Why The Job Market Seems "Completely Broken"

As a surprise to nobody, the number one overall complaint I hear from job seekers is that the job market is completely broken, and frankly, I don't necessarily disagree with them. So, in this video, I want to dive into why hiring is so messed up and what companies can potentially do about it. Now, if you don't know who I am, I'm Brian KY.

I'm a corporate recruiter, an HR professional, and a career coach who's interviewed and hired thousands of people into some of the world's most well-known and well-regarded companies. I've made it my mission to try to demystify how hiring works in major corporations to give you a leg up on the competition. So, if this kind of content interests you, make sure you hit the subscribe button.

You may also want to hit the notification bell so you don't miss any future content. If you've looked for a job over the last few years, and in particular from 2020 onward, you probably have realized that hiring is not nearly as smooth and seamless as it really should be. So, why is this the case?

Especially in today's era of modern applicant tracking systems, you would think that things would be much better. But let's take a look at how hiring used to work really quickly, and then we'll get into where hiring is breaking down today. Back before applicant tracking systems and online job forums were a thing—and there actually was a time when that was the case—we used to do things very manually.

Companies would run ads in local newspapers or maybe put a sign up in front of their property or on their door, and people would manually mail in resumes, cover letters, etc. The personnel departments, as they were called at that point in time, typically had file folders for each job and would track things manually, either using a primitive version of Microsoft Excel or even, before that, it was pen and paper. When it came time to interview and move people throughout the company, it was typically very hands-on and in-person.

The hiring teams would literally get packets of resumes and interview guides distributed to them before the interviews, and candidates would typically come on-site. There wasn't much of a screening process to begin with, so often the hiring manager would maybe pick up the phone and call them, and then they would be invited into an on-site interview. Everything happened relatively hands-on, in-person, and quickly.

However, you have to keep in mind that things were pretty localized back then, and it was very rare for you to consider taking a job outside of maybe a 50-mile radius of your home. But as things modernized and went more and more online, companies started to leverage tools like job boards, where suddenly people all over the world could start to apply for roles. Candidates started pouring in for all of these roles, and a cottage industry sort of popped up as a result.

HR departments started to split apart the traditional HR functions and recruiting functions, and especially in those bigger companies where they had multiple locations, the volume of data became too big. That's where applicant tracking systems came in. It's kind of a natural evolution, just like an ERP system for a manufacturing company in order to handle all the inventory, or a CRM system for someone involved in sales and customer relations.

As more candidates poured into these companies, the systems grew and grew to manage all of the data and to also figure out ways to screen people more effectively. That's where things started to go off track. They began adding in all these screening steps in order to filter out the people who just weren't qualified from the people who actually were.

As a result, these hiring processes have gotten out of control over time, and it has certainly impacted candidate experience. So, now we have a little bit of context to the history of recruiting. Here we are in the present day, and certainly, things are broken.

So, where did it go off track? The first pain point naturally starts with the application itself. A lot of these companies are using outdated applicant tracking systems, which still to this day require you to create an account in order to apply.

There's nothing more frustrating than finding a job you're really interested in, clicking on the job posting, and then being required to put in an email address and a password, along with all these unnecessary steps for a company that you really don't care that much about. Not to mention, when you do upload that resume, it doesn't parse it correctly, so you have to add in all this manual information anyway, and essentially, you're just duplicating what you've already submitted. So, from a candidate experience perspective, we're already starting off on the wrong foot.

Then there are the overzealous employers who decide to add in a bunch of behavior-based interview questions right into the application itself. So, the candidate finds themselves not only having to parse their resume manually, but now they have to answer a whole bunch of questions that they know they're probably going to get screened out as a result. If that's not bad enough, you're potentially competing with thousands of other candidates for these same relatively low-quality jobs.

You see, with the advent of job boards and the rise in popularity of remote roles, you have people all over the planet taking their proverbial shot on every single job posting that even remotely matches their background. What that means is that the person who's actually really qualified for a role is oftentimes getting completely buried by a whole bunch of people who have nothing to do with the role. Feel like a complete feeding frenzy, especially for those high-quality positions with well-regged employers.

You have to have perfect timing in order to make it through the gauntlet just to be seen. And of course, everybody's favorite topic: the ridiculous requirements that employers demand of all their candidates for even the most basic positions. Certainly, not all their jobs require more years of experience than the technologies have even been around.

Now I know that there are a lot of people out there who are going to say, "Well, you also have to get by the applicant tracking systems, which are automatically parsing your resume. " I have my own opinions on that, and in general, that's actually not the case where an applicant tracking system is automatically filtering you out. There are some circumstances where it might, and I've talked about that in other videos, but with modern applicant tracking systems, they are actually starting to add in that functionality more and more commonly.

So you may actually have an AI bot parsing your resume and looking for specific things. The applicant tracking companies themselves tell us that that's a good thing: that everybody, all 1,000 people, can get reviewed. But the reality is that I think a lot of people are getting automatically filtered out, and that's a very frustrating thing for them.

Not to mention, if you are fortunate enough to get seen by the recruiter, you typically only have a very short amount of time to capture their attention. So your resume has to be airtight, very concise, and targeted to the role, which means now you've got to customize your applications. I know that a lot of people don't like to go through the extra effort because it's an additional step; unfortunately, it's a necessary one.

Of course, there are some AI tools that you can use to help speed that up. I also teach some techniques on how to customize very quickly in the course "Resume Rocket Fuel. " But nonetheless, it's another burdensome step that people have to take to jump through hoops just to get a damn job.

And of course, once you actually get your foot in the door for the interview, there are multiple rounds of interviews, multiple steps, and multiple data points that all need to be tracked. It can be a complete bear for recruiting teams to try to keep track of all the data, and that's actually where today's sponsor comes in: ClickUp. With ClickUp’s productivity tools, it allows human resource departments, recruiters, and hiring teams to be much more efficient and organized with very complex processes and a ton of different data points.

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And when that candidate's hired, the HR department can create onboarding workflows to help make sure everything is seamless and smooth. In other words, they can remove some of the pain points that people tend to have with the hiring process. So let ClickUp help you get done more than 99% of people!

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So then, once you get into the interview process, you're also met with a ton of inefficiencies as well in the form of endless interviewing. It seems like companies are adding more and more steps to the interviewing process, and they're essentially asking you to jump through hoop after hoop after hoop. I've heard of as many as 8 to 10 interviews in some processes.

Me personally, I would never sit through that many, but there are companies out there who don't value what the candidate is experiencing and has to go through. Not to mention, you could get into an interview and find that you're in a room with five or six other people. Think about how intimidating that is!

The problem is that companies are notoriously risk-averse, and they have too many decision-makers wanting to put their hands on things. It's not unheard of for these companies to take weeks in between interview steps and months in order to get a relatively simple position filled. And if you're lucky enough to make it through that gauntlet, you're probably going to be met with some assessments and potentially a take-home assignment now.

These assessments are particularly annoying because they may take you as long as an hour and a half to complete. Companies love to either put them at the very beginning of the application so that literally all 1,000 people have to fill them out, or they'll put them at the very end of the interviewing process, and it's another potential for you to trip up and get rejected. My least favorite is the take-home assignments; these are notoriously poor interview experiences.

Frankly, I wish companies would just get rid of them for all but the most senior of roles because essentially what they are doing is having you conduct free work for them. At best, you're going to work on something that's a generic problem that could take you at least a few hours, if not several days—potentially even a couple of weeks. Or at worst, they actually hand you a real-life problem they're experiencing and then have you do this assignment.

At the very end, they reject you, and you probably check back in a couple of weeks and see that they've actually implemented what you came up with. Up with. So basically, they just used you for free consultative services.

Then, if you're lucky enough to complete it satisfactorily and get everybody to give you that thumbs-up, which seems literally impossible, then you get to the offer process. This is another major pain point for job seekers because it seems like a lot of games are played here too, particularly with the salary negotiation. At the end of the day, this is a very nerve-wracking time for the job seeker because oftentimes they don’t feel like they’ve got a whole lot of bargaining power and they don’t know how to negotiate their offers.

I speak from experience that a company’s not looking for ways to enrich your job offer if they can get you for the lowest common denominator. So it’s up to you to make sure that you negotiate your offers. But even if you’re lucky enough to have gotten and accepted that offer, I have heard horror stories of people who have quit jobs, potentially moved across the country, only to get their offer rescinded a day or two before they're about to start.

The company will say, "Sorry, there's been a change of direction; we actually don’t need the role anymore," and they basically ruin the candidate’s life. There’s no recourse for them. What all this boils down to is an extreme risk aversion mentality where companies are petrified of making the wrong hiring decisions.

Of course, they'll claim that it's too expensive to hire somebody, to onboard them, to train them up, only to turn them over. Then there’s the employer who’ll say, “We’re very slow to hire and quick to fire,” and I feel like that should maybe be the other way around. But it sure does seem like companies are looking for any reason to reject you versus the other way around.

If you make one wrong move or make a simple mistake at any stage of the interviewing process, you can expect to receive a canned rejection in the mail, or you may not receive one at all, because employment ghosting is also a big deal. I made another video about employment ghosting and why that happens. There’s not really a great excuse for it; it's just poor recruiting and a poor candidate experience.

But it's gotten even worse lately because what has also happened is that with all of these layoffs that have occurred over the last few years, talent acquisition teams are typically targeted first. What’s happened is they've eliminated a lot of these recruiting positions and pushed them down to the remaining staff. So you’ve got these overworked recruiters who can’t handle the volume that’s sitting on their desks, or they’ve pushed it down to other low-level people or potentially some contractors who don't have a lot of skin in the game.

But anyway you look at it, candidate experience is sure to suffer when you don’t have somebody who is moving people through the systems methodically. So how do we fix this? Well, I don’t think there’s any real solution unless the company buys into it from the very top of the organization down.

In fact, I’m a proponent of the C-suite having to go and interview for positions in their own organizations anonymously and see how it goes, because I think that that would clear up a lot of things. But if candidate experience is truly at the top of their priority list, like they often say in their corporate literature and on their website, then they actually have to live it. They have to go in and change the processes, remove inefficiencies, and start eliminating these steps that are just not focused on the candidate.

Frankly, I feel like a lot of these steps don’t actually help them hire better people to begin with. And as a job seeker, what can you do when you're just trying to find a job and it seems like you're faced with these odds in a job market that seems literally impossible? The problem is you can’t really change them, and you shouting from the top of the mountains is not really going to solve anything.

Therefore, the best solution for you is to change how you approach the job search by doing things much more efficiently and much more targeted, and try to reclaim control over your career. That means being smart with your job search. You’re not just applying to a million jobs and hoping for the best; you’re making sure that for the roles that you really are interested in, you’re going the extra mile.

You’re customizing your applications and your résumés, trying to be an early applicant, leveraging targeted networking, and really trying to increase your chances at getting those callbacks, because that’s really what you can control. Unfortunately, until employers are forced to out of necessity, I just don’t see things changing much in the immediate future. Anyway, if you need more help with a particularly nasty job search, check out my website, aifalayoff.

com. It’s loaded with tips and tricks all from an insider's perspective, and I do share my deepest and most intimate recruiting knowledge in the form of some training courses. You can check it out on the courses tab.

Again, I’d like to thank today’s sponsor, ClickUp. I appreciate you watching. We’ll see you on the next one!