Job hunting but no response whatsoever - is it me or the UK job market is incredibly bad?

[ForThisPost1]

I work in tech in London, and this is the first time I have experienced this. Usually, I will receive calls from recruiters shortly after I set my LinkedIn profile to "open to work, actively searching". But I have been waiting to hear something since last October. I applied for many jobs but have yet to receive a response, apart from one or two rejection emails. This is very unusual. Initially, I thought it was because of my CV, but my friend, who is a professional recruiter, reviewed it and said it was a great one. This situation puzzles me. Is it me, or is the job market exceptionally bad now?

Any suggestion is welcome. Thank you so much.

We need a BA too! Impossible to find just now. Where did all the good project people go?

*commenting = commuting

As someone who worked in Executive Recruiting we didn't represent individuals, we represented the clients. We went in and met with the senior management or whoever was needed this person in their dept/team and learnt about their personalities and culture and got a good sense of who would fit and also what they were missing that they needed.

We then went out looking for those individuals. I rarely looked through a bank of resumes I looked for people who were already doing what we needed and if they weren't interested asked them who they knew. These were high level posts. I would also contact universities who taught what we needed if it was specialized and got networked with people in the department so they could give recommendations of people (not new grads but those who already had years in the industry)

So I still think face 2 face networking is essential for trust and getting connected to companies and people within them in any way you can.

The sheer numbers of redundancies across tech means the market has turned to the recruiters favour. The last few years felt like a bubble. how can your experience help companies save money, or make more?

I think the product manager role has peaked (I remember when it was the future and DevOps was new). Look at transferable skills.

I also think the developer boom is on the turn. My place is going back to buying tech instead of building it. The inflated DevOps salaries and recruitment challenges have played a part in that.

There's certainly been a downturn, yes but it's companies purging all the Covid hiring. I'm an engineer and still in demand. But that is because I know my fundamentals.
Lots of people with 'professional qualifications' in the latest bit of shiny new tech, who don't understand how things work at a fundamental level. Move jobs after a year without gaining any real experience in scaling and running that they've built. They're suffering certainly.
I've interviewed people who didn't know that a load balancer was a general infrastructure, not an AWS concept. Blew my mind.

If you were in fintech a lot of VC money has dried up.

TPM is a strange job role, bit like 'SRE' and 'DevOps' engineer means different things to different people. However, if you role is the intermediary between product and engineering in a downturn a lot of companies cull the role just splitting it between both divisions. Perhaps they don't make as many changes to product as well. And can get away with it.

What is your actual skillset OP? Could you reposition yourself as an architect or engineering/tech lead?

My top tip is to add loads of connections to your LinkedIn profile from companies you'd like to work for, or for people that might be looking for hires. For example CFOs for finance jobs. Don't worry if you know them just ask to connect.

I did that and landed my current role because someone was looking for someone like me, and the job wasn't advertised yet. It might not work for you, but it's worth a try.

Good luck x

Is just in tech that things are slow? In the autumn they were telling us its "a jobseekers market"....

I'm assuming if they are in a decent paid role, with the expectation that it will last- they aren't moving.
I guess with a lot of home working now then people can apply for jobs really far away. However I do think a PM and BA does need to see people face to face.

I work in professional services marketing and it's definitely a job seekers market in my world. Salaries have sky rocketed as very few good candidates on the marketand we're all competing for the same candidates.

The market is ticking over for engineers and developers but slow for the “discretionary” roles - project managers, product owners, team leads etc. Are you an ex developer who could go back to that for a while?
The contract market is definitely improving so it might be worth looking there.
At the very top it’s improving which will trickle down I think but right now, supply outstrips demand.

Since December 28th I've applied to 70 jobs and had three interviews.... And two emails saying that my application wasn't going any further. I thankfully have just been offered the job I wanted.It is very frustrating applying for jobs continuously and not even getting a reply!

Job market in tech / software for any talent is very tough at the moment. Tons of layoffs…
However, if you have the right skills… tons of companies are hiring too, it’s just a harder to stand out

I'm in a non tech role in tech (which interfaces heavily with tech roles)

You'll know yourself contractors are generally a bit crap...

We struggled to find a good candidate in back end of 21 for my first mat leave in 2022 (the guy they settled on was fucking dire - hi Chris!) which made returning quite nice as the bar was so low it was on the floor.

Roll on to my 2024 mat leave - we have (alarmingly) excellent candidates most/several of whom are non contractors scrabbling for any kind of work... Presumably just victims of the tech cull across 22/24.
I was incredibly thankful to not lose my job.

We had something like 500+ applications

When I was looking (couple years back) I Got calls from places that I had applied to soooo long ago that I didn’t remember applying.

right now is hard, they maybe got posted in November, EVERYTHING STALLS for December and then slide to restart in January. I wouldn’t worry till middle February.

The market is awful at the moment. There was some movement at the end of last year, so hopefully it's picking up.

Yes but when we recruit bia LinkedIn we get literally 100s of CVs from people who haven't read the JD and aren't suitable for the role at all. Writing back to those who are not going forward individually is a pain. Sorry. It kind of cuts both ways.

@ForThisPost1 I work in public sector and have noticed that we find it easier to appoint excellent quality candidates which tells me job market is changing (normally we struggle due to salaries). Have you tried not for profit or public sector? Pays less but also can be more stable.

Are you stating your salary expectations? They might be too high.
loads of people in tech have not seen their salaries grow this year and no bonuses (I M talking about big tech companies) so candidates need to re-assess their job asks. I think the time of crazy salaries and changing jobs often to double salary is finished. There is generally much less investment in the UK as it is a small market no linked with Europe or the US. So realistically people need to expect pay cuts.

I can't believe how much people are expecting for the salary, for the money. Eg let's pretend a Finance Manager £45k, Finance Controller £60k, Finance Director £75k. Jobs are paying £30k, parts of the Job Description are that of a FD, but they clearly don't want to pay £80k, and are offering £28k. It's shocking.

The last 30 or so applications I made on LinkedIn didn't even get viewed, recruiters either tell me they don't have anything or just don't even reply to my messages. Very few e.g. one or two to zero roles on jobserve/cwjobs to apply for for scrum masters / test managers / project managers etc

Its an employers market, employers can save on salary and make more profit. probably thanks to outsourcing and tech layoffs.

Then we have AI and it's potential impact on jobs https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-67977967

It’s not just tech. Many other sectors are bad right now. Companies have been pulling back investment as inflation hit costs.

Salary expectations are also becoming unreasonable too. My assistant with 2 years experience feels they are underpaid on 50k a year. I recruited a manager on 3-5 years experience and most applicants wanted 100k.

I do not work in finance or tech. It’s gone mad.

I imagine a finance job that’s paying £28k won’t be at FD level even if there’s overlap in job description. I suspect it’s a job in a team where there already is an FD and perhaps a few rungs between the role and FD.

Why is it so bad right now?

ETA: Presumably just victims of the tech cull across 22/24.

Tech cull? What happened there? I would have thought that with the rise of remote, well, everything, tech would be doing well.

Companies like google, meta, twitter over-hired during Covid and have laid off tens of thousands over the past year, outsourcing to off-shore partners has become cheaper and easier.

Re salary - tech salaries in the UK are far lower than they are in the US.

“Re salary - tech salaries in the UK are far lower than they are in the US.”

isn’t this true for ALL salaries/industries? The way people in the us is paid is different to the uk, e.g. health insurance issues etc, so salaries are higher. In my (badly) paid (academic type) industry, US jobs are always advertised as way higher.