Just one year ago, employers were still claiming to do everything they could to make getting employed easier than ever. They claimed they wanted to get people back to work and to make the economy strong yet again.
As people applied for jobs in droves, many came back with the same results: “Thanks but no thanks.”
Despite what the mainstream media and President Biden would have you believe, people weren’t getting hired; they were simply falling off unemployment.
While pre-pandemic job hunting was already difficult enough, the initial months of COVID only made things rougher than ever as businesses pivoted to working from home, and companies were forced to lay off staff as they shut their doors for good. This got people to look into new lines of work, as well as the prospects of going back to school.
Now, as the dust begins to settle from that sordid time in history, we are seeing fewer openings than ever before, and it’s getting more and more competitive at the top. As labor shortages during the pandemic are gone, companies are now bringing back the ringer to put potential candidates through before hiring them.
Speaking with Time magazine, Michael Cook detailed how much harder things were than ever before. Laid off back in December from a gaming company following a decade of work, he has applied for hundreds of jobs in the months after his termination.
One company decided he needed to go through six rounds of interviews before ultimately deciding to go another way. Another company asked him to create a project for them, featured it on their website, and never paid him for his efforts. Still, others sent him home with tests or requested video answers to canned questions.
In tech specifically, there have been hundreds of thousands of people left unemployed over the last nine months as the job market only continues to tighten. LinkedIn has reported a massive shift in the job market, with one job opening for every two applicants, when in 2022, it was still 1:1 across the board.
Another problem that is forcing these multiple-step interviews is the push by the left to fulfill diversity changes, as well as trying to get more equity out of each employee than ever before. A never-ending quest for perfect employees means more people who all think their 3% interaction with a new hire necessitates their input has made it much worse as well. Given the number of companies that have now outsourced their HR endeavors only to have managers hiring people have found this to be an increasingly burdensome tasking.
This extra burden adds up quickly. Many managers cannot afford to put the time in to properly examine resumes, so they leave it up to AI and hiring software to detect the keywords that they think need to be present in a resume to be effective for the position. Unfortunately, they also tend to have blinders on and don’t see things for what they are.
Instead, these managers are now bringing it to an average of 44 days to hire someone in 2023, and there is no sign it will improve any time soon.
Another underreported and talked about issue is the number of scams that have now penetrated companies like LinkedIn. While Craigslist and Indeed always had a bit of a shady aspect to them for job hunting, LinkedIn was the place for professionals where good jobs were posted. Now, the scams are everywhere, and many of them are good at what they do.
Of those seeking educated work, 45% will go through the entire interview process without an offer, and only 35% of standard job seekers will endure that. 32% are asked to go through multi-round interviews, and only 11% of uneducated workers will face this waste of time. All in all, it’s harder to hire educated people because everyone wants more without committing.
