Why we are getting further away from normal hiring processes
Something is going on in the EU job market these days that I didn't mention last week. It's happening in all of the 5 countries that I shared, and in the overall EU job market. There's a huge blocker between job seeker and hiring manager that is an elephant in the room, and neither side knows how they created it.
Let's start with the no show's. Ghosting is at a new high point, where many hours of application or interview preparation don't even get a simple reply from the employer. The company no show's the candidate. On the other side? Applicants make applications and forget all the jobs they applied to, or even miss email invitations in their email. Recruiters follow up to clarify interest but they too don't hear back.
The reason for this? Many of the job posts simply aren't real. They are ghost posts. Literally, fake job postings to make a company appear to be healthy and hiring, but in fact have no intention to hire for that role.
Around 81% of recruiters now say that their firm has posted a ghost job (Euronews). That's more than the last time I wrote about this two years ago. But you may already know this. When you take so much time customizing a few applications and never hear back, it naturally changes your motivation to continue, and you slip into the AI mass applying approach. That's what the employers hate.
But then the result is a stalemate: people just don't get calls for interviews, since recruiters energy wears down after the first couple days of reviewing apps. They call this decision fatigue. Both sides lost trust, and the hiring process cracks from the inside.
Now we are in this strange world where people are actually working too hard on the wrong approach of spraying the CV to as many employers as possible. The problem with this? Your CV comes in looking the exact same as the other candidates. Because they also use ChatGpt, Gemini, Claude, and the rest of the chat bots to make their CV and cover letters faster, to apply to more jobs. If you think about it, everyone feeding the bots with the same job post and requesting the same docs, there's only a few ways its gonna design those for you. As someone who has hired myself, how can I decide who's different if I'm looking at the same words and sentence structures?
But how do we get over this now that we're in it? We've got to get back to writing to people rather than writing for algorithms. Even though the people getting into the first rounds might be better at knowing the algorithm, you will be tested later on, which reveals what you actually know. We should focus on connecting with the people who need help rather than writing the right things to please the systems.
If you are a hiring manager, perhaps you can agree with me. Trustworthiness, reliability, and excitement for the job are what to look for. That usually happens when you hear it from someone personally. Asking questions to the hiring manager can even show you read the job description, and you want clarification on your understanding. One of my clients got a feedback from his interview the other day that they would have liked that he pause and ask for clarification on their question first, rather than jumping into the answer and going a different direction with it.
Going into Q2: Slow down. Take a smaller batch of companies each week and start to identify who are the people at the company that you'll relate with. Those are the people who are ultimately going to help you get a job. Why do referrals work more than ever these days? That's easy, they bypass ghost posts and AI generated CV problems in one step.
And on the employer side: if you post jobs you don't intend to fill, you lose the trust of candidates forever when they don't hear anything back. Plus, over-compensated keyword CV's come in more often than genuine voices when you use automated screening systems.
The hiring process today reflects as a two-way street, which had a car on each side that decided to speed past - without checking their rearview mirrors. Right now, that reflection in the mirror is unappealing.
Have a nice week,
Kevin