Once upon a time, it was easy for people to apply for jobs as employers were in a hurry to hire. However, things have changed, and job hunting has become more difficult even before the pandemic. This is due to the fact that the amount of time companies take to hire has stretched out, and they require candidates to undergo multiple interviews. During the pandemic, labor shortages gave some respite, but as fears concerning a recession grow, companies are reverting to their old habits of putting candidates through a grueling hiring process. The tight labor market is also a contributing factor to the difficulty of the job hunt, especially in fields such as tech, where there have been numerous layoffs over the last nine months.
Peter Cappelli, a management professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, believes that it's not just the economy that's causing companies to modify their hiring processes and take longer. The pandemic increased the use of one-way video interviews, which made interviews difficult to conduct in person. But the increase in these types of interviews only made it more challenging for companies to sort through the content. Additionally, as companies prioritize equity, they are involving more people in the hiring process, which adds time. Meanwhile, companies that laid off human resources staff are now delegating interviewing and hiring to line managers who aren't familiar with the process. These changes don't necessarily mean that employers are getting better candidates, but they have significantly lengthened the time it takes to hire an employee.
Job seekers have encountered scams from supposed hirers offering them an attractive job but turning out to be people posing as recruiters looking for personal information and job accounts. Even legitimate companies are posting "ghost jobs" that they never fill to build up a pool of candidates, create the impression that their company is expanding, and motivate existing employees. According to a survey by Clarify Capital, 1,045 managers involved in the hiring process acknowledged this practice.
According to a Harris Poll conducted on behalf of TIME, the job market appears to be worse for people with a college degree. Job hunting is particularly challenging, and candidates are going through a grueling process. The hiring market is unlikely to get easier anytime soon, as stated by Jim Sykes, global managing director of client operations at AMS, which released a report stating that the average time it takes to hire an employee reached an all-time high of 44 days in early 2023.
It found that 51% of job seekers with bachelor’s degrees who had at least one interview completed the interview process without receiving an offer, compared to 35% with at most a high school diploma. Those with a bachelor’s degree were also more likely than those with a high school diploma to be asked to complete a job skills assessment; to be asked to do a one-way interview in which they record themselves answering pre-set questions; and report inconsistencies between the job requirements and salary range listed in the posting vs. what they were told later on in the interview process.
Companies’ commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion appears to be gone too, with Black job seekers having particularly bad experiences. In one recent survey of 1,200 U.S.-based employees conducted by the recruiting firm Greenhouse, though two-thirds of respondents overall reported having been ghosted after a job interview, candidates from historically underrepresented groups faced a 25% higher chance of being ghosted when compared to white candidates.
Candidates frustrated with the rigamarole are applying to more positions, creating a vicious cycle in which the job market is even more saturated with applications and employers turn to software to sort through these applications that lengthens the process even more. Job seekers are sending out 40% more applications than they did last year at this time, according to Rand Ghayad, head of economics and global labor markets at LinkedIn. “Workers are losing some of the bargaining power they had over the last few years,” he says. “The balance of power is drifting back to employers.”
Part of this changing balance of power is related to uncertainty in the economy. Hiring managers and human resources personnel may think that they have the budget to hire one week, and then find out, after they’ve posted the job and even conducted interviews, that the company has changed its mind. The barriers in the interview process may explain why more people seeking employment are turning to freelancing and part-time jobs—perhaps they are trying to avoid wasting their time jumping through companies’ hoops when they aren’t likely to get a job.
Cierra Reid has applied to at least 10 jobs a day since getting laid off from her job as a customer success manager in November. She’s had a few interviews, but her experience has mostly been frustrating. Recruiters will schedule interviews and then cancel, saying that the company froze hiring or that the role has been filled internally. If the interviewing and recruiting process wasn’t already exhausting enough, Reid delivers for DoorDash 7-8 hours a day to earn money.
For Reid, the worst part of the job-hunting process is the scams. Someone will reach out to her with an email address that looks like it’s from a well-known company and ask her to download a third-party application, but when she looks closely at their email address she sees that it is missing a letter or suffix and is clearly trying to impersonate the company. Sometimes the scammers will take the name of the real recruiter at the organization. Reid has been tricked: she’s filled out applications and answered interview questions for jobs that she later learned were scammed when they asked her to send her bank account info. “You can’t ever be confident it’s a real job reaching out to you,” she says. “These companies are getting really good, and people are so desperate they could be vulnerable.”
One time, Reid, skeptical at this point, reached out to the recruiter independently to make sure the interview was real and received a message back informing her the email address was “fraudulent and from someone trying to scam people.” Now, she spends a lot of time deleting scam emails that reach her via LinkedIn and ZipRecruiter, and searching messages from recruiters to catch grammar or spelling errors that may signal a scam.
LinkedIn said in a statement that it uses technology and teams of experts to find and remove unsafe jobs and those that don’t meet their standards. In May, the company said it would start to show verifications related to a job post, meaning that the information has been verified as authentic by the job poster, LinkedIn, or its partners.
That technology may be helpful in scanning for scammers, but both Reid and Cook say there’s a downside. They’ve both had the experience lately of applying for a job and getting a form rejection email within minutes—a sign, they both say, that no human looked at their application and that some sort of software filtered them out. When you get a form rejection at 2 a.m. after you’ve applied for a job at midnight, Reid says, you can be pretty sure software is sending that message. As frustrating as long and onerous interview processes are, the increasing reliance on artificial intelligence, with its lack of nuance and context, could be even worse for job seekers.”
It’s an ironic twist since both Reid and Cook worked in tech and had long known of the threat AI posed to their jobs. They had worried that software would replace them, not that it would make it almost impossible to get a job.