from satisfactory. He feels deeply disappointed not knowing why he didn’t land the job.
Stepstone Group, a European recruitment agency’s data sheds light on the gradual escalation of the hiring period to just under five weeks during Q2 of 2024. This time frame tends to extend further when dealing with larger businesses of over 1,000 staff members.
Pam Lindsay-Dunn, who is in charge of people and culture at Hays, a recruiting firm that operates extensively in Europe, explains that the turbulence in the economic atmosphere has led to a sense of wariness amongst both job recruiters and job seekers. Subsequent to the mass exodus of employees termed as the “great resignation”, recruiters are witnessing a trend of employees resolving to stay put, a phenomenon they now refer to as the “big stay”. She adds that quit rates have taken a dip compared to numbers recorded in 2021 and concludes that the job market is rather unusual and everyone appears to be waiting for some development.
However, Kantenga suggests that job seekers should not lose hope in spite of the current predicament. She assures that things will look up once the monetary policy normalises, injecting renewed energy into the job market.
In a recent LinkedIn update, Joyce revealed his minted status as a senior talent manager, expressing his eagerness to start his new tenure. The announcement finally took away some of the negativity surrounding job searching. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2024.