Job market is awful

The companies will literally own the government.

Big companies, plutocrats, banks and the financial markets really run the world, not governments.

@Booklin ”The attitude is you can get 4 replaceable heads for the same as one head in the UK, plus they will be someone who doesn't know their rights or their value.”

The Indians know exactly their value. India is rapidly becoming more expensive to hire, and they job hop to get decent pay rises.
My company have opened 2 offices there, and are struggling like crazy to recruit because they did the maths 2 years ago and are now advertising jobs that are no longer competitively priced.
It’s an economy on the rise.

Very difficult to tell the difference between real jobs that get pulled and fake jobs. We just advertised a role didn't get decent applicants and now they are having second thoughts whether they can afford the skills needed so job has been pulled for a re think, possibly not to proceed at all, but it was real initially.

I've seen one job I applied for (outside of Linkedin) and actually received a rejection email for still advertised six months later.

Most of it I think is data gathering, there isn't actually a job. I think the government need to ban offering a job where there isn't one available, like they are introducing having to state a salary. Hard to enforce.

The last time we handed out money to people who weren't working... furlough... it didn't end so well. Caused a bit of inflation i hear...

I'm currently unemployed and can confirm, it's awful! I'm 25+ years experienced in my field, c-suite level. I've applied for around 60 roles I'd say over the last few months and only two of those progressed past the CV stage.

Companies just don't have the budgets they did. Many are also now on the AI train and it's all about creating efficiencies without adding head count. They started outsourcing to cheaper locations years back and despite public opinion, persist with the model because it brings huge savings and hasn't damaged their revenues- at least not to the extent that it's worth undoing. Covid changed alot because so many roles now are not tied to a location, you're going to get more applications. And the dreaded AI CV screening...it was inevitable but it's beyond frustrating to get an automated response to an application which you know a human has never seen. For me, age doesn't help. What 38 year old chief of something wants to manage a 50 year old woman who used to be a chief of something? I'll be honest, if I was that 38 year old hiring manager I'd be giving my CV a suspicious scan too.

Perhaps ironically, my experience over the last decade has been purely around moving work to AI powered workflows, much of it abroad in cheaper countries. So technically speaking I have the exact experience so many companies are looking for right now yet, here I am... I chose to leave my job and I don't regret it but it's still been a shock to the system.

Despite all that, I'm optimistic. Roles will change, but humans will become even more valuable precisely because of the AI shift. We are already seeing that pattern emerge in some sectors. It's unfortunate for those it impacts right now because we're the guinea pigs, we know what the world of work looked like before but we're not quite sure what it'll look like in the future. The following generations will be clearer on this once things have settled.

I work in HR and this has a name...restructure by attrition. Basically see how you make do after people leave as you can't get budget to backfill. We even have a list of not to replace roles already identified, although at least we are not at the point of enforcing redundancies

LinkedIn is a fucking shitshow. I blame it for creating at least some of the problems in the market through the use of AI and "easy apply".

Job market is awful. Doesn’t help when AI is used to filter CVs and application forms.

AI does not understand transferable skills. Applied for jobs which done the tasks/duties bits in one job and from others. Didn’t get a look in.

I think AI selects the wrong people and they can’t cope etc. Hence why 12 weeks later, saw the same job being advertised again.

it took me 10 months to get a job and waited another 10 weeks to get the checks done- civil service before I was working.

Getting rid of AI in recruitment will get more people through the next stage who are borderline and able to sift out those who look good on CV but bad in practice. I wonder if any employers has noticed a change in the type of people they recruit and how long if they last for. If turnover has increased a lot, need to investigate that

The worst thing I did was an online interview with about 25 questions and had to record the answers once and was timed. 2 mins per question. Some didn’t need two minutes such as do you have pre booked holidays. The STAR questions weren’t. Not suitable for dyslexics. I didn’t get passed that stage

Loads of our support roles in finance and IT are moving to India. The attitude is you can get 4 replaceable heads for the same as one head in the UK, plus they will be someone who doesn't know their rights or their value. Whilst the work wont be perfect, the savings are considered worth it.

I took a massive pay cut when looking myself and got lucky. I do work long hours plus im careful about not sharing everything I know now. Companies are ruthless.

It's not quite just 'luck' that was the reason the industrial revolution properly started in the UK. It would be quite a coincidence if the industrial revolution, developing empiricism, discovering antibiotics, inventing radio and the television all just happened to be on one small set of islands. The western wold in general has been the forefront of innovation for the past several hundred years and never in the history of our species have things changed faster or has life been better. I don't think that trajectory is likely to change in our lifetimes, at least.

Agree. The Indians, and everyone else, are worried about these call center jobs.
AI is destroying them.

Honestly yes, and it's getting worse. I call financial companies for work and most are in India or Phillipines. Maybe 2 or 3 have local call centre staff. The WFH covid change up did this. I went to an industry staff day & was shocked most companies in our field use AI or off shore processing & have very few staff. We don't and are actually getting busier as clients comment on our service & ability to talk to a person who knows their accounts.

Also, a client has just lost their job as director at a child care (nursery) centre. Replaced by an AI administration system. No idea how they are supposed to manage staff. Most here are very transient & poorly paid so it's constant.

I know many people hate the idea, but i
I can't help but think that the answer to rising unemployment and increasingly poor public services will ultimately lie in having those out of work deploy their skills for the public good in return for a reformed unemployment benefit, with an uplift to recognise their work. It would allow people to keep their skills up to date and build experience whilst improving the country for the benefit of society as a whole.

I think the key would be to make sure people are in relevant areas so they feel it is worthwhile. So, for example, could unemployed IT specialists be deployed to help schools with outdated and crumbling IT systems yet no funds or expertise to sort them out?

I appreciate it's really complex, and if it wasn't done right it would result in more people losing their jobs as they get replaced by cheaper "unemployed" workers. But I think there has to be a solution there somewhere. A bit like the idea of a universal basic income, but having people deploy their skills for the good of society in return. I think we will ultimately have to move away from such an indivualist society if we're going to make things work in the future.

Blame Rachel Reeves and Angela Raynor for making it so expensive to hire minimum wage workers, getting rid of any advantage in hiring younger workers and giving employee rights from day 1 so there's too much risk in hiring someone at entry level.

Combine that with runaway mass immigration, since the 90s (which both main parties are to blame for).

Tbh if you voted Labour and now can't get a job, or your kids can't, I have limited sympathy.

A friend senior in a British bank told me recently that at her bank all the offshoring that happened 20 years ago, hiring people in India etc…they’re now being made redundant and replaced by AI

Sadly it is becuase of the Ni raise and business rates. We have just had to make 3 people redundant at my office very reluctantly but we just need to cut costs. If the government cut business rates in half and reduced NI by 2% we’d be hiring right now. Margins are just so very tight right now. If I was in government I’d be slashing employer taxes in a heartbeat- things will not improve until they do that.

Aren’t we partly responsible? If we shopped on the high street we would have shop jobs. We would have a high street.

Instead ‘we’ buy cheap, poor quality, poorly made products from online markets.

Even better if we buy British instead of products made cheaply in China.

Planned obsolescence? Some products will deliberately be made not to last and some will just fall out of fashion. And people will keep buying more stuff, as they have been taught to. This year’s car, this season’s clothes, a bigger house to fill with stuff…

The pay, too. Pay is so low now. The charity sector is abysmal.

While I think there is a lot of truth in this, degrees were supposed to be about learning to critically think and transferable skills.

i think it was here, some while ago, that a thread about what was your degree and what do you do now (or similar question) and lots of people who did a history degree had gone on to become accountants. As an example.

Hopefully people still value critical thinking and transferable skills but maybe not so much?

@LooneyLiberalSpaceWaster Your instinct is pointing toward a real structural tension inside capitalism. However you’re also identifying something genuinely new about the AI/automation moment. This makes it different from other social revolutions such as the Industrial Revolution or the end of feudalism. The concise takeaway is that automation doesn’t just intensify the classic crisis of under‑consumption. It threatens to make capital itself dependent on state‑manufactured demand This is why you’re right that owners may end up demanding something like UBI.

Automation changes the composition of the workforce itself. If AI and robots replace labour at scale, then the traditional mechanism of paying workers less than the value they create breaks down. Workers cease to be the primary consumers. Capital needs buyers but automation removes the ability of buyers to consume. Capitalists are discovering that their own system cannot function without mass purchasing power..

Its Government jobs as well, NS&I, Nest, the courts service, - a lot of jobs are outsourced to consultancies who offshore the work. Plus consultancies like KPMG who a few years back might have a couple of hundred young software developers have outsourced that work offshore.

Globalism is a disaster. It's destroying countries and societies, and the planet too.

Clearly Elon can't count. There cant be a limitless increase in productivity because there is a finite population. Once we all buy a new car, a new house new clothes, what then? "High level UBI is just unemployment benefit.