Question
I try to keep my head down and not stress too much while looking for a new job. But there’s no avoiding the really weird news reports. For example, what do you think about articles like these that suggest my job search is in trouble?
Fake Job Postings Are Becoming a Real Problem
One in five jobs advertised is fake or not filled, according to a new analysis; ‘more soul-crushing than ever’Employers Are Buried in A.I.-Generated Résumés
Candidates are frustrated. Employers are overwhelmed. The problem? An untenable pile of applications — many of them generated with the help of A.I. tools.And one about how somebody now has an app that helps you cheat on job interviews. It all seems so unprofessional and un-business-like. Are these stories just click-bait? Has job hunting, recruiting and hiring become a clusterf@ck: “a complete failure or very serious problem in which many mistakes or problems happen at the same time”?
Nick’s Reply
Yes. Taken as a whole, what I call the Employment System — job hunting and hiring — is an epic traffic pile-up. I pity job seekers and hiring managers alike.
Are these reports merely alarmist click-bait? If they are, then every reader’s comment on this entire website is, too. There is no end of revelations by job seekers and employers about this broken system.
I’ve seen some of the articles you refer to, and more. They’re easy to find. (You didn’t provide links but I’ve added them so others can check them out. I also added the subtitles.) While some of these articles are behind pay walls (e.g., New York Times, Wall Street Journal), I think for our purposes just reading the titles is enough to start a discussion!
Here are a couple more recent news articles that got my attention.
- The Summer Job, a Rite of Passage for Teens, May Be Fading Away
As businesses face economic uncertainty, seasonal work is harder to find, pushing the unemployment rate for teenagers above 13 percent. - Millions of Résumés Never Make It Past the Bots. One Man Is Trying to Find Out Why.
After more than 100 unsuccessful job applications, Derek Mobley sued software firm Workday for discrimination, claiming its algorithm screened him out.
These articles don’t begin to reveal the enormity of the pile-up catastrophe that is the Employment System. The clusterf@ck.
Other than confirm your suspicion that things aren’t good in the Employment System, I’m not going to comment on the particulars. I think I rail about these issues often enough!
Instead, I want to hear what Ask The Headhunter readers have to say.
- Do you believe what you’re reading about the job market in articles such as these?
- What extraordinary news reports have you seen that seriously concern you? (I’d be happy to add them to this column if you provide links.)
- What are your thoughts and experiences regarding the obstacles that articles like these reveal?
- Is the Employment System really a clusterf@ck as the original poster suggests?
- What signs of hope for a better system of job hunting and hiring do you see? Someone must be doing it right!
Please don’t hold back! Tell us what you see and what you think about the system that drives job hunting, recruiting and hiring — and tell us what you’re doing about it.
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This only validates what you have always been saying, Nick — the best way to find a job is to initiate, nurture and cultivate real relationships with real people who can connect you to your employment opportunities.
Consider that all the major ATS have embedded features that allow HR to block applicants if they are too old, too male, too white, applied too many times, etc. Yes, the system is a clusterf@ck, and will be until the C-Suite and hiring managers wrest control of the hiring process away from HR.
Executives need to rename HR to “Payroll and Benefits”, and leave them with these two limited tasks: Make sure payroll is correct, and that the insurance policies are paid up to date.
@L.T.: An HR manager on LinkedIn is swearing up and down that ATSes don’t make decisions to reject applicants. She caught a bit of flak!
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/kathleen-english-6056bb136_ive-seen-way-too-many-posts-lately-about-activity-7344103871775940610-VfsU?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAAOLb4BTnJMvgPGKzP61jyH0FiWbx51MnU
Lest we forget:
https://x.com/phreakydev/status/1934781207532982408?t=ig5K0W47dBAEMkv7dWdV3g&s=19
The further down the rabbit hole he gets in the comments, the.the more depressing it gets.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
I’m so old that I remember that’s the way it used to be. Back then, “HR” was simply known as “Personnel,” and their job was to make sure all the paperwork (insurance, W-2s, etc) was in order. That was it.
Fellow oldster here. And that system worked well until the 90’s when HR tried to make themselves more “relevant” to the company’s success and really effed it up more.
I had an elaborate scam done on me just to mine my resume data. It included emails, people cc’d. Requests for my top phone interview times. Follow-up emails, and text reminders. When I was all prepped and ready for my first interview…nobody called. Because there WAS NO PERSON.
I went digging and digging on the web and found: “beware of bots pretending to recruit for company X”
Live and learn. What a let-down and waste of my time. Waste of my hope.
More on the job market, which is the worst since the great Depression in the 1920’s: I sent my ATS resume out or applied for a job almost 300 times in three years with no results, including no responses to follow-ups.
I just started a new job this week. One of the managers I interviewed with said “you are a type A top-of-the line candidate. We need you here to manage the B/C workers.” Basically, I was told they hire morons. Dumb-Dumbs. Only in America will they hire a moron over the highly accomplished genius.
More: I talked with unemployment services and they said: “you’ve sent out a lot of resumes and job apps. That’s NOTHING. We talk to people who have applied to 500, 800, even over 1,000 jobs in a year. These highly qualified people STILL can’t find a job.”
These are your job options in the US: retail, fast food, bartender/server. In my search I didn’t come across a job in my field paying even 75k (searching southern NH).
Best of luck to the job searchers. Use your contacts. Go right to the company and drop off your resume in person.
By far the best advice I ever received was when an HR professional pointed out that companies frequently run job placement ands even when they aren’t hiring. Why? Any number of reasons. They want to keep their talent pools updated. They need to run quarterly ads to fulfill contract obligations with search companies. They want to get a sense of salary expectations to see how competitive they are in the market. Bottom line? There’s absolutely no guarantee that the position you’re applying for has an actual job behind it. Use wants ads to help your search, but don’t count on them for success.
In addition, US companies are required by law to run ads prior to hiring foreign technology or engineering workers on H-1B visas in order to “prove” that there are no qualified US technical workers. So many want-ads for technical workers are just “cover” for the foreign workers they are seeking to hire.
Such as this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TCbFEgFajGU
Thanks for posting that link. I had seen that video several years ago but was having trouble narrowing down the search sufficiently to get it in the results.
I haven’t had to look for a job in a while, but I noticed there appears to be a lot of window shopping, HR and recruiters have to keep busy, or look busy. Some companies also have to go through the motions, even if they already know who they are going to hire or promote. And some positions do legitimately get cancelled
@Jim: It’s no accident. HR doesn’t get paid to fill jobs. It gets paid to process applicant data records. A lot would change if HR were paid when it actually filled jobs. You’d see them getting out from behind the safety of their screens and actually looking for the right people in the right places.
Perhaps someone ought to launch a collective-action lawsuit against Microsoft for forcing LinkedIn members to list specific dates of employment in their profiles, thus giving algorithms – and recruiters – another tool to approximate a candidate’s age. Some people use functional résumés to get around this…no can do on LinkedIn….algorithms need data points, not esoterics. I can’t sue because I likely agreed to some stupid arbitration clause when I joined the site eons ago.
Yes, “the system” is broken. And the best way to avoid continued disappointment and frustration is to avoid “the system” altogether. As Nick frequently reminds readers here, a job search should never begin with a résumé (or a LinkedIn profile) but rather with a conversation.
I recently received a “Thanks, but no thanks’ email from a company, saying that I applied too late in the hiring process.
That was 6 months after I applied! 6 months! If that was too late in the process, exactly how long does the process take? And if that was too late, why was the position still posted?
It sounds like an excuse. I think, as another commenter wrote, it is cover for the H1B they want to hire.
Of course it is. Their shtick is to write a job description that is impossibly narrow, come up with some flimsy excuse to dismiss any Americans who happen to squeeze through their filter, then throw up their hands and cry to Uncle Sam, “Gee, we ‘tried’ to hire Americans but we simply can’t find any who are qualified…. so we ‘need’ more H1B visas, thankyouveddymuch!”
I am a retired maintenance mechanic and work part time at a foundry handling the metal and wood recycling. The maintenance supervisor was complaining about not finding qualified applicants and after asking questions about hiring practices, I suggested he meet with the plant manager and HR and figure out what’s going on. To make a long story short, HR was using hiring programs and rejecting all applicants, including me after I sent one in and then gave it to the supervisor who would have hired me on the spot. You know the rest of the story, hiring program was thrown out and direct ads were placed and the supervisor did the hiring.He was very diplomatic and kept HR in the hiring loop so feathers weren’t ruffled. Problem solved.
@mike: Thanks for sharing one from the trenches. It’s not so hard to do it right, is it? Good for you for making the suggestion! I’d give you a raise!
Hi Nick
A senior tech manager made a metaphor at the start of AI – Imagine a 18th century peasant and his ox standing in the field looking over at the village. Something is happening. The peasant decides it has nothing to do with him and goes back to plowing. It’s the industrial revolution, which took 200 years. AI is happening in real time right now.
In both cases, we have no idea what it means for the future. You’re right, bypass HR, find the hiring authority, communicate directly. Easy in your local cafe, not so easy elsewhere. Still, people who understand the problem will not waste time in futile efforts. Keep up the good work.