The memes are true. Recruiting has gone insane.

[iloveeverykindofcat]

I've never seen it this bad. I'm an academic/charity professional. I'm fortunate that I've worked one relatively good contract after another for ten years now, and the last five years has been very good indeed. I'm well paid at the moment. But my contract ends in April. I'm very used to looking for the next thing, that's just how the industries are these days- even so-called permanent jobs are falling to redundances and budget freezes. Normally my I'm pretty sanguine about it.

Oh my God. I have never seen it this bad in my life. Jobs that don't exist, posted purely for data gathering. Five page applications for a first sift. Employers that ghost. RECRUITMENT COMPANIES THAT GHOST. 100+ applications per post. Experience mandatory, then rejected for being overqualified. Bullshit salaries for posts that are easily 3 jobs in 1. 4+ stage application processes for entry level posts.

It seems like my 2 best leads right now are based on my network - effectively, who I know. Which is sad, that's but reality right now. Anyway this is a vent post. I've built up a bit of a savings buffer over this last post, and I'm a hairs breadth from jacking it all in for a year and cleaning houses whilst listening to podcasts.

Thank you for coming to my TED talk.

Thank you so much for explaining.

That's awful, total cowboys. Getting people's hopes up and wasting their time!

I think it’s been like this for years. I can remember a decade ago looking for a job, every recruiter I spoke to wanted details of where I was currently working, I never heard anything back from them about jobs but lo and behold the next day reception would get a call from the same recruiter asking to speak to the hiring manager to see if they were looking for candidates for my job.

Following with interest.

Charity professional of 15+ years here. I’ve been out of work since July - a longer break than planned buffered by a little inheritance.

It’s hell fire out there. Charity roles are frequently asking for director-level experience/miracle workers but paying no more than £45k. I’ve been the final two candidate for two senior roles, rejected for roles paying £25k less than my last salary and led up the garden path by recruiters wanting to ‘check in’ but never offering any meaningful follow up. Then add the intense levels of EDI screening and hoop jumping many orgs want you to do. Plus the jobs that don’t dignify you with a reason you weren’t shortlisted, presumably due to volume of applications.

This experience has contributed to me deciding to do something entirely different in the new year. It’s been demoralising and annoying in equal measure.

I got rejected post-interview for a job on which I exceeded every descriptor, for being over qualified.

Like. What am I supposed to do with that? I'd have been happy with the salary. I don't have director-level experience.

I agree its bad, DH really wants to change his job (same field but to a different company / area) but at the moment it's too crazy out there.

It is brutal out there. Made redundant a few months ago and living off savings just now. Doing some studying but really I need to work - still got a mortgage (expensive divorce). Nothing for it but to plough on but it is soul destroying.

I’m pretty sure it is or subject to heavy fines if you’re caught - I don’t know any recruiters that do this.
It used to be a thing about 20 years ago but the regulations are much tighter.
External recruiters make their money on commission, so there is no benefit to wasting anyone’s time as it wastes or time too.
Companies mainly use us because it’s too lengthy and costly to source by themselves, so we get a job on and then it’s a case of advertising and using job boards and LinkedIn to find people. There’s no benefit to advertising fake jobs or registering people we don’t have a suitable job for. There’s not enough time in the day for that nonsense.

Add into that 'Competitive salary' rather than the pay range or an amount. It is never competitive.

I saw a ‘big national firm’ reported a couple of days ago that they advertised for 15 graduates in their finance department and had to take down the ad after only a few hours after they received over 3500 applicants. I presume many of the graduates in question use AI for their applications in order to generate responses that quickly too.

It was much like this in the 1980s-90s too, though. I remember looking at a pile of 150 paper applications for a second-job type post after HR had selected them from over 500. We started by chucking out all the non-graduates, which I hated doing as personal abilities were more important than a degree, but we had to get it down to a reasonable number by setting unreasonable criteria.

Contrary to most people's beliefs about 'boomers', it was expected by the 1980s that you'd move jobs every few years - it may have been different in the public sector and probably still is but, in commerce, career progression often relied on moving. After my first entry-level position, all of mine were by personal recommendation.

I'm by no means trying to belittle everyone's experience here: it's horrible. It can be even more horrible as you move up the pay scale, there being relatively fewer openings and comparatively stronger competition. Just reminding everyone that networking (or 'knowing people' as we used to call it) really is important. Wishing you luck!

I think there's absolutely no hope for me. Right now I can't work, but I'd love to be able to in future if my health improves. But it would need to be really flexible. And I can't manage people or do anything very physical. I have no qualifications above GCSE.

All the work I used to do either doesn't really exist anymore or is being taken over by AI.

I'm so sorry for everyone out there looking for work x

Data gathering as OP has said. IME it also makes the company look like it's growing which is common right after a huge restructure.

@BillieWiper, the Economist was saying this/last week that the jobs AI will create are mostly in human relations - the interfaces between machines and people. As anyone needing customer service recently can attest, we still need people to understand what we want and to sort it out for us, especially if the solution needs a bit of creativity.

I think they're being way too bullish, as developers are obviously keen to get their artificial babies up to scratch and they will succeed. But, for now, this should make client relations a growing sector; that can be done part-time and remotely.

I think AI is a bubble that will burst. Hopefully before it wrecks the reliability of all data on the internet though a doom loop of LLM being increasingly trained on AI output.

Mind you, the upside it that if I do either have to or decide to take a bit of a break after this contract ends at the end of April (which to be fair, is still 4 months off), I'll have some of my contribution-based jobseekers allowance back please, and fulfil the job application requirements every day by applying to one-click bullshit on LinkedIn for an hour.

Thank you. Maybe it's not quite so bad. It is that human touch, speaking to people, that's my skill.

Just last week I did the final of 3 rounds of interviews. It went really well and the recruiter who placed me was very confident.

Last Friday she called me to tell me they weren’t making an offer to me … OR ANYONE they had interviewed. She was rightly pissed off and said that they probably don’t know what they want.

I’ve been job hunting on and off for a year. I’ve done 280+ applications, had 15 interviews, one verbal offer that ghosted me and an impossible number of recruiters ghosting me too. It’s bleak.

I read somewhere, LinkedIn I think, that employers have set the bar so high and put AI filtering in place that they are “unable to find skilled talent”. BOLLOX, get a human to look at the applications and you’ll find plenty of skilled people.

It really isn't. The AI stock bubble may burst, but AI won't burst any more than the internet did after the internet stock bubble burst.

White collar jobs are now being hollowed out like blue collar jobs were by automation.

It's bonkers atm.

DS went for a second interview (for a very basic/low level job) in the first week of March. He then heard nothing, even follow up email was ignored, so assumed he'd been unsuccessful.

He got a call at the end of July from a woman who ended up being incredibly rude about the fact he wasn't delighted she was ringing to confirm he'd been successful and to arrange a start date! They were properly miffed he'd got another job in the meantime.

I know a couple of people who’re looking at the moment and they’re saying the same.
Highly qualified professionals with plenty of experience - sent off hundreds of applications, and don’t even hear back from around 70% of them.

No, I think the AI itself will fall out of favour, not just the stock, as what is already unreliable becomes increasingly so. It may leave behind useful tools but a lot of the hype will dissolve away. The main issue being it is not intelligent, just text prediction based increasingly on what AI itself produces.

You just need to look and the ruling in the Sandra Peggie trial to see the issue - made up quotes, selective/manipulation of other quotes, misrepresentation of data etc etc and yet the ruling is used by AI to produce further misinformation. Then there was a doctor who used AI to find recommendations for a treatment, specifically asking for citations who found AI made up citations of drug trials to meet the criteria.

I really do hope so!

I did a lot of hiring this year and also got ghosted by recruiters! They are sales agents basically and clearly thought my roles weren't lucrative enough for them.
These days I have to filter hard, AI cv generators make everyone look good. But a sizeable number of my initial shortlist all worked for made up companies. It makes it very hard to spot the genuine applicants.

Poor users of AI do not mean that AI is not, and will not, continue to be useful.

There are plenty of poor users of computers, or poor drivers of cars, or poor searchers on Google. Yet none of these things are going away soon.

If you think AI might go away or "fall out of favour", you have no idea how much it is already, and will be increasingly, incorporated into your life. It's not all about people at home asking for recipes, or recommendations, or quotes.

Really wishing everyone looking for work the best of luck - DH was made redundant from a director level marketing role over 18 months ago, and had applied for over 800 jobs - from Executive levels to NMW jobs in supermarkets and everything in between. He had some interviews, lots of near misses and so many rejections despite often fitting the JDs perfectly.

He has now secured a new job in Jan, paying only slightly less than he was on before, back in his old industry (which given the level of redundancies in the sector seemed very unlikely) - so miracles DO happen!! Keep trying, sweat your networks and 🤞 for those of you needing positive news soon.