The Job Market Is Absurd

I can't remember who, but someone famous recently said, "having everyone randomly probe everybody else is pointless" and I immediately thought of invitation-only nightclubs that ban cameras. That might strike you as an odd basis for an article about the job market, but there is more than a passing similarity - career development has become a digital herpes bath.

There is almost no friction left in job applications. Companies and recruiters can throw roles onto the web in seconds and applicants can use things like Easy Apply to respond even faster. Then, the recruiters can use AI tools, both old and new, to scan those applications and reject anyone who doesn't fit a very narrow view of what's wanted. A huge chunk of human effort has thus been removed from both sides of the equation.

Under traditional economics that ought to be a good thing. Every day that an unemployed person spends job hunting and every minute that a company spends recruiting is time neither is putting into economic production. So, if technology can reduce that wasted human effort, so much the better. Add to that, faster recruitment should enable workers to move around more and find roles they're happy in, even if it's a case of kissing a few frogs first. Traditional thumbs up all round.

But the digitised job market has resulted in two direct negative consequences. Firstly, companies have stopped bothering to put any thought into job descriptions. Why would they? A good job description is a filtering device that stops the bulk of inappropriate, poorly qualified candidates putting themselves forward in the first place. There's little point in bothering to do that when you can make AI do the filtering after those candidates have wasted their time applying.

That's why every job description in a given industry seems to be more or less the same these days and comes with a laundry list of nonsense "must-have" capabilities. I read somewhere that candidates now consider themselves qualified if they meet just 40% of the job description's ask.

And why not? It's not as if applying costs them more than a few mouse clicks, and it doesn't even need to cost those, if you're clever. LinkedIn was recently split over a guy who had written an AI bot to apply to thousands of roles and secured a few dozen interviews with it. That's a shockingly poor success rate - something like one interview per hundred applications - but aside from the few hours he'd have spent building the bot, it cost him nothing to make those applications, so he doesn't need to care.

And that's a less callous view that it may seem. Granted, only a small proportion of job hunters have the technical nous to build a bot like that, so his thousands of applications - most of them presumably inappropriate - crowded out more worthwhile candidates. But we don't live on a planet that hosts the internet anymore, it's more like an internet with a planet attached and learning how to operate on it is how you remain a first-class citizen. To my mind, that guy played the game smartly, and since the recruiters would have used AI to assess his (the bot’s) applications, I say he played it fairly, too.

But think about what actually happened here - dozens of companies who didn't put any thought into their job descriptions went on to interview a guy who didn't read any of them. That can't be a healthy way to start a working relationship.

Perhaps a mitigation would be for companies to open fewer roles to the applying public. Maybe they'll look at their existing employees and see who can be retrained or up-skilled instead of going through redundancy processes and the inevitable mass hiring 12-24 months later? Not willingly, of course, but maybe the lunacy of having their AI filter applications from their candidates' AI might force a recruitment rethink?

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