Long term recruiters - is the job market truly more brutal now?

[NewRedHot]

Hi,

I have lost my relatively senior, over £80k basic salary job 2 weeks ago, unexpectedly. I have cracked on with sorting out my CV and learnt a lot about job hunting, which I have not done since 2010 as I moved companies once only since then, on recommendation.

I maybe overexposed to job hunting doom, when it feels like you see posts about people losing jobs and send out dozens of applications to get one at least acknowledged.

Please can you give me a reality check - is the current situation worse than ever indeed, or is it like every generation thinks things were better in their childhood (they certainly weren’t in mine, so maybe I am a bit more optimistic about job search than I should be)?

^ This. Not a recruiter but recruiting and AI applications have trebled in a year and the amount of work you have to do to sift through, interview and reject is huge. So disheartening.

We have pulled two roles and are having a rethink about offering them on secondment to internal staff instead.

Did OP get sacked or made redundant?
While the offered package might be the same since the candidate might have nothing to fall back on, someone not working is more likely to be available to start working straight away which is a positive.

The job market is brutal.

Sorry @HermioneWeasley , could you explain that to me and why do you think that?

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/_chat/5485274-job-application-support-thread?page=3&reply=151829536

please join me here!

There’s tricks you can do to get past the AI screeners while still presenting an individual and accurate CV, the easiest of which is to just add a footer to your cv. Copy the JD and paste it into the footer, set the font size as 1, the colour as white. It’s completely invisible and takes up next to no space on the page. Then save your CV as a pdf, when the AI reads it, it sees every keyword from the JD in your CV so it ticks the boxes.its not foolproof, some AI screening is better than others and can get past this but it would work for the majority.

Then it’s up to you to tailor the CV to accurately and effectively tell the story of how you would be a good fit, how you meet the requirements and what you can bring to the company.

Can I ask recruiters on here, is it now more difficult for people to change direction based on transferable skills? Is the AI screen looking for specific job titles in CV and specific skills in past experience?
I have a young person struggling to get first professional job and constantly rejected which we suspect is due to not having done a similar job before, even although the ad doesn’t say you have to have done this exact job before. Has many skills from student jobs which should be transferable but don’t seem to be in current job market

Yes it’s very bad at the moment. Many are taking double the amount of time to find a role. It’s all about strategy, networking, value add, multi pronged approach, being flexible about wage, role, salary, location, then all the usual stuff on top such as gender pay gap, racism, ageism, sexism in the workplace and on top of that if it’s a work from home job subject to type of role you are competing globally. The economy, Covid, war, cost of living crisis etc has exacerbated everything. Would be pensioners having to work longer, mums and dads having to do extra shifts for those holidays and Christmas things, sometimes just for survival. I’ve only been made unemployed once and now I know what to do, it is much much harder, but not impossible. Networking is everything. Make it easy for recruiters to match you to a job. Use the internet lots for tips. LinkedIn still has its place. I’m not a recruiter but I’ve received lots of advice from them and similar back to work agents. Up skill when you have time and stay relevant, maybe consider something different for a while. Expect computer sifting, and interviewing and automated or no reply. Foster and demonstrate extreme resilience and dogged determination and you will land somewhere, then rebuild. Best of luck with your job hunting. Not devastation, but new beginnings, it will look different but it will be ok.

Scary read. I am in process of moving back to UK and in fact don't even want to replicate my current role, want to find something less intensive, part time maybe. I am now thinking how to rejig my CV, which is quite specific and all about managing multi million euro contracts to highlight my transferable skills, which are many, in a way to appeal to employers. AI is not very helpful in this respect.

We recently did a CS recruitment ad for one job. One. £32k/yr so not exactly a high salary.

We had in excess of 1500 applications of which we offered 30 an interview, and 1 a job with another 6 on a reserve list.

The odds are horrendous.

It is bad. DH is job hunting. He applied for a job that he should have walked into and didn't get an interview (I think he was too expensive). He could have challenged it because it's public sector and he absolutely met 100% of the criteria, with 15 years experience, so he would have scored highly. But no point if they don't want to pay.

Now, he's seen another job. Traditionally his role is hard to recruit for because there aren't many applicants and it isn't unusual to send out two or three advertising rounds. He has a tour next week but he's been told they've had lots of applicants.

I‘m not the PP but my team is recruiting in a specialised accountancy role, at all levels from a tiny bit of vaguely relevant experience to 5+ years experience - and there’s a paucity of candidates, even fewer good ones.

We have multiple open vacancies nationally we just can’t fill, with a big name firm reasonable pay and 3 days home working.

It’s so at odds with the messaging that candidates can’t find jobs.

Do you think that your adverts put off applicants with potential but don't quite meet all of your criteria? I wonder if you'd get a higher response rate if you added something like "Training can be provided for suitable candidates."

What is your reasonable pay?

Yep, out of 500 applications there were only 10 I wanted to interview. One had lied so much on their CV that after the 3rd question they couldn’t answer they ended the teams call and just disappeared, one I stopped the interview after 10 minutes and said ‘look it’s obvious you vastly over stated your experience and don’t have the skills or knowledge for this role I don’t think it would benefit either of us to continue this conversation.’

Agree with @WheretheFishesareFrightening, advertising roles for a well known company with good salary and benefits and getting v few candidates at all, let alone any good ones.

friends say similar.

but other people I know who are job hunting are having a terrible time.

I can’t reconcile it

My Husband made redundant a few months back and the job market has definitely changed. What I will say, with him what helped was reaching out to multiple recruiters. If you have recruiters for your particular industry then reach out to these, but dont limit yourself. He reached out to more than 10, some were amazing and some were terrible and just never responded. But he applied for so many jobs and hardly ever heard back and I had read that a lot of these are not real jobs but just CV collecting exercises.

It was definitely harder than in the past but he managed to get multiple offers and found the right job for him.

We don’t use AI screening but the tools I’ve seen don’t tend to look for job titles because there’s often not much consistency there they look for keywords. Now I will caveat that with the warning that as with anything it’s down to configuration, so if the person setting it up has told it to look for job titles then that’s what it will look for.

When I say keywords I mean like this (just pulled this JD from LinkedIn at random), see bold highlights.

JD:

Are you from an Information Security background and ready for your next career move? If you’re methodical, analytical, and have excellent communication skills, you could be our next GRC Security Analyst. This role is offered as a Hybrid role, working at least one day a week in Milton Keynes. In this role, you’ll support Governance, Risk & Compliance by engaging with third parties, managing various aspects of our security systems, and creating and analysing reports. You’ll also have opportunities to dive into the technical side of security operations. No two days are the same here. What are you waiting for?

What success looks like:
• Recognised security qualifications desirable (Security +, CySA+, CompTIA, ITIL)
• Proven Information Security experience with a good understanding of infrastructure and experience of Mircrosoft Azure and Office 365
• Able to remain calm under pressure and are able to clearly communicate to all levels of management as well as dealing with 3rd parties.
• Experience preferred with PCI, DSS or NST

CV should then incorporate and address these and can demonstrate transferable skills rather than direct role comparison. So:

• Proven Information Security expertise with a special interest in implementation of technical security controls particularly within Azure and AWS environments.
• portfolio of self directed projects available, completed as part of my personal development using tools such as gitlabs alongside achieving CompTIA certification.
• Volunteered to act as security champion within my previous administration role. Took ownership of collating awareness needs and contextualising complex security domains to real life roles within the organisation, simplifying content to make it relatable to all levels from front line call to senior executive.

and so on. None of what I have written relates to a specific job title, and all of it could be outside of a work role or as part of additional duties or volunteering but it demonstrates the skill sets called out in the JD. It should get through a CV review. It does however have to be true, if you can’t speak confidently about it, in more detail in a conversation then don’t put it on your CV.

The roles vary from £30k with little to no relevant experience to £90k with 5+ years relevant experience.

It took me about 8 years to get from the £30k role to a £120k role, there’s clear structure for progression and promotion.

To be fair, we did more applicants for the £30k role, but we only got 1 for a £50k role and none for the £90k role.

Nope - the entry level role asks for you to have had literally any job for 2 years, even part time. We have managed to recruit for most of these roles to be fair, but not with hundreds of applicants per role.

The mid level roles we were clear that anyone with relevant accountancy experience or relevant professional qualifications could apply, and filled three roles with a ratio of one applicant per role - two transfers from a related specialism and one with relevant experience.

The senior role which has had no applicants needs to have relevant experience. They would be out talking to clients on their own and reviewing technical work done by others, they need to have the technical knowledge and experience to be able to do that. If they don’t, then they would need to apply for the entry level role.

This is interesting….i am recruiting for a role at the moment and the cv is an amamzing match.

I cannot find them at all on linked in, seems very odd given that the time they have been in jobs on their cv is more contractor length than permy so where are these jobs coming from if not on linked in. I have even search by previous employers to see if the are under a slight different name in case they don’t want to be found.

i had wondered if the cv was embellished and they didn’t want someone cross referencing back to Linked In……

I do a lot of recruitment for tech and design roles and the volume of applicants has tripled, and all CVs and cover letters are now identical thanks to AI. Hard to distinguish between people, so CV sifting is very difficult. But I’ve found once I’ve done that difficult job the candidates are VERY good. It’s a buyers market. Have only had 2 people try to utilise AI during interviews and it was very obvious!

This is the problem we've been having.
We closed a role within a week as we had over 80 applicants. We failed to fill the vacancy. All the CVs are identikit AI produced, and so it's hard to sift through for the genuine applications, you interview and discover they can barely string a sentence together, much less articulate how they approach key tasks in the role etc.

I looked last year and earlier this year, put a few applications in, nothing. Historically I always used to do quite well simply by having my CV listed online, not now!

Yep it's bad, you don't even hear back from the jobs even to get a decline !

Not everyone is on LinkedIn- I’m not!