The problem
The Frenzy to Find Work
The current job market has become
hugely frustrating—for candidates and
companies alike. How did it get This way,
and where do we go from here?
By Russell Pearlman / Illustrations by Tim Ames
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FULL MAGAZINE
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For their part, HR officials complain that there are simply too many candidates to vet—as many as 250 applications for the average corporate job post, according to one study. That sheer volume has contributed to a slowdown in the time it takes to hire. Last year, it took an average of 44 days for a company to fill an open role, an all-time high, according to research by HR consultancy Josh Bersin Company.
Recruiters are also discovering flaws in some of the AI software they are using. Some 64 percent of professionals surveyed in 2022 by the Society
for Human Resource Management said their organization uses AI or other forms of automation to sort applicants. The hope has been that generative-AI tools will create a fairer evaluation process. But at least early on, some software has systematically reproduced human bias. One study reported that AI tools, ranking two otherwise equivalent candidates, were 26 percent more likely to rate a disabled person lower—even if the job wasn’t
physically demanding.
In another experiment, Bloomberg used a common AI tool to rank eight identical résumés for a financial-analyst role: Those with names distinct to Black Americans were the least likely to be the highest ranked, while those with names distinct to Asian women were highest ranked more than twice as often as those with names distinct to Black men.
Apart from the question of bias, experts warn that some employers are relying on AI to do things it just can’t do, such as evaluating someone’s
so-called soft skills. “Ask AI to determine whether someone works well with others, and it’s terrible,” says Shanda Mints, Korn Ferry’s vice president of recruitment process outsourcing analytics and implementation. Mints warns that companies that rely on AI to shape the evaluation process—rather than interviews, assessments, and job references—will make hiring mistakes, overlook wide swaths of the talent pool, or both.
Indeed, say recruiters, a big problem is that applicant-tracking software, whether AI powered or not, rejects job seekers simply for failing to use specific keywords or phrases. On a résumé, a candidate for a salesperson role might highlight the accounts she managed or the award she won as salesperson of the year. But if she doesn’t mention that she “increased sales by 20 percent”—a phrase tracking systems commonly seek out—her résumé may be jettisoned. “The candidate might have a killer track record,” says Travis Lindemoen, founder of Enjoy Mondays, an online job-posting service. “It won’t matter.”
The job market has come a long way, of course. As recently as the 1970s, most bosses seeking to fill a position would ask around town or, if their business was big enough, consult a colleague in another city. Companies could also take out a short classified ad in the local newspaper (an expensive proposition; advertisers paid for each line of type) in the hope that a qualified candidate would read the paper that day.
That all changed when the Monster Board, the world’s first online public job-search and résumé database, went online in 1994. The earliest job postings, heavily reliant on bullet points and short descriptions, resembled newspaper ads. Ads on the Monster Board, and its hundreds of imitators, reached a far wider potential candidate pool. Job seekers with a good dial-up connection could peruse the listings, then reach out independently to the employer, often by phone or snail mail. With additional tech advancements, job seekers could search by location, company, and a slew of other features; for their part, firms could amass hundreds of résumés at once from candidates around the world. By 2015, a majority of Americans—54 percent—had gone online to look for information about a job, and 45 percent went online to apply for one.
But the modern job marketplace makes those not-too-long-ago tech improvements seem about as quaint as a “Help Wanted” sign. Today’s job searches allow candidates
to comb through tens of thousands of open roles and not only learn what each one entails, but also explore the culture of the employer. Job seekers can apply through the job board itself, or directly through the employer’s AI-powered applicant-tracking system, or, if they’re traditionalists, via email. On the employer side, more than 40 percent of large firms are using some sort of AI in their recruiting process, according
to the Society of Human Resources Professionals. AI tools scan résumés for keywords, and they identify and rank experienced candidates according to numerous metrics. The software can set up interviews, send out follow-up notes, and more. Companies in some industries boast that their new systems can receive an application from a candidate, contact them, hire them, and tell them when and where to report to work…all in a
single day.
In theory, these tech innovations should make the hiring process cheaper, more efficient, and less anxiety inducing for everyone involved. And yet, there are a lot of people going through experiences similar to Philip Pratt’s. For the last few months, the New York-based sommelier and restaurant beverage director has been sending out multiple applications weekly, after using a combination of LinkedIn and personal connections to seek out roles. With hospitality employment soaring post-pandemic, Pratt imagined the market winds would be at his back. Instead, he says, many employers have never responded. While he has gotten several interviews, he has been “ghosted” afterward multiple times: The potential employer simply never follows up. “It is frustrating to be in a position where I really can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong,” he says.
If anything, the innovations in the marketplace over the last few years have made it easier for companies to reject applicants. Sure, a job seeker only needs one new offer for their search to be successful. But there’s an awful lot of rejection along the way.
According to data from the US government, the odds of getting an interview after applying for a job are a little better than one in five—22 percent. If a candidate does proceed to an interview, their odds of being offered the position, at 36 percent, are a little better than one in three. So the odds that any single job application will lead to a job offer are, on average, about 8 percent. Americans have better odds of getting food poisoning in a year than they do of finding a job after sending just one application.
That’s why people have to spend a lot of time job searching—around 11 hours per week, on average—to send up to several hundred applications, write résumés, and network, according to one study. But the vast majority of their applications are never seen by human eyes. The inner workings of automated applicant-tracking systems are
a mystery and great frustration to many, but they rank incoming résumés based on a variety of criteria, experts say, including skills listed, keywords, and even the person’s geographical proximity. While very few systems will reject applications outright, it’s common at many organizations for human managers to look only at the system’s top-ranked candidates. What happens to all of the other applicants? They get software-generated rejection letters.
Still, that’s better than never hearing back at all, which is far more common than many might expect. According to a 2018 study of dating, about 30 percent of people say they have been ghosted—given the cold shoulder—after meeting someone for a first date. But that level of rejection would be a welcome development for the job market. According to a 2023 Indeed survey, a whopping 77 percent of job seekers said they had been ghosted by a prospective employer within the past year. Ghosting can occur at any time during the job-search process. According to Indeed, for 40 percent of job seekers, the ghosting happened after a second or third interview; for 10 percent, it happened after a verbal job offer!
When candidates do break through, the next level of vetting can be a time-sapping exercise that can involve written exams, personality tests, follow-up interviews, and presentations, even for lower-level positions. A client of Korn Ferry career coach Tiffinee Swanson had to create presentations or case studies for seven separate interviews with one prospective employer. After being turned down, the client went through a similar process with other companies. “It’s really become a test of resilience,” Swanson says.
Half of Job seekers described themselves as ‘completely burned out’
by the process.”
“
Still, she applies for these jobs frequently, as many as eight in a single day, without a response. Unemployment is hard enough, but now, she says, she’s often at a loss about what exactly firms are looking for. “The whole process is exceptionally frustrating,” Fleischauer says.
Looking at the job-market numbers in isolation, you might think job seekers have never had it better. In the US alone, there were more than 9 million open positions last year, a number never seen before the pandemic. Unemployment is near historic lows in many parts of the world. Plus, thanks to a host of technological advancements, it’s never been easier to apply for a job. Yet there’s a growing sense that the process of finding a job, far from a journey down the yellow brick road, is a Kafkaesque nightmare. In one survey, more than 40 percent of candidates described their search as “frustrating and long.” In another, half of job seekers described themselves as “completely burned out” by the process.
Those candidates seem to have good reasons to complain. Technology has enabled many more candidates to apply, even as new automated screening tools reject many of them without explanation. When applicants do get past screening tools, communication with the company tends to drag on. Meanwhile, job-posting scams that aim to extract candidates’ money or private information have become so prevalent that the US government has had to issue an alert. “No market is more broken than the labor market,” says Byron Auguste, president of Opportunity@Work, a nonprofit that aims to get people without college degrees into high-paying roles.
But the mess isn’t limited to the job-seeker side. In one 2023 survey, 93 percent of hiring managers said they were having problems finding the skilled professionals they need. “Qualified candidates are slipping through the cracks, while many companies are still struggling to hire,” says Raj Mukherjee, executive vice president at job site Indeed.
By some accounts, filling a job takes longer than ever. Even with the proliferation of job boards, talent professionals consistently complain about a lack of qualified applicants. Layoffs and reorganizations have depleted HR staffs at many organizations, leaving those who remain with too much to do. Most importantly, firms worry that some of the AI tools they so eagerly adopted to improve the job-filling process are backfiring—quietly rejecting qualified candidates and, just as many humans do, showing bias toward underrepresented groups.
To be sure, many experts are hopeful that the problems will be ironed out, as technology and human labor evolve in tandem. But when? The same pros worry that if there’s so much frustration now, amid a growing economy and many open jobs, how bad might things get when the economy inevitably goes south?
Americans have better odds
of getting food poisoning in a year than they do of finding a job after sending just one application.
“
Related Insights
How Candidates Can Job Search Using Artificial Intelligence
Talent Recruitment
AI in Recruiting 2024: Pros and Cons
AI in the Workplace
AI Recruitment Tools: The Pros and Cons
New technology aimed at improving job hiring hasn’t
worked as intended, stymieing both candidates and
hiring managers.
Firms are missing out on the best talent, as too many
people get lost in a rising sea of candidates.
why it matters
Pay attention to the weaknesses of new hiring
technology and deploy more humans or different
tech where needed.
The solution
Don’t tell Rosann Fleischauer that this is a great job market. The Boston-based project manager is tired of reading online listings that demand perfectly tailored résumés and cover letters. She rolls her eyes at job postings that demand a combination of 30 skills, traits, and experiences possessed by few people in the world. Within a day of being posted, she notices, many openings suddenly have hundreds of applicants—how is that possible?
Nearly 60 percent of large firms have incorporated some kind of AI into the hiring process. It can bring in a new pool of candidates quickly, but some tasks are still better done by humans.
AI or Humans?
Can make job postings more concise and effective. Posts across dozens of job boards, broadening a firm’s potential talent pool.
AI Strengths
Human StrengThs
Can read through job requirements, then offer up candidates
based on desirable skills, experience level, geography, and even
the likelihood that the candidate will accept the position.
Can automate repetitive tasks such as scheduling interviews
and answering candidates’ frequently asked questions.
Can maintain communication with candidates and
determine skill-level differences between them.
Can judge the skills and traits that are critical for the role.
Can spot biases that AI might overlook.
Can build trust and rapport with candidates; can recognize subtle behavioral cues.
Can gauge emotional intelligence and cultural fit; can sell the organization to the candidate.
Posting
jobs
Sorting
candidates
Interviewing
Screening
finalists
Large companies that say lack
of talent is the main reason they haven’t filled open positions.
Number of résumés rejected
by applicant-tracking systems,
AI-powered and otherwise.
75
%
67
%
Job seekers who describe
the online job search as time-consuming and frustrating.
61
%
Employers who have rejected candidates based on their
social-media profiles.
54
%
Stunning Stats About the Job Market
5
months
The average length of a job search in the United States.
On some level, frustration about job seeking is rooted in the power dynamics of the job marketplace itself. Two years ago, during the height
of the Great Resignation, the job market shifted to enable employees of all types to find high-paying roles, often with great ease. But that era is gone. The number of open roles, while still historically high, is down more than 30% from 2022, and wage growth has slowed considerably. Plus, the last
18 months have seen hundreds of thousands of layoffs in white-collar and management roles, as organizations reorient their workforces to areas
that offer more promising growth. “That’s why you’re hearing about all
this anxiety now,” says Peter Cappelli, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who tracks the job market. Some hiring managers and HR executives may be stuck in a different era too—the one before 2020, when they didn’t have to think about massive salary increases or remote-work options. Even after the Great Resignation, hiring costs are far higher than they were prepandemic.
Plus, both job seekers and employers are anxious about AI. Clearly, the technology will replace lots of jobs, but which ones, exactly, remains unclear. Job seekers are desperate to get in the door before an employer decides to let the robots do the work, Cappelli says. Employers, meanwhile, are pouring billions into incorporating AI to reshape their manufacturing, marketing, finance, and other operations to make them both leaner and more productive. So far, the results have been mixed at best.
The hope, of course, is that the power dynamics of today, combined with improvements in AI technology, will go a long way toward mending the
job-hiring process. For his part, Dan Kaplan, a senior partner in Korn Ferry’s CHRO practice, believes that many firms have only one choice for now: to slow down their automated systems. “You need to put the human back in human resources,” he says.
It is frustrating to be in a position where I really can't figure out what I'm doing wrong.”
“
To many candidates, and some worried HR officials, technology can make a host of critical decisions during each step of the hiring process.
Optimizes what the job posting looks and sounds like. Recommends which job boards to place ads on.
1. Sourcing:
Reads résumés and compares skills and experiences to the job description. Sorts and ranks candidates according to their fit for the role. Can automatically send emails to potential “best fits” and rejection letters to others.
2. screening:
Schedules interviews. More sophisticated AI software can assess language, facial features, and tone in video interviews.
3. Interviewing:
Compares attributes of finalists and makes suggestions. Some AI software can recommend the lowest offer with the best chance of convincing the candidate to take the role.
4. Selecting:
• Job descriptions
• Advertising
• Qualification
• Assessments
• Background
• Offer
After reading your job description, candidates should know exactly what’s expected of them—not only in the role, but also during the hiring process.
Write easy-to-understand job descriptions.
High-Tech Hiring
Help Wanted
More than 20 percent of job seekers don’t finish filling
out the application because they can’t get through it.
Provide clear application instructions.
Thank the candidate for applying, and keep them abreast of the hiring timeline. If they are no longer under consideration, tell them immediately.
Communicate frequently.
Finding out what works—and what doesn’t—is essential to improving the experiences of future candidates.
Ask for feedback.
A positive letter from a former employer can propel a candidate into consideration.
Ask for a recommendation.
One résumé does not fit all job postings. Make sure the document lists keywords and skills critical to the role you are applying for.
Customize the résumé.
Getting a referral from someone within an organization can enable a candidate skip the long online application process.
Network.
After interviews, send thank-you notes. Candidates who haven’t heard back within a few weeks should write a follow-up to the people they spoke with.
Be both persistent and gracious.
• Matching
• Headhunting
How Candidates Can Improve the Job-Search Experience
How Firms Can Improve the Hiring Process
READ THE
FULL MAGAZINE
VIEW THE
PODCAST
Talent Recruitment
How Candidates Can Job Search Using Artificial Intelligence
AI in Recruiting 2024: Pros and Cons
AI Recruitment Tools: The Pros and Cons
THE
TO FIND
WORK
READ THE
FULL MAGAZINE
VIEW THE
PODCAST
1. Sourcing:
1.
1.
1.
The job market has come a long way, of course. As recently as the 1970s, most bosses seeking to fill a position would ask around town or, if their business was big enough, consult a colleague in another city. Companies could also take out a short classified ad in the local newspaper (an expensive proposition; advertisers paid for each line of type) in the hope that a qualified candidate would read the paper that day.
That all changed when the Monster Board, the world’s first online public job-search and résumé database, went online in 1994. The earliest job postings, heavily reliant on on bullet points and short descriptions, resembled newspaper ads. Ads on the Monster Board, and its hundreds of imitators, reached a far wider potential candidate pool. Job seekers with a good dial-up connection could peruse the listings, then reach out independently to the employer, often by phone or snail mail. With additional tech advancements, job seekers could search by location, company, and a slew of other features; for their part, firms could amass hundreds of résumés at once from candidates around the world. By 2015, a majority of Americans—54 percent—had gone online to look for information about a job, and 45 percent went online to apply for one.
But the modern job marketplace makes those not-too-long-ago tech improvements seem about as quaint as a “Help Wanted” sign. Today’s job searches allow candidates to comb through tens of thousands of open roles and not only learn what each one entails, but also explore the culture of the employer. Job seekers can apply through the job board itself, or directly through the employer’s AI-powered applicant-tracking system, or, if they’re traditionalists, via email. On the employer side, more than 40 percent of large firms are using some sort of AI in their recruiting process, according to the Society of Human Resources Professionals. AI tools scan résumés for keywords, and they identify and rank experienced candidates according to numerous metrics. The software can set up interviews, send out follow-up notes, and more. Companies in some industries boast that their new systems can receive an application from a candidate, contact them, hire them, and tell them when and where to report to work…all in a single day.
In theory, these tech innovations should make the hiring process cheaper, more efficient, and less anxiety inducing for everyone involved. And yet, there are a lot of people going through experiences similar to Philip Pratt’s. For the last few months, the New York-based sommelier and restaurant beverage director has been sending out multiple applications weekly, after using a combination of LinkedIn and personal connections to seek out roles. With hospitality employment soaring post-pandemic, Pratt imagined the market winds would be at his back. Instead, he says, many employers have never responded. While he has gotten several interviews, he has been “ghosted” afterward multiple times: The potential employer simply never follows up. “It is frustrating to be in a position where I really can’t figure out what I’m doing wrong,” he says.
If anything, the innovations in the marketplace over the
last few years have made it easier for companies to reject applicants. Sure, a job seeker only needs one new offer for their search to be successful. But there’s an awful lot of rejection along the way.
According to data from the US government, the odds
of getting an interview after applying for a job are a little better than one in five—22 percent. If a candidate does proceed to an interview, their odds of being offered the position, at 36 percent, are a little better than one in three. So the odds that any single job application will lead to a
job offer are, on average, about 8 percent. Americans have better odds of getting food poisoning in a year than they do of finding a job after sending just one application.
That’s why people have to spend a lot of time job searching—around 11 hours per week, on average—to send up to several hundred applications, write résumés, and network, according to one study. But the vast majority of their applications are never seen by human eyes. The inner workings of automated applicant-tracking systems are a mystery and great frustration to many, but they rank incoming résumés based on a variety of criteria, experts say, including skills listed, keywords, and even the person’s geographical proximity. While very few systems will reject applications outright, it’s common at many organizations for human managers to look only at the system’s top-ranked candidates. What happens to all of the other applicants? They get software-generated rejection letters.
Still, that’s better than never hearing back at all, which is
far more common than many might expect. According to a 2018 study of dating, about 30 percent of people say they have been ghosted—given the cold shoulder—after meeting someone for a first date. But that level of rejection would be a welcome development for the job market. According to a 2023 Indeed survey, a whopping 77 percent of job seekers said they had been ghosted by a prospective employer within the past year. Ghosting can occur at any time during the job-search process. According to Indeed, for 40 percent of job seekers, the ghosting happened after a second or third interview; for 10 percent, it happened after a verbal job offer!
When candidates do break through, the next level of vetting can be a time-sapping exercise that can involve written exams, personality tests, follow-up interviews, and presentations, even for lower-level positions. A client of Korn Ferry career coach Tiffinee Swanson had to create presentations or case studies for seven separate interviews with one prospective employer. After being turned down, the client went through a similar process with other companies. “It’s really become a test of resilience,”
Swanson says.