'Shortlisting has been delayed due to a high volume of applications'

[Imitatingangels]

Most of the jobs I apply to, argh, is anyone else waiting to find out if they've been shortlisted?
I currently work through an agency for the Civil Service as an Admin Officer so low pay, no pension or sick pay, even though I enjoy the role.
I applied for an EO role campaign in April and they still haven't completed shortlisting. I asked about a timescale last week and was told 'keep waiting'.

I've applied for a local council role which is a 10k pay rise and I've got a bit of impostor syndrome about it, even though I felt I met the person specification I bet I won't get an interview, should hear today..

Then I've applied for another permanent civil service role, still only AO but at least I'll get the perks.

Anyone else applying/waiting to hear back and how is it going?
I know it's not an AIBU, or actually am I being unreasonable to think 4-5 months sifting is ridiculous?

We've been through recruitment at work recently. Local Authority. Immensely time consuming.
Very little is done by HR staff so it's finding time amongst the day job.
Good luck! If you meet the spec there's an excellent chance you will be interviewed.

Thank you!
I interviewed for another LA role last month but was unsuccessful sadly, I think I need to familiarise myself with their interview style better.

I applied to a job at a well known charity around April-May time, and received a message that shortlisting had been delayed due to a high volume of applicants for another role they'd advertised. Still haven't heard anything back - I presume by now, it's safe to say I haven't been successful, but it's still frustrating not to receive any acknowledgement whatsoever when you go to a lot of effort applying.

I don't know what some places really expect when they're advertising vacancies. If they don't have the capacity to work through appplications and respond promptly, they should even advertise jobs for less time or not bother at all, imo!

There probably isn't a general style to LA interviews (unlike CS which follows a format).
Make sure your answers reflect the job description and look up things like current priorities for the LA in case they ask a question where that would be relevant.
We set questions and score the answers, so it's often a simple case of offering to the highest scoring applicant.

A lot of places, public sector especially because they are unionised, have agreements or policies that all roles will be advertised externally for the minimum of 2 weeks - this is on the grounds of 'fairness' (although I'm not convinced it does always lead to a fairer process) and to avoid favouritism or nepotism where jobs are just given to the favoured candidate or notionally advertised for 10 minutes only at midnight or whatever.

Even if there is no such policy (or if there is a clause allowing adverts to be closed early), this idea is so embedded in the minds of hiring managers and HR that most roles are advertised for the full 2 weeks which leads to this kind of stupid situation where there are 1000 applicants for an low-ish level role, where most if not all of them meet most or all of the person spec and can't possibly all be interviewed - I'd argue that's more unfair in many ways than the favouritism situation - it's quite possible for the hiring manager to rig the process in favour of an internal candidate if that's who they want the job to go to anyway...

Thanks all. I understand they have a lot of applications but it's rubbish when you don't hear back after an application, you're just left to wonder, especially when they take hours to complete.

We advertised an admin role recently - public sector so advertised externally on our website and on appropriate sites.

Whereas previously we might have received a dozen applicants, this time it was hundreds.

People see a job and feed the person spec into AI which generates an application which they then fire off. Takes 5 minutes. So lots of people are firing off non-serious applications which take hours to wade through to shortlist. I think the fact that people in receipt of benefits have to fire off so many applications in order not to be sanctioned is increasing this problem. Public sector employers often have a list of jobs available on the website, so it's easy to find a selection of jobs in one place with a predictable format. Bingo.

So, the three applicants who genuinely have an interest in our area of work are submerged in 237 applications from people who are blindly firing off identikit applications to Housing, Environmental Services and Adult Social Care.

It is swamping people who are trying to recruit whilst also doing the jobs they're actually supposed to be doing.